Arresting girls vs recovering victims

Describing the girl as someone who was engaging in prostitution rather than a victim of trafficking doesn’t surprise Rachel Lloyd, the founder of GEMS, a New York–based educational and mentoring service targeting girls and young women who have been trafficked for sex.

The standard viewpoint, she said, is “Teen hooker arrested!”

But with the FBI setting the pace for how trafficked minors should be seen — as vulnerable victims in need of services and not as criminals — things are starting to change, slowly, in local jurisdictions.

Sgt. Daniel J. Steele, a member of the FBI Innocence Lost Task Force in Denver for almost four years, said he has seen a “dramatic shift” in how minor victims of human trafficking are now seen as people needing help, not merely accessories to “pimping cases.”

He said that in Denver, 60 percent of those arrested in prostitution busts are sellers and the remainder are buyers — which he said means johns aren’t getting arrested frequently enough.

That, he added, is a function of staffing, with seven investigators, including him, to handle domestic minor cases, with the vice squad being tied up with gangs, homicides and even protests.

Lina Nealon, the director of Boston-based Demand Abolition noted that nationally, it’s clear that sellers — including minors — “are being arrested at twice the rate of buyers.”

“If anything, that ratio should be should be flipped. If a vulnerable child is being bought five or 10 times a night, there should be five or 10 adults being arrested for every one person selling,” she said.

Seattle is among the cities that recently flipped those stats, because, said Val Richey, the deputy King County prosecutor, officials realized the numbers did not reflect the true nature of what was happening.

In 2009, King County arrested two men for soliciting sex from minors and 53 minors for prostitution. “When I looked at those numbers in 2009, it was pretty clear that we needed to change our tactics,” he said, adding that the focus switched from solicitation by minors to exploitation of those minors.

Source: Demanding Justice Project fact sheet. Graphic by Alex Newman/Al Jazeera America.

By 2014, the arrest numbers had been reversed: 52 johns arrested for trying to buy sex from a minor and one minor arrested for prostitution.

“The average age is 13 or 14 or 15. The problem in the past was that no one was taking the time to talk with these children,” said Richey. But finding police who are trained to deal with them isn’t easy.

Sgt. Brian Gallagher, who runs the South LA Human Trafficking Task Force, said that when he requested more officers to help with the enormous workload, he got 12 gang officers who weren’t trained in dealing with exploited minors.

But the somewhat silver lining is that gangs are connected to this trade more and more, so gang experience can be of use.

The largest annual sweep of trafficked minors and their pimps is the FBI’s Operation Cross Country, in which the feds link up with local law enforcement departments and go on dozens of busts. This year yielded 149 trafficked minors, the youngest 12 years old.

Michael Osborne, the chief of the FBI’s violent crimes against children unit, said the FBI created the national Innocence Lost initiative — with 71 child exploitation task forces that partner with more than 400 local, state and federal agencies — to fight child sex trafficking.

The focus of the work, he said, is “recovering young boys or girls that are being victimized. Period.” This means that prosecutions of pimps or johns can take a backseat. If they “identify a child that’s being trafficked, we shut the case down and pull the girl out.”

Osborne said that the FBI uses state and federal courts to go after pimps when possible but that “sometimes we forgo prosecutions to ensure that the children are pulled out and, obviously, not continuing to be victimized.”

He conceded that law enforcement has a way to go when it comes to how it looks at the girls — as victims, not as prostitutes. “We are, quite frankly, educating law enforcement and judges … [The minors] are not prostitutes. They’re victims. Children can’t consent in this situation,” he said.

While the minors are not arrested in the course of FBI stings, local authorities tend to handle things differently. Los Angeles County, for example stopped arresting sexually trafficked minors only in October.

Lisa Thurau — is the executive director of Strategies for Youth, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who trains police departments across the country — said the change is slow to come, if at all. “We’re not seeing those changes either. We’re not seeing that [police] are necessarily trained,” she said.

This, she said, is because there are financial constraints — training costs money — and because training on how to interact with youths is extremely sparse, with less than 1 percent of academy time is spent on it. And even that, she said, “has more to do with the law than with communication.”

Most officers, she said, have a hard time factoring in the notion of abuse when dealing with teens who act tough. “In certain taboo areas where you mix sex and violence, we find that officers have an even more difficult time recognizing that this is not a voluntary activity,” she said.

Compounding the issue is that there’s little in the way of statistics to show the rate at which minors are arrested on prostitution charges — or anything else, for that matter, because although states are supposed to keep track of juvenile arrests, that requirement is not enforced. (It’s much like the lack of data on disproportionate law enforcement contact with minorities.)

What happens when that information is not collected?

“Nothing,” said Thurau.

Local district attorneys, she said, are still prosecuting the girls, largely because there’s so little in place to deal with them otherwise. “What do you do with them … if there’s no other service to support this child and separate her from her pimp who is exploiting them and raping them?” she said.