Once upon a time, there was a young man who met a lovely young lady at a conference for Christian college students. They got along great for a couple of days, and then it was time to fly home, she to one end of the country, he to the other. They exchanged addresses, and went home. Then, a few weeks later, he showed up on the young lady’s doorstep, unannounced, with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, claiming to “just be out that way.” The young lady, a good friend of my wife, was a little freaked out by whole business, half expecting that he had brought engagement rings of multiple sizes along with him just to be sure one of them fit.

I thought this story was delightful. I cannot remember the young man’s name, but he inspired me to write a book, “Heaven Help the Single Christian.” Before I met my wife, I had taken a few trips like his, when you show up at a distant church for no apparent reason in hopes of chatting up a lovely young lady who goes there. I called these “Romantic Pilgrimages.” Each time I did this, I was found out pretty quickly, and the amount of snickering I had to endure from girl’s friends was . . . painful.

For regular church-goers who really like going to church and also happen to be single, life can be frustrating when you want to meet someone. Certainly, there’s the possibility of dating someone outside of church, but then you’re likely to end up with someone who respects rather than loves your faith. This is known as “missionary dating,” and many a church-goer have ended up disappointed like the girl who tried it only to have it fall apart when her boyfriend was caught roasting marshmallows over the candlestand during services.

So, for most regular church-goers, there’s the dating scene in church, a dangerous world of nerds, zealots, insta-spouses, and well-meaning matchmakers claiming prophetic knowledge about whom you should marry. I bumbled through this world for several years, striking out at numerous coffee hours, and trying to woo two girls who are now nuns. (I’m not making that up.)

That was in the blog form. And then I put it in the manuscript, and the publisher took it out, too!

 

Eric Ruthford, a writer of special projects for PostGlobe, has authored the new humorous advice book titled “Heaven Help the Single Christian: Your (Practical) Guide to Navigating Church as Your Search for a Godly Mate” under the name “Thomas Ruthford.”

ALSO BY ERIC RUTHFORD

Special report: Gang members turn from selling drugs to selling girls for sex

Special report: Officials plan to end homelessness by 2014. Can it happen?

 

Editor’s note: Below is a collection of humor-tinged writings from Eric Ruthford’s two-years-and-counting quest to land full-time employment during these hard economic times. The first installment below was written during the snowstorm of December 2008 and the final section below dates to November 2010, with others dating from points in between.

I. We interrupt this life to bring you…

I am hearing a voice broadcasting through the room: “We interrupt this life to bring you the following important bulletin: We are putting your life on hold for a while. You have food, shelter, clothing and water right now. Apply for jobs all you like, but it’s a week before Christmas, and no one is going to want to schedule job interviews until January. Look at apartments all you like, but you won’t have the money to start rent payments.

“Feel free to move about the reality, but there is ice on the roads that is not your standard Seattle slush-for-a-day-then-leave stuff. Your usual cost-free method of getting about, bicycling, isn’t going to help you much on ice. This is not a time for starting new adventures; it is a time for being thankful for what you have. You are a reasonably talented person, but this is as far as you’re getting right now. This is not a time for thinking about where your talents ought to be taking you. Making plans based on your hopes being fulfilled is going to make you unhappy. That only works if you’re Barack Obama. The mess that you are in right now was caused by everybody feeling entitled to success, causing reality to be overpriced.

“Please be assured that the space-time continuum is functioning as it should. Your movement through time plus your movement through space will always equal the speed of light. If you don’t seem to be going anywhere in space, you’re going all sorts of places in time that people in spaceships don’t get to have. Enjoy this time while you have it. We will inform you when we restart your life.”

(Written in December 2008, during the snowstorm that gave us an icy Christmas)

***

II. Momentary panic when The Call comes

Guys, remember back in high school or college when a girl would say something nice to you in science class and you thought, “Hey, maybe she likes me” and felt pretty good about it? And then for a week or so, you’d wave at her in the hallway and try saying something nice and then after a week or two nothing really happened and you were disappointed for a while and then forgot about her and start looking around at other girls to think about and have nothing happen with them, either.

And then, perhaps you’ve had this experience too — several months later (usually when the girl is on the rebound from a breakup) the girl comes up to you and is all chatty-Kathy with you like you’ve been friends for years and you’re standing there thinking, “This is a vaguely familiar person. She seems to know me. It would be kind of embarrassing if I admitted that I don’t know what her name actually is.”

I have been finding the job search to be remarkably similar recently. I find jobs on Craigslist and other job boards, and I think, “That sounds like a nice job. Maybe I’d really enjoy working there. Maybe they’d hire me. The commute doesn’t look too bad, either.” And then I send off my resume with a cover letter. And then I repeat this process several dozen more times with other job prospects, since, in this economy, you have to apply to hundreds to actually find one that will call you back and then…..

You actually get a call, for the first time in weeks. And the hiring manager on the other end of the line is asking you all these questions about how you’d fit in to their organization and asking for details about things you said on your cover letter and you’re thinking, “Oh crap, I have no idea who these people are, what they do or what I said to them.” And, you try to give general but intelligent sounding answers to their questions, praying that you don’t end up sounding like Sarah Palin giving one of her famous alphabet-soup answers to a TV reporter’s question.

I don’t know if anyone reading this is an HR manager, but I know that there are some single girls who read this stuff, but here’s what I want to say: Excuse cluelessness on a first conversation.

***

III. Recession Survival – Negative Thinking

The way that you survive a financial panic is by the stuff you don’t do in the two or three years leading up to the recession. There really isn’t that much you can do to prepare for a recession unless you’re an expert at making short sales several times a day.

I have been unemployed for the past nine months, having quit my job the same week Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. That part may not have been the best-timed decision, but now that I have plenty of time to ponder such things, I can remember a couple of moments when I blew some people off for their outlandish suggestions.

The first was at the beginning of 2005, when I became friends with a mortgage broker.

After he told me what he did, I said, “Sounds cool, but I have no money, just debt. It’ll be a long time before I can buy something.”

“You could borrow money from family,” he said, “and then rent the house to people to pay the mortgage. You can make money off the rent from the increase of the house’s value.”

And I laughed. My new friend didn’t know me that well yet; he was obviously assuming I had some resources I didn’t have.

A couple of months later, I opened a bank account at Washington Mutual Bank in San Francisco. I had a personal liking for this bank because they gave my great-grandmother a home mortgage during the Great Depression on the house where my family lived when I was a baby. My initial deposit was less than $1,000. At the end of the initial meeting, the woman in the collared WaMu shirt gave me a certificate saying that I had been pre-approved for a home loan of $250,000. I snorted, quietly. I knew that offer wouldn’t hold after I filled out all the forms and put on a tie and came in and tried to explain to a suit-wearing mortgage officer I could pay for a house or condo in San Francisco with my $30,000 salary.

Obviously, these people were talking about someone else. I blew them off. It wasn’t a temptation I was resisting, as much as a joke that I thought was mildly funny. I forgot all about it.

As it turns out, they weren’t joking. A month ago, I read this first person account by an economics reporter at The New York Times who really wanted to buy a house but was paying two-thirds of his salary to his ex-wife in child support. He found a mortgage broker who told him that wasn’t a problem and started descending the credibility scale for types of mortgages available until he found one that would not require that aspect of his background to be put on a loan application. He told the broker he felt guilty asking with such bad history, and the broker told him that the broker’s job was to make things possible for the customer, not to judge them. He bought the house and a year later, he had a hard time making payments, and called up the same broker to refinance. “No problem,” he said. Calling the broker felt like calling a drug dealer. Eventually, he started missing payments and the mortgage was underwater, but the bank was too busy to foreclose. At the time he wrote the article, eight months after he stopped paying, he still had not heard back from the bank.

Reading this article made me reconnect the dots of some forgotten memories. I was angry over the fact I had been unemployed for eight months and living with my parents, but I hadn’t understood that I had been very close to this bad mortgage nonsense without even knowing it. Washington Mutual, a leader in subprime mortgages, probably would’ve given me a home loan in 2005. Now they’re gone, but my checking account got bailed out by the FDIC. My friend the mortgage broker is still my friend, but isn’t working now, either, trying to find a new job outside of real estate.

Now I have just finished a temp job. I have a moderate amount of debt (that isn’t growing) and a room at my parents’ house where my wife and I sleep. We’re doing all right, mainly because of all that stuff we never did.

Thinking in negative terms — benefits of things not done — is so counter-intuitive, but now I know what economics professors mean when they tell us about opportunity cost.

**

IV. It’s The Thought That Counts

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your application for the public affairs representative position at the police department, but we’re not likely to hire you any time soon. It’s quite obvious from your application that you’re a slob. Sure, your grammar and punctuation were all correct, and you graduated from a good school, but we could tell that you sneezed on your resume without covering your mouth. What professional would leave a booger on his resume? And don’t think that a .025 mm booger would get past us! We’re a police department and we can DNA test anything. Don’t you watch NCIS? We can figure out far more than Abby can.

Sincerely yours,
The Duwamish County Police Department

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your application to work at Frederick and Nelson’s as a loss prevention agent. Here, we mean “thank you” in the same way Flannery O’Connor wrote “she stretched her mouth politely” to describe the reaction of a woman who had just been insulted by a child. Did you really think we wanted to hire someone with a master’s degree in public policy and management? What are you going to do, interrogate shoplifters about the socio-economic causes behind their thievery? Obviously you are looking for a crap job that you can leave at a moment’s notice when something better comes along.

Sincerely yours,
Human Resources

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your book proposal about your time serving in the U.S. Peace Corps. While we enjoyed it, we regret to inform you that your manuscript is ineligible for publication due the fact that you are still living. We only publish memoirs posthumously. We are sorry to deliver you this disappointing news, but hopefully you can find a different publisher. If not, at least you have something to look forward to when you are dead. Besides Heaven, that is.

Sincerely yours,
St. Vladyka’s Press

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your application for position 0009-4332-al@$-q14-SWFseeksSWMforbowling-4562 with the Department of Administrative Departmental Affairs. We regret to inform you that due to our unusually long hiring process that the position you applied for is no longer available. Unfortunately, because of the earth’s wobbling on its axis, since you applied for the job, the area of the United States you would have been responsible for examining has gone through severe climate change and is now a desert. Since no one lives there any more, under U.S. Code √1024 x 2.3 relating to places that no longer exist, we cannot offer you a position.

Sincerely,
The Department of Administrative Departmental Affairs
$500 penalty for private use (photo from here)

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your proposal for use of stimulus funds to create economic activity and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While your idea has merit for producing both results, I think you are a little ahead of your time. It is my hope that some day, we will see old boats refurbished and equipped with anti-gravity generators as a means of alternative transportation, but I do not believe it is the most appropriate means of using the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds at this time.

Sincerely yours,
Barack Obama

****

V. We Interrupt This Interruption

As I sit in my parents’ house, getting ready for my third winter as a professional resume submitter, I hear this voice:

“We interrupt this interruption to bring you the following important announcement: We have received a number of complaints from local observers in your area that an unusual number of lives seem to be on hold. We are aware of this problem.

 ”If this seems to be taking longer than it should, please note that recessions are caused by inactivity. What’s happened is that an unexpected amount of money and an unexpected number of people gathering at this point in spacetime have caused an unexpected amount of mass to coalesce, thus depressing the continuum. This may seem to slow things down, and the recovery, at least for an unenlightened observer such as yourself, stuck in the spacetime depression. While we apologize for the negative feedback loop you seem to be stuck in, please be reassured we will prevent you from crossing your own event horizon and creating a black hole. It is true that no one seems to think you have a right to a job, a place to live, or any of that other stuff they said you’d get if you studied hard in school, but please be assured that we are committed to the continued existence of your particles.

 ”If things seem a little blue when you try to look beyond your situation, that’s just because light is moving more slowly where you are. If you would like to take photographs, may we recommend a filter for your camera’s lens?

 ”Please feel free to move about the continuum. In fact, you might try moving and talking a little faster. From our perspective, you’ve got quite a drawl, which is pretty humorous.

 ”Please be assured that your life will eventually resume. Be glad for all that time you spent in post-Soviet republics. Your trajectory out of the spacetime depression will be curved, but the experience taught you to be thankful it isn’t parabolic.

 ”Thank you for your attention during the interruption. We now return you to your regularly scheduled interruption.”

 (Written in November 2010)

***

Eric Ruthford has experience as a newspaper reporter, a homeless shelter financial director, and as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. He worked for several newspapers in Washington state in 1998-2001, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Herald of Everett, The News Tribune, and The Tri-City Herald. Currently, he publishes articles for PostGlobe and works as a consultant while seeking a full-time post.  

Ruthford authored the new humorous advice book titled “Heaven Help the Single Christian” under the name “Thomas Ruthford.” (Photos for this story: telephone girl via Wikimedia Commons; ditto for Washington Mutual image.)

ALSO BY ERIC RUTHFORD

Special report: Gang members turn from selling drugs to selling girls for sex

Special report: Officials plan to end homelessness by 2014. Can it happen?

 

***

PostGlobe relies on donations

Final day of the series

Leslie Briner works with children who have been forced to sell sex and finds that there’s two stories that she hears again and again. One is that is that it started with a moment when they believed they could trust someone.

“Of all the girls I’ve worked with, they’ve said if I hadn’t made that one choice, all these things might not have happened,” she said.

The other is that as they were going through the process of being recruited, groomed, abused, controlled and turned out by violent pimps, there were adults – teachers, medical professionals, or relatives – who should have seen the signs of prostitution.

“I’ve had children say, ‘I’ve been in the life three years and no one’s ever asked,’” Briner said.

Briner believes that it’s possible to save far more children from the life of prostitution, but a lot of things have to change in the way that law enforcement, social service providers and society as a whole understands and deals with commercial sexual exploitation of children. Briner is the associate director of residential services at YouthCare, a Seattle non-profit organization that serves at-risk youth, including those who are involved in prostitution.

Briner also helped with a prostitution sweep in early November by federal and local law enforcement, recovering 23 children in King and Pierce County. The sweep’s purpose was to focus on girls who are being controlled by gang-affiliated pimps who are often also domestically and sexually abusing girls.

Police and social services providers were glad that they could recover the 23 girls, but they knew that they only had found a tiny portion of the children who are being exploited in the area. Estimates of the number of people under 18 involved in prostitution range as high as 1,000 in Seattle and King County.

FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Steven Dean said that a total of 26 adult prostitution suspects, nine pimping suspects and 23 children were arrested locally in the sweep, part of the nationwide Operation Cross Country that performed nationwide prostitution stings Nov. 5 through 8.

Seattle Police followed a victim-centered approach to the arrests, which meant that girls under 18 met with staff members from YouthCare. Briner participated in the sweep by meeting with girls after they had been brought in by police.

Girls are usually very uncooperative when they get arrested for prostitution, Briner said, but this time was easier. “They’re so used to the cops leveraging information out of them, and then criminalizing them,” she said. “Once they realized that we weren’t going to jam up their lives, they were more cooperative.” Several of them offered up the names of “bad johns,” or abusive customers, Briner said.

She said that it was the first time that she’d seen Seattle police try a victim-centered approach to dealing with commercially sexually exploited children. Briner said that police had done well to have social workers and nurses available at the interviews, but in some ways the officers were still treating the girls like criminals – interrogating them first before the youth-services workers could talk to them.

The girls had been brought in by stings by undercover police officers, mostly over the phone from advertisements on Backpage.com and other Internet sites. Rainy weather in Seattle meant that there hadn’t been much streetwalking activity. (Craigslist.org stopped allowing erotic services ads in September, but no one interviewed for this story thought that’s put a damper on overall prostitution activity.)

A typical prostitution sting requires the undercover officer and the prostitute to make an offer and agreement for an amount of money to be paid for sexual services, but Briner said with these recoveries, the officers arrested the girls as soon as they met. The Becca Legislation in Washington state allows police to detain runaway children if they believe they are in danger even if there’s no proof of a crime. “The goal was to recover minors,” she said.

Of the 23 children who came through, Briner said, about 12 got booked into juvenile detention for old warrants and probation violations, but not for anything they did the night they were arrested. Another two went into shelters. Others were released to family members. Briner said that YouthCare staff were keeping track of all of them, and one-third of the girls had been known to YouthCare previously.

Seattle Police Lt. Eric Sano, commander of the vice/high risk victims unit, said that so far in 2010, Seattle police have recovered 77 prostituted children – last year, it was 30 total. The increase, he said, is because the department is putting more emphasis on recovering children this year.

A report by anthropologist Debra Boyer found 238 children who were known to be involved in prostitution in Seattle and Pierce County, and she estimated that actual total was between 300 and 500. Sano believes the number is closer to 800 or 1,000, although he doesn’t have a scientific compilation.

Sano also believes the overall number of children who are being exploited this way is increasing because the Internet makes it easier for customers to find girls, and because gang members are getting involved as pimps, finding that recruiting, controlling and selling girls is a more lucrative and less risky business than selling drugs.

Law enforcement and social services agencies have been changing the way that they deal with girls who are being commercially exploited for sexual purposes. Part of Sano’s job is to go around the state educating other police departments about commercial sexual exploitation of children and getting them to view girls under 18 who involved in prostitution as victims, not criminals. In some ways, the attitude change that has to happen is like the one that has to happen 25 years ago for domestic violence. Back then, he remembered, officers would often say, “Oh, I can’t believe that’s a mandatory arrest.”

Police have also realized that exiting the life of prostitution is very difficult for girls because of the pimps – they control the girls through violence, and they recruit girls without other places to go, including runaways and children from the foster care system.

“When we recover a juvenile, returning home to the parents may not be the best option – or an option at all,” Sano said.

One new service that YouthCare started this year is The Bridge (pictured at left), a residential facility with room for six girls at an undisclosed location somewhere in the Seattle area. The Bridge allows girls who have been previously exploited to live there for up to two years or until they turn 18, and the location is kept secret as many of the girls are fleeing from violent pimps who might try to get them back into the life of prostitution.

With room for only six girls, Briner said she knows that there’s not nearly enough space to deal with all of the girls who need help, but she added that pushing for a change in public opinion is an equally important part of helping exploited children. “You’ll never have enough specialized beds,” she said.

Her hope is that as more people know about domestic sex trafficking, more adults will know to look for the signs of prostitution in children as young as 11 or 12 and have the nerve to ask: “Have you ever exchanged sex for money or a place to stay?”

This series is being made possible by your donations via Spot.us and directly to PostGlobe, which receives no grants nor government money and relies on tax-deductible donations. 

Donate here to support PostGlobe

 

ENTIRE SERIES

Special report: Gang members turn from selling drugs to selling girls for sex

Special report: Controlled and abused teens exploited in prostitution trade can’t get out

Special report: Buyers of child sex are ordinary guys doing something illegal

Voices of the exploited… ‘Make every day of your life count’

Prostitution sweep recovered 23 children; hundreds more still stuck in “The Life”

Teen prostitution: Prevention tips and warning signs

Lost and found: Home provides place for sexually exploited teens

Commercial sexual exploitation of children thrives on secrecy as the illegal trade operates underground. Teenagers naturally try to keep things secret from adults, which can make warning signs of prostitution hard to spot for parents, teachers and other adults in a child’s life.

Leslie Briner, associate director of Residential Services at Youth Care, which runs a new home for children who have been recovered from prostitution, said that there are some things that adults can be looking for:

The biggest red flag should be a hotel key. “A girl of 13 or 14 has no need for a hotel key,” Briner said. Another is a quick turnaround in behavior from “I’m just a kid acting out” to “Someone else is taking care of me, I don’t need you anymore.”

Other warning signs can include talking about an older boyfriend that the girl is very secretive about. “One of the cons that’s used [by pimps] is ‘I’m a record producer, you’d make a really good backup singer. Come down to my studio,’” Briner said.

Having unexplained amounts of cash, new cell phones that weren’t purchased by parents, or a drastic change in physical appearance can also signal that a pimp is getting involved. “One of the things that pimps do when they’re grooming girls is taking them in to get their hair and nails done, and buying sexy clothes,” Briner said. “Body modification is the breakdown of the old identity and construction of a new one.”

Another important thing for adults to do is simply ask if there’s been any prostitution going on, Briner said. Many teachers, nurses and counselors either don’t know that commercial sexual exploitation of children is a major problem or are afraid to ask about it, but they need to ask: “Have you ever exchanged sex for money or a place to stay?” Briner has known girls who went for years ashamed to talk about their involvement in prostitution, but they did act out in other negative ways, and no adult ever asked that question.

Another important prevention tool is to tell girls about the dangers of pimps, and to tell them how active they are in recruiting. Seattle Police Lt. Eric Sano said that last year the vice squad had gotten tips that there were pimps trying to recruit girls at Westlake Center. An undercover female officer was sent to the shopping center and looked “young and bored.”

After only 45 minutes, Sano said, two young men started conversing with her and tried to recruit her. The conversation was later used to convict Roosevelt Johnson Jr. of attempted promoting commercial sexual abuse of a minor. Lester Dwight Payton Jr. was convicted of second-degree attempted promoting prostitution.

This series has been made possible by your donations via Spot.us and directly to PostGlobe, which receives no grants nor government money and relies on tax-deductible donations.

Donate here to support PostGlobe

ENTIRE SERIES

Special report: Gang members turn from selling drugs to selling girls for sex

Special report: Controlled and abused teens exploited in prostitution trade can’t get out

Special report: Buyers of child sex are ordinary guys doing something illegal

Voices of the exploited… ‘Make every day of your life count’

Prostitution sweep recovered 23 children; hundreds more still stuck in “The Life”

Teen prostitution: Prevention tips and warning signs

Lost and found: Home provides place for sexually exploited teens

At left: After a national prostitution sweep picked up 23 Seattle-area youths in early November, Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna and state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles joined Seattle Against Slavery to launch a multi-language poster campaign meant to encourage victims of human trafficking — including forced prostitution — to seek help.  Download a poster here. (Photo: Seattle Against Slavery)

ENTIRE SERIES

Special report: Gang members turn from selling drugs to selling girls for sex

Special report: Controlled and abused teens exploited in prostitution trade can’t get out

Special report: Buyers of child sex are ordinary guys doing something illegal

Voices of the exploited… ‘Make every day of your life count’

Prostitution sweep recovered 23 children; hundreds more still stuck in “The Life”

Teen prostitution: Prevention tips and warning signs

Lost and found: Home provides place for sexually exploited teens

Part of a series

Below are poems by five former sexually exploited youths who no longer are trapped in lives of prostitution. Now living at The Bridge in Seattle, they recently read aloud their poems at a Seattle coffee shop. [Warning: Some graphic language below.]

 

My Painful Life

There are days in my life that are filled with emptiness

My heart leaks from pain and washes away with sorrow

When I was young I did not get what I wanted in life.

At times I was alone and filled with madness,

My tears dropped from my eyes and were soggy wet

on my pillow.

My life had no stairs or ladder to climb up,

no boat sailed smoothly to my destinations.

My life was hopeless and helpless like a man

without a liver.

Life, without life is nothing but my shattered dreams

and wishes.

At night, moonlight brightens me across the window,

but no one is close enough to hug

or care for me or my feelings.

Nothing can be done and I have to live

with my destiny of life.

I watched others who had everything in their life

but it did not bring me jealousy.

Even a smile on my face was far from me.

Happiness kept me away and darkness hugged me closely.

So many broken promised have played deep in my life

and the outcome results made me feel so terrible

They say “you can live the life you were born to live,”

But what can I do when I was born where there

is no life in store for me.

Today what I have learned is to accept life and live it

without counting the regrets for nothing.

Make every day of your life count.

 

***********

 

Perfect Star

I always drew

really nice stars

until someone

told me my

stars were

perfect.

Now I make

sure my stars

aren’t that

nice.

 

****

My Life

Is a story. I’m just

writing it as I go.

 

So many reasons to be

disappointed but so many

reasons to be happy it’s

all perspective.

 

You got to laugh a little

try to enjoy every moment

cause you’ll be remembering

and laughing about it when

you’re older.

Sometimes when I think

about it, you know getting

older, I ask myself, What will I remember most?”

 

May that, that day was

mine. I hope when I’m older

I’ll never ever regret anything

especially things that made me smile.

 

 ********

 

Confusion With Life

I’ve had a gun held to my head

If someone said yes, I would be dead

I’ve been raped many times

I’m just happy I lived to say I’m fine

All alone

I just wanted to go home

Walking through the rain, in shame

Never felt so much pain

I stopped trying

Because I felt like dying

Throwing up means getting beat up

They didn’t care that it hurt

Socked to the ground

Everyone around

Busted lip Hurting hip

It was such a trip

Thrown out of cars

That could have gone too far

I guess making it here today

Makes me a STAR

 

 ****

 

The final two poems are by the same person

 

Blue

If blue had a personality it would be calming

Blue is the calm of the storm

Like a newborn child blue is a miracle

Blue is the feeling as well as the color that cannot be defined

If blue had a personality it would be sad

The feeling we get before we cry

Blue is the emotion we cannot run from

Like a thorn in your finger

It’s there but we don’t always want to see it

If blue had a personality it would be a Sunday morning in winter

With coffee by a warm fire

A calming feeling

A longing feeling of social interaction

If blue had a personality I’d ask it to be my friend

 

 

Black & White

You can dress up or dress down

But your cue is on time

You can ask for time to stand still

But it will not follow

You can bitch and whine but nothing will change

All you see it what you want or nothing at all

Wonder why that is?

Must be because you only see in Black & White.

 

This series is being made possible by your donations via Spot.us and directly to PostGlobe, which receives no grants nor government money and relies on tax-deductible donations

Donate here to support PostGlobe

 

ENTIRE SERIES

Special report: Gang members turn from selling drugs to selling girls for sex

Special report: Controlled and abused teens exploited in prostitution trade can’t get out

Special report: Buyers of child sex are ordinary guys doing something illegal

Voices of the exploited… ‘Make every day of your life count’

Prostitution sweep recovered 23 children; hundreds more still stuck in “The Life”

Teen prostitution: Prevention tips and warning signs

Lost and found: Home provides place for sexually exploited teens

Fourth in a series

 A teenage girl stands in a coffee shop, reading a poem about her life getting into and getting out of prostitution. She reads in part:

“My life had no stairs or ladder to climb up,

no boat sailed smoothly to my destinations.

My life was hopeless and helpless like a man without a liver.”

The poem, “My Painful Life,” continues in its sad metaphors and similes, eventually reaching an ending of acceptance without resolution. The girl looks and acts like any other high-school girl, joking with and sassing the other girls at the reception, but she and the five other girls in the coffee shop of the Treehouse building in Seattle have been through experiences of exploitation and abuse that are nothing like the typical high-school experience.

What makes them more unique is that they are the first girls to go through a new program for girls who want to get out of the life of prostitution – and who do not have a safe home to go back to. The housing facility where they live, called The Bridge, opened somewhere in the Seattle area this year. The location is kept secret because some of these girls are fleeing violent pimps who both abused them and forced them to have sex with customers.

The idea is to help them complete their childhood after they’ve been through the sexual abuse and domestic violence of a relationship with a pimp, explained Leslie Briner (pictured at left), associate director of Residential Services at YouthCare, the Seattle non-profit that runs The Bridge and several other service centers for at-risk youth. The name “The Bridge” was chosen because it’s intended to be a path to reconnect to normal life, and because founders wanted to name it after Former Supreme Court Justice Bobbe Bridge, who has campaigned for the rights of runaway children.

Girls can stay at the Bridge for two years, or until they turn 18. They get help in getting caught up with high school, they get counseling for substance abuse and mental-health problems. The doors and windows of The Bridge are all wired to an alarm system, and there are security cameras on the entrances. In effect, the agency and its workers take on most aspects of parental responsibility for the girls, said Briner (pictured again at left).

The Bridge is a pilot program with room for six girls at one time. It’s full now.

Briner would not share details about the current residents, but said that the average age of girls in the house was 16. She also said that 99 percent of the time, the children who come to YouthCare because of involvement in prostitution get referred after an arrest. She also added that the average age for entry into the life of prostitution is 13.

A report by anthropologist Debra Boyer, called “Who Pays the Price,” identified 238 youths ranging in age from 13 to 18 involved in prostitution in Seattle and King County. Boyer compiled names by talking to social workers and law enforcement officials who worked with at-risk youth. She estimated 300 to 500 children in total were being prostituted. Seattle Police Lt. Eric Sano, commander of the vice/high risk victims unit, estimated that the number was more like 800 to 1,000 children involved in prostitution, although he didn’t have any scientific compilation.

After girls under 18 are arrested for prostitution, police officers are faced with a contradiction. The girls can be booked into jail and tried for a crime, but they’re also victims of sex crimes, usually having been abused by pimps.  Releasing them to family also usually isn’t a good option. According to Ryan Larson, an FBI task force officer in Lakewood, 90 percent of the girls who get arrested for prostitution are either runaways or wards of the state. Putting the girls back in foster care also isn’t a good option because pimps can find them there again, go get them and put them back into the life. Often, Larson said, law enforcement officers will recover the same girl several times.

Boyer, who has been researching prostitution since the 1980s, says that she and Melinda Giovengo, the executive director of YouthCare, had been wanting to open a housing facility for years that would serve the long-term needs of girls who were getting prostituted and had nowhere to go.

 “You cannot get off the street if you do not have a place to go,” explains Boyer. The Bridge (pictured at left), with its six beds, cannot come close to meeting the needs of the larger population of exploited homeless girls, but she said it’s a good start. Also, she says that there needs to be housing specifically for formerly prostituted women in the 18 to 30 age range so that being homeless doesn’t push them back into prostitution.

The Bridge is funded through a combination of federal, city and private money, said Terri Kimball, director of the City’s Domestic and Sexual Violence Prevention Office. The Bridge is a three-year pilot project that needs $1.9 million, of which $1.5 million has been raised, she said. The Bridge is funded through a combination of federal, city and private money, says Terri Kimball, director of the City’s Domestic and Sexual Violence Prevention Office. The project was in danger of getting cut last year because of government budget shortfalls, but private donors – including many people who gave $20 or $50 – have given about $500,000 towards the cost of The Bridge. YouthCare is still looking for donations to raise the remaining $380,000, and information about donating can be found by clicking here.

YouthCare staff would not allow any current residents of the Bridge to be interviewed by the PostGlobe. Briner says that because consent had been taken away from them so many times when they were being prostituted, the notion of when to consent to talk with someone – a reporter or anyone else – was something that had to be rebuilt. The Bridge, being such a new program, doesn’t have any graduates over 18.

However, their poems do provide a meaningful window into their experiences. The poem quoted earlier ends:

“Today, what I have learned is to accept life and live with it without counting the regrets for nothing.

Make every day of your life count.”

For the full poem and more poems, click here.

 

This series is being made possible by your donations via Spot.us and directly to PostGlobe, which receives no grants nor government money and relies strictly on your tax-deductible donations.

Donate here to support PostGlobe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            On a girl’s bedside table, next to a collection of cosmetics, is a handwritten sheet of music. Gloria Womack, a program director at The Bridge, is reflected in a mirror during a tour Nov. 11. (All photos by Jordan Stead.)   

 

ENTIRE SERIES

Special report: Gang members turn from selling drugs to selling girls for sex

Special report: Controlled and abused teens exploited in prostitution trade can’t get out

Special report: Buyers of child sex are ordinary guys doing something illegal

Voices of the exploited… ‘Make every day of your life count’

Prostitution sweep recovered 23 children; hundreds more still stuck in “The Life”

Teen prostitution: Prevention tips and warning signs

Lost and found: Home provides place for sexually exploited teens

Third in a series

Prostitution of children is a problem driven by demand from customers, explained Kaffie McCullough.

“You will never bring down this business on the victim’s side. The driver is the clients’ side,” explained McCullough, executive director of “A Future. Not A Past,” a Georgia campaign to help prostituted children. She came to Seattle in August to tell human services and law enforcement staff about the results of a study on demand for child prostitution in the Atlanta area.

The study was particularly important because no one really had a good measure of the size of the market of customers for prostitution. As an underground market, it’s difficult to measure. No such research has been done on demand in Washington state.

Researchers in Georgia advertised a fake escort service on Craigslist.org and Backpage.com that allowed customers to call in to make an appointment with a girl. Conversing with potential customers, phone operators of the fake escort service gave several warnings about the girl’s age:

“She doesn’t look like she’s 18.”

“I don’t believe this girl is actually 18, and I have no reason to believe she is.”

“We’re talking about the really young girl, right?”

Of the men who received these warnings, 47 percent continued to express interest in setting up an appointment with a prostitute. Only 6 percent of the men who called the service said they were specifically looking for an adolescent.

The study concluded that 7,200 men were purchasing sex each month with girls who were under 18, totaling 8,700 sex acts each month in Georgia.

One question that came up immediately at McCullough’s presentation was about the customers’ motivations: What’s wrong with these men, or “What’s their psychopathology?”

The answer was short: “There isn’t one.”

McCullough explained that our society teaches that it’s normal for a man to have interest in a young-looking female who’s sexually mature, and so they seek that out.

The text of the report explained a little more about the customers:

Men who purchase sex tend to come from normal backgrounds and seem no more likely to suffer from apparent pathologies than the rest of the adult male population. There simply appears to be no magic bullet in determining what individual qualities and experiences lead a man to purchase sex. Prostitution is a societal problem, not an individual problem.

The researchers also wrote that only the small percentage of men who are specifically seeking out adolescents would fit the description of a “sex predator,” and that the behavior of purchasing sex from prostitutes is more common than most people would think.

The study estimated that 23 percent of all adult males in Georgia had purchased sex from a prostitute – under or above 18 – at some point in their lives.

In other words, most purchasers of sex with girls under the age of 18 are just “regular guys” doing something illegal and trying to not pay attention to the fact they’re having sex with children.

Here is where McCullough said that an overall change in society’s attitudes needs to happen – she advised a campaign modeled after Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s work to make drunk driving socially unacceptable.

The Seattle picture

Lt. Eric Sano, commander of the vice/high risk victims unit of the Seattle Police department, said that while he didn’t have any data like the Georgia study, demand is huge for young-looking prostitutes. The vice squad runs several stings a month, arresting 360 men a year — one guy a day, on average — for soliciting sex with undercover female officers. They are given an opportunity to get the arrest off their records if they attend “John School,” a day of classes about the consequences of prostitution on themselves, the community, and the women and girls involved. Sano said that no attendees have been arrested a second time – at least in the city of Seattle.

Customers caught in these stings face only a misdemeanor because cops must witness them following through on the sex act to bring felony charges, and the undercover policewomen aren’t expected to go there.

Discouraging demand isn’t easy, Sano said. In addition to the stings, one tactic that he uses is to send a “John letter” to the owner of a car that police officers see circling in a high prostitution area. Wives who happen to see these letters are “not real happy,” he said.

One deterrent Sano doesn’t want to try is public shaming, such as Oakland’s “Don’t John in Oakland” campaign in which pictures of men arrested for soliciting sex were put on billboards. “I don’t want to be responsible for somebody killing themselves over a misdemeanor,” he said. A few other cities have come up with some anti-prostitution billboards, such as one from Chicago that says, “Dear John, if you’re here to solicit sex it could cost you $2,150. We’re teaming up to bust you.” Another from Minneapolis says “Picking Up a Prostitute in Minneapolis? Your photo will be posted online: www.johnspics.org.”

Not a victimless crime

What’s needed is an overall attitude change in society to get demand down.

“We need to bring it from the dark into light. People think it’s consensual sex, just a victimless crime,” Sano said.

“No, this is a child. This is somebody’s daughter.”

Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (pictured at left), said that while most people wouldn’t shop for sex with children, their ignorance on the topic helps allow it to happen.

“The vast majority of the American public is blissfully unaware of the problem, and when you focus on it as slavery,” Allen said, “it shocks them.”

Allen estimated that 60 percent of customers could be diverted from buying sex if a campaign let them know that America was watching. “There is a segment of the customer population that is not hardcore. They can be dissuaded,” Allen said.

Will society hold Johns accountable?

Allen didn’t think “John Schools” were effective  at getting demand under control. “We’ve got to at least embarrass the customers,” he said. “They need to be held accountable.”

Allen said that more stories in the national media, plus campaigns by Hollywood stars, are beginning to bring the problem of commercial sexual exploitation of children out of the shadows. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore (pictured at left) have started a campaign called “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls.”

The additional awareness and deterrents won’t stop the problem of child exploitation, but Allen believes it can be significantly reduced.

“Over time,” Allen said, “it will make it harder to market and sell kids.”

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SAMPLE ‘DEAR JOHN’ PROSTITUTION LETTERS

Here’s a template of a letter sent by Seattle police to suspected Johns:

(Date)

(Addressee)

Dear (Registered owner),

Due to a growing concern among business owners and residents regarding the crime of prostitution, the Seattle Police Department’s Vice Unit is actively interdicting prostitution activity by enforcing all applicable prostitution laws, as defined under Seattle Municipal Code 12A.10.  As part of our enforcement efforts, the Seattle Police Department is sending out letters to registered owners of specific vehicles seen in areas of prostitution. 

Our records indicate the registered owner information for the following vehicle:

Registered Owner                                License#          Make               Model              State

(Name)                                                (plate)              (Make)             (Model)            (State)

On                        the vehicle described above was observed by Seattle Police Department personnel in an area of frequent prostitution activity.  The actions of the driver while in this area were consistent with the elements of                                              and/or                                     .  Examples of such activity include, but are not limited to the following:

• Repeatedly circling an area where known prostitutes are working;
• Slowing and/or stopping in an area of high prostitution activity when beckoned to by pedestrians;
• Stopping to engage in conversation with a known prostitute in an area of high prostitution activity.

The Seattle Police Department appreciates your assistance to make this a safer and more enjoyable city in which to reside and conduct business.  If you have any questions regarding this notification, or you believe it was sent to you in error, please contact the Vice Unit Street Team Supervisor, Sergeant Jim Kelly at 684-8660.

Sincerely,

 

John Diaz

Chief of Police

 

Lieutenant Eric Sano

Vice/High Risk Victims Unit Commander

 

****

Here’s a sample letter from Florida…

According to NorthEscambia.com, the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office released this copy of a letter that will be sent to the registered owners of the vehicles involved in arrests for violations of Florida prostitution  laws. Download the letter here (pdf).

 

This series is being made possible by your donations via Spot.us and directly to PostGlobe, which receives no grants nor government money and relies on your tax-deductible donations. Photo sources: Girls are Not for Sale, Ernie Allen, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.

Donate here to support PostGlobe

 

ENTIRE SERIES

Special report: Gang members turn from selling drugs to selling girls for sex

Special report: Controlled and abused teens exploited in prostitution trade can’t get out

Special report: Buyers of child sex are ordinary guys doing something illegal

Voices of the exploited… ‘Make every day of your life count’

Prostitution sweep recovered 23 children; hundreds more still stuck in “The Life”

Teen prostitution: Prevention tips and warning signs

Lost and found: Home provides place for sexually exploited teens

Second in a series

Drug dealing can be lucrative, but some gang members who sell drugs get tired of standing out on the street all night, at risk of arrest simply by possessing the drugs they’re selling. So, they become pimps and make their girlfriends work all night instead — selling sex.

Pimping can be very lucrative, and both federal and local law enforcement agencies have seen a trend of gang members getting involved in controlling girls under the age of 18 through violence, making them sell themselves, and keeping all of the profits.

FBI Task Force Officer Ryan Larson said the reason for the change was simply economic. From the pimps’ perspective, he explained, “I sell crack, I sell it, it’s gone, I sell a girl, she’s still there.”

“If a pimp has two girls, say each one does two dates, that makes $600 a day, times 30,” Larson said. “The average pimp can make $18,000 a month for two girls doing two dates a day.”

One recently convicted pimp was making $30,000 a month from the girls who were working for him, Larson said. Juan Alexander Vianez, 26, of Lakewood, was sentenced in federal court to 20 years in prison in September.

“Pimping out girls gets me money, which gets me respect,” gang member Shawn Clark, 21, wrote in a confession, according to Seattlepi.com, before he was sentenced in December to nine years in prison for his role in a West Seattle prostitution ring. “And if I’m respected as an associate of West Side Street Mobb, then the gang gets more respect… Next to money, respect is all that matters.”

His brother, Deshawn “Cash Money” Clark, 19, sentenced in January to 17 years for his role in the prostitution ring and the first to be convicted under a new state human-trafficking law, apologized.

“I know what I did was wrong,” Clark said to King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North, according to Seattlepi.com. “I apologize to the women in this case, to their families, my family, to everyone.”

How it works

Pimps prefer to recruit girls who are runaways or who are wards of the state, FBI’s Larson explained, meaning that one of the things that keeps them in the life of prostitution and attached to the pimp is that they don’t have anywhere else to go. The average age of entry for girls into prostitution is 13 in the United States, according to a University of Pennsylvania study.

Even when girls do have relatives to go back to, a return often isn’t possible. “I called one mother and I said, ‘I don’t want to take your daughter to jail, come get her.’ She said she’d file a complaint if I didn’t stop harassing her,” Larson said.

“These girls need to be loved, and this is what the pimp provides, and they start dating, and then bam, they turn her out,” Larson said. “They’re street psychologists and therapists. They get the girl to believe that dream, and they work them until they’re done.”

He said that understanding that girls who have been involved in prostitution are victims is a difficult notion to grasp because when they get arrested, they don’t act like victims. Uncooperative, they swear at officers and say that they don’t need help. “Even myself, three years ago, I didn’t realize the dynamics of the domestic nature of the situation. I would have thought that she’s an unruly runaway that is prostituting,” Larson said.

“In reality, she’s the worst victim of domestic violence you could imagine, being manipulated, made to sleep with these nasty old men.”

Estimates of how many underage girls are involved in prostitution vary: A study by anthropologist Debra Boyer called “Who Pays the Price” found about 250 girls working as prostitutes who were known to Seattle social services providers. Boyer estimated that 300 to 500 girls total were working in the Seattle-King County area. Lt. Eric Sano, commander of the vice and high-risk victims unit of the Seattle Police Department, said that he believes the number to be closer to the range of 800 to 1,000 girls involved.

Sano said that gang members have been getting more involved in pimping in recent years, a dangerous trend because they’re more prone to violence both with the girls and with rival gang members.

“They’ve grown up in an era that glorifies the gang lifestyle through rap music, video games, movies and TV shows,” Sano said.

Police believe several shootings last year were between gang members over control of prostitutes and turf, culminating in the shooting death of Mario Spearman on April 13, 2009. [See security-cam video below of shooters' getaway.] Four men were convicted of his killing in September 2010.

 

 

 

The gang members who pimp prostitutes tend to be less organized than what law enforcement would call an “organized crime family,” Sano said. “The gangs are usually a little less formal, although there is usually one member that is the ad hoc leader,” he said. Each pimp has between one and four girls that he controls. One of the girls becomes the “Bottom Girl,” a street term to describe the girl closest to the exploiter, and she also ends up recruiting or coercing other girls to prostitute themselves. 

Another reason some gang members get involved with prostitution rather than drugs is that a girl can be coached to say that she’s a cousin, friend, etc., of the pimp if she is questioned by police, while illegal drugs are illegal regardless of what kind of explanation they give to the officers, Sano said.

FBI Special Agent Tarna Derby-McCurtain said that federal authorities have been getting more involved in prosecuting pimps in recent years, even in cases where they can’t prove that the pimp moved across state lines. If a telephone or computer is used in the crime, or if the pimp buys condoms for a prostitute, that shows that there was interstate commerce. (Condoms aren’t manufactured in Washington state.)

Derby-McCurtain said federal prosecutors take on four or five of the worst cases of pimping each year in Western Washington. Recently, a former Army Sergeant, Sterling Terrance Hospedales, 27, was sentenced in federal court to 11 years in prison for sex trafficking juveniles. According to a statement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he had lured one girl out from Wyoming and set up a Lakewood apartment where the girls were living and servicing customers. Derby-McCurtain said that sentences in the federal system tend to be longer, with defendants serving 80 percent of their time, as opposed to 50 percent in state prisons.

More advanced pimps who travel with their girls are known as “circuit pimps,” meaning that they travel around every few weeks, taking the girls to the large cities in the West. Derby-McCurtain said Washington state isn’t the most profitable place to run a prostitution ring – demand is higher in Las Vegas and Reno. Also, when a major sports event like the Super Bowl takes place, circuit pimps from all around the area will come with their girls.

Why some teens become pimps

Money is the major motivator for why pimps control and turn out girls, but one Seattle non-profit organization believes that there are other factors, and is trying to reach out to them. New Horizons Ministries in Seattle goes out on the streets with teams of counselors to talk with prostitutes and with pimps. Sheila Houston, director of Outreach Services, said that about half of the females they talk with are under 18. Many pimps, too, are quite young and need to be helped.

“If you have boys that are 17, 18 or 19 doing this, there is something wrong. There needs to be some kind of rehabilitation,” Houston said. She cited lack of money, lack of education and poverty in the African-American community as reasons that young men are getting involved in the trade.

Looking at it from the perspective of a woman of color herself, Houston said, she had to consider the challenges that African-American young men go through when they’re raised. “Some of them didn’t have a father figure in the home telling them what it means to be a man.”

Houston said that pimping should still be prosecuted as a crime, but she thinks that sentences of 26 years are excessive.

She added that there isn’t enough emphasis in the law enforcement response being put on the customers of prostitutes, some of whom are raping, beating and sodomizing them. One thing that New Horizons does is help prostitutes put together a “bad date list,” containing names and descriptions of customers who abuse prostitutes. The list usually has about 15 names on it.

Sano said that in his police work, he’s heard arguments that pimps aren’t all hardened criminals, but those arguments don’t sit well with him.

“People say, ‘Oh, these pimps, they’re just victims of society.’ But, once you start assaulting, raping people, torturing people — you lose your victim status,” he said.

Leslie Briner, associate director of Residential Services at YouthCare, a Seattle non-profit organization that runs a home for children recovered from prostitution, said that she does understand Houston’s point that many pimps are themselves youths who don’t think about the consequences of their actions.

“It’s really easy to villainize these guys,” Briner said. “I absolutely agree . . . that villainization of the pimps is because of racism and classism.

“Pimps are oftentimes folk heroes in their communities because they’re the ones with resources in their community,” Briner added. “They have money.”

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******

Prostitution among Youth in Case Management (Year 2007)

Agency/Program                                                                               

Case Manager                                     Total # Caseload        # Youth in Prostitution —————————————————————————————————————–

YC Juvenile Detention Case Manager        118                                    58

YC HIV Case Manager                                 23                                      9

YC Home of Hope                                        36                                      3

YC Orion Case Manager 1                           34                                      4

YC Isis                                                         30                                      4

YC Orion Case Mangr. 2                              50                                    15

YC Pathways                                               25                                      1

YC Passages                                               35                                      6

UDYC Case Mgr. 1                                       45                                      8

UDYC Case Manager                                   75                                    24

YMCA WZ                                                     35                                      4

SEYFS                                                        150                                    13

Spruce St CRC 687 66

YC Straley                                                   40                                      3

YC Casa/ORR                                              27                                      0

YC Shelter                                                 118                                    20

                 TOTALS                                 1,528                               238

Agency Key – YC=YouthCare, UDYC=University District Youth Center, YMCA WZ= YMCA Working

Zone, SEYFS =Southeast Youth and Family Services. Source: “Who Pays The Price?” report, Table 3.

***

This series is being made possible by your donations via Spot.us and directly to PostGlobe,  which receives no grants nor government money and relies on tax-deductible donations. Photo sources: New Horizon Ministries, Craigscrimelist.org, Girls are Not for Sale. 

Donate here to support PostGlobe

 

ENTIRE SERIES

Special report: Gang members turn from selling drugs to selling girls for sex

Special report: Controlled and abused teens exploited in prostitution trade can’t get out

Special report: Buyers of child sex are ordinary guys doing something illegal

Voices of the exploited… ‘Make every day of your life count’

Prostitution sweep recovered 23 children; hundreds more still stuck in “The Life”

Teen prostitution: Prevention tips and warning signs

Lost and found: Home provides place for sexually exploited teens

First in a series

At the age of 15, “Maria” was a Seattle teenager estranged from her family. She had gotten pregnant and had a child, and was kicked out of the house. She went to live with the baby’s father for a while, but that didn’t work out, either, and she became effectively homeless.

A few months later, she met a man, Tracey James Barnes, who was three years older than she was, who became her boyfriend. Tracey bragged about being a pimp. He had lots of money, but she didn’t take him seriously. He was physically abusive, but she was used to that at home and from previous boyfriends. Maria left her son with the baby’s father, and went to Los Angeles with the new boyfriend. “I was really excited to go to Hollywood,” she said.

Soon, she was in a motel on Sunset Boulevard, and Tracey took her identification, and told her to go out to make some money or she’d be left there. He provided her with a short skirt and high heels. “It was terrifying,” she said. She was afraid of working as a prostitute, but, “I was more scared of disappointing him, and him period. He told me he knew where my son lived.”

Physical abuse was a regular part of her life, she explained. “The way you learn the rules, you mess up, and then you get your ass kicked.”

That night a client found her. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I told him I needed money for my babysitter. We ate dinner, walked in the park. It was like an actual date. He must have thought I was the weirdest prostitute ever.” They did not actually engage in sex.

Seattle Police estimate that there are between 800 and 1,000 girls like Maria who got tricked into a life of prostitution, and cannot get out. That’s because they’re being forced to work by pimps who control them with violence and because they don’t have any home to go back to. A prostitution sweep at the beginning of November recovered 23 girls under the age of 18 in King and Pierce counties. 

“These kids are victims. This is 21st century slavery,” said Ernie Allen (pictured at left), president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who estimated that 100,000 children a year nationwide are caught up in prostitution, 60 percent of whom are runaways, “thrown aways” or children rejected by their families, or homeless. He also cited data saying that one-third of prostitutes working streets are under 18.

 Maria is now 37 and works for YouthCare, a Seattle non-profit organization, where she works specifically with commercially sexually exploited children. When the children got brought in during the prostitution sweep on the weekend of Nov. 5 through Nov. 8, Maria interviewed them and offered options for programs that can help them get out of prostitution and away from their pimps. As a survivor herself, she offers her own experiences to relate to girls who are often combative.

Maria agreed to speak with the PostGlobe under the condition that a pseudonym be used in this story because her not all of her new acquaintances know of her past. She did allow her work with YouthCare to be described fully because her co-workers are already aware of her background.

**

Back when Maria was a teenager and being initiated into the life of prostitution, her first “real night,” as she explained it, was in San Diego. She got drunk first, and went out and worked. For $50, she performed oral sex on a man in a car. She explained that she felt a mental boost when she made money. “You think the customer’s stupid. You feel closer to getting back to the hotel room. You have to make a certain amount of money to get back,” she said. At that time, the amount was $500.

“You were expected to ‘break yourself,’ give him the money, and you can go take a shower,” she said. Some days, she could make $1,000 to $1,500. She estimated she was making $200,000 a year, all of it going to her pimp, Tracey.

Tracey took her on the “circuit,” a series of cities in the West that pimps and prostitutes rotate through, leaving whenever law enforcement efforts were stepped up.

Maria stayed with Tracey for another seven years. There were three other girls he controlled. Maria says that Tracey was “Gorilla pimp,” meaning that he used a lot of violence on the girls.

“To punish you, he’d make you take off all your clothes,” Maria says, “and beat you in front of other girls.”

Cut off from friends and family, she did not see any way she could leave. She remembers two experiences when she did have contact with law enforcement and with a hospital, but they didn’t provide opportunities to get out of the life. Rather, they furthered her feelings of dehumanization.

In San Diego, a man solicited her for sex on the street. He was driving a van. Prostitutes tell each other to stay away from clients in vans, but Maria had serviced him before, and thought that she could trust him. In the back of the van, he held her down and used a stun gun on her several times and hit her with a baseball bat.

The stun gun wasn’t knocking her out completely.

“I wanted to go to sleep, but I knew I had to stay awake, or I’d be found dead. I was scratching him to get his DNA under my nails,” Maria said.

“I know what it feels like to have your last thoughts.”

Eventually, she was able to escape him, and jumped out of the van. The man started driving away. She was left in the middle of the street, screaming, with no one to help. She walked to the nearest business, an auto repair place, and the mechanic called 911.

“All the police had to say is, ‘What kind of drugs are you on?’ I wasn’t on drugs,” she said. They took her to the hospital, still in a state of panic. “I was totally freaked out. I thought, ‘this guy’s going to come back and kill me.’”

During her treatment, she was given an X-ray. In the X-ray room, the two male technicians molested her. “They were young guys, laughing and saying I was a prostitute. I just laid there and cried,” Maria recalled. She didn’t complain about the assault by the technicians, not expecting anyone to believe her because she was involved in prostitution.

She gave a description of the van and of the man who assaulted her to the police, but the police never called her back to follow up. She doesn’t know anything more about him, but wonders if he was a serial killer who didn’t have his methods refined well enough.

Another experience she had was in Arizona, where a man picked her up, and they agreed on a price for sex.

“He pulled out a bat, told me he was police, and that I was under arrest,” she said. “He handcuffed me, and had me sit in the front seat. He talked about ‘making a deal,’ and I said, ‘No, just take me to jail.’ He said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ He blindfolded me, and told me he was going to take me to a safe house to get me away from my pimp.

 “Handcuffed and blindfolded, I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to die.’ He took me to a house somewhere, and in the living room, he took the $900 I was carrying, forced me to give him a blowjob with no condom, and told me I’d better get out of town.” The man drove her back to the area where she’d been picked up, and let her out. Her pimp, Tracey, didn’t believe the story, but understood that they needed to leave town.

The next day, Maria went out of the hotel room and was arrested within five minutes, which made her believe that the man from the previous night was actually a cop. “I was taken to jail, never allowed to make a phone call, never allowed to see a judge, and for 90 days. They let me out in the middle of the desert at 2:30 a.m.” She and Tracey left and never went back.

If something like that happened to her today, she would complain about that kind of treatment, but back then, she didn’t. “When you’re in that kind of a position, you don’t think anybody’s going to believe you.”

After seven years with Tracey, he let Maria go, saying that she was too experienced to continue as his girl. They stayed friends, though. “He was like a god to me. He brainwashed me. To this day, I protect him. They call it the Stockholm Syndrome,” she said.

***

Tracey James Barnes was later convicted of sex trafficking crimes in federal court in Florida. The charges involved other girls he pimped. He was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison, and died in federal prison in Louisiana in 2007.

Maria continued working as a prostitute for another seven or eight years, first as an escort – setting up meetings with customers by phone – and later as a dancer at Rick’s strip club on Lake City Way in Seattle, an establishment later shut down as part of a federal racketeering prosecution.

As she neared the end of telling her story to a Seattle PostGlobe reporter a few weeks ago, her tone warmed when she talked about working for Frank Colacurcio Sr., the now-late owner of Rick’s. “He loved us. Some days when business was slow, he’d come through and give us each $40,” she said. “He wasn’t a pimp. He wasn’t saying, ‘Go, make money!’”

Maria said the setup at Rick’s was that women who wanted to dance would pay $150 per day to dance at the club, and customers would pay them with tips, both for dancing, but mostly for performing sex acts on the side, some days making $1,500 in a day. “You make more money in a strip club, because they think you’re higher class,” she said.

As she got toward the age of 30, she got into an Alcoholics Anonymous group, and there also started dealing with her anxiety problems, and post-traumatic stress disorder. She also started attending church, and told a woman there her entire story of what had happened to her. She got sober, and exited the life of prostitution.

Now she uses her experiences to help teenagers who are being exploited. Melinda Giovengo (pictured at left), executive director of YouthCare, said that having Maria there can provide credibility in dealing with girls who don’t believe anyone can relate to them.

“It’s really important to having someone who has an empathetic voice, who can help them get out of this awful hole,” Giovengo said.

Giovengo said that it helps to have Maria’s eyes at the drop-in center that YouthCare runs, the Orion Center. The drop-in center is open to any teenager who wants to visit, so it is possible for pimps to get in, but Maria often spots warning signs. “She can say that this person is grooming, and this person is recruiting. She’s a person who can say, ‘This is not okay,’” Giovengo said.

Maria also speaks at two classes for adults involved in prostitution. At Seattle’s “John School,” the class for the men who get arrested for soliciting sex, she tells her story, and she tries to humanize these girls. She tries to make the men understand how pimps work. Some of them thank her for talking, she said. At the class for adult women who are selling sex, she approaches being in a life of prostitution as being in a state of addiction, and going through the stages of change.

Terri Kimball, director of the city’s Domestic and Sexual Violence Prevention Office, said that having a survivor like Maria help run the “John School” class provides a direct connection between the men’s actions and their reasons for being in the school. “At first they see her as the administrator, and then she stands up and says, ‘I’m not just running the class, I was also a sex worker,’” Kimball said.

Maria relates one time when she was able to use her experience as a survivor to help a girl at the Orion Center. The girl was “pretty entrenched,” she said, thought she was in love with a guy, but this man was a pimp, forcing her to sell sex for a year and a half. Just like a domestic violence victim, this girl was keeping it secret.

“She wasn’t telling people why she was getting these bruises, but she thought she could tell me,” Maria remembered. Talking it over with Maria helped the girl build her self-esteem so she could believe that she deserved someone who didn’t make her sell herself and didn’t beat her. “When she figured that out, her love turned to anger, and that’s when she left.”

That girl later got a job as a nanny, and a job at Nordstrom, got out of the life of prostitution, and never went back.

The version of love that girls suffer from when they’re being exploited by pimps is that they’re looking for someone who pays a lot of attention to them, someone who is cool, someone who has a lot of nice things, and is the “opposite of a trick,” Maria said.

A trick, or a customer, Maria explained, is held in low regard by the girl because he can be manipulated out of his money. “The opposite of that is guys who are hard, they’re in the game, you can’t play games with their heads. You can’t get away with anything with these guys,” she said of the pimps.

Her hope is that education can break through the myths of what it means to be sexy.

“I hope that girls are not feeling like the only thing that’s good for them is that they’re sexy and they can wear little clothes and show their body,” she said. “I think self-esteem is a huge issue with our youth today because they have so much to live up to.”

Maria said that even though she left the sex trade life in 2002, she still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and has a hard time finding a counselor who can relate to her experiences. “Every psychiatrist I’ve called has said, ‘I’ve never worked with anyone who’s been in the sex industry,” Maria said. There are hundreds of thousands of sex workers in the United States, but apparently not many of them are reaching for help.

“I don’t think that there’s many of us that make it out. There’s probably not a big need. They don’t get that phone call very often,” Maria said, adding, “It’s a hidden world, and it’s an ugly world, and if it’s put out in the light, everyone will see the ugliness and the pain, and maybe there will be more people willing to help.”

This series is being made possible by your donations via Spot.us and directly to PostGlobe, which receives no grants nor government money and relies on tax-deductible donations. Photo sources: Ernie Allen, California map (from Wikimedia Commons), Melinda Giovengo, Orion Center.

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ENTIRE SERIES

Special report: Gang members turn from selling drugs to selling girls for sex

Special report: Controlled and abused teens exploited in prostitution trade can’t get out

Special report: Buyers of child sex are ordinary guys doing something illegal

Voices of the exploited… ‘Make every day of your life count’

Prostitution sweep recovered 23 children; hundreds more still stuck in “The Life”

Teen prostitution: Prevention tips and warning signs

Lost and found: Home provides place for sexually exploited teens

Writing about children getting controlled and sold for sex by pimps is one of the more difficult tasks I’ve taken on as a journalist, mainly because I’m the kind of journalist who really likes explaining how things work. I like to write about why a problem exists, how it came to be, how it can be solved, and what kind of endpoint there is to the problem – what will our world look like when the problem is gone?

Exploitation of children is hard to explain not just because it’s disturbing. It’s hard to explain because its cause is three other problems carried to an extreme degree. It’s an extreme case of domestic violence because usually the relationship between pimp and child starts out as dating, and she calls him her boyfriend, and then the pimp controls her through physical and sexual violence. It’s an extreme case of youth homelessness because most of the children who get taken by pimps are runaways or ward of the state. It’s also an extreme case of sexual abuse because most of these children have been sexually abused before they meet the pimp – and is often the reason that they run away.

There are some other contributing factors – an increasing sexualized media environment means that everyone is getting overwhelmed with depictions of sexual encounters, often with a woman who appears very young. This sends the message to both at-risk girls and to males who are potential buyers of sex that youth sex is a great thing. Hip-hop music glorifies pimp culture, and law enforcement sources tell me that every pimp is an amateur rapper. Also, the Internet makes it easier to set up a sexual encounter with a prostitute, which some advocates for children believe is increasing the overall number sexual transactions.

If you try to combat a social problem, you’re always going after something kind of abstract. “There’s NO excuse for domestic violence” makes for a nice bumper sticker, but what does this mean as regards action? You can talk about the “fraying social safety net,” but what that really adds up to is salaries of a lot of human services employees that are hard to pay. You can complain about pervasive sexuality in the media, but then you sound like you’re advocating for censorship. You can wonder why it’s so hard to buy clothes that aren’t sexually provocative for a 9-year-old girl in this country, but maybe you’re just an overprotective parent.

These are the abstract problems that feed in to this complex machine of our society’s ills, but exploitation of children is the concrete problem that comes out the other end of the machine and slaps you in the face. This is where we discover the consequences of allowing all those other things to happen.

With this story, I’m mostly going to tell a story about the experiences of those who go through exploitation and of the law enforcement people who try to track down and rescue exploited children. Keeping the story’s focus narrow enough so that it doesn’t get lost in the number – and severity – of the problems that feed exploitation of children is going to be quite a challenge.

Eric Ruthford is in the process of writing a special report on child sexual exploitation in Seattle and King County. His blog post above is an update on his progress. His upcoming special report is made possible by your donations via Spot.us.  

PRIOR POSTS BY ERIC:

 

Solutions to youth prostitution?

What do you call a child forced to sell sex?

His story pitch: Gang involvement in selling child sex is rising, and hard to stop

“Don’t John in Seattle” — would such a campaign curb demand for child prostitutes?