WASHINGTON — When the FBI announced a nationwide crackdown
on child prostitution last month as part of a long-term initiative to combat
domestic sex trafficking, it noted that 52 children had been rescued from
“sexual slavery.”
“It is repugnant that children in these times could be
subjected to the great pain, suffering, and indignity of being forced into
sexual slavery for someone else’s profit,” said Assistant Attorney General
Lanny Breuer at the time.
But a month later none of those children is receiving the
kind of help that experts say they require to overcome the trauma of their
experiences, and some are still languishing in local juvenile detention
centers, according to a Tribune Newspapers check of the children’s situation.
Experts say the only way to ensure a good chance of recovery
for these children is placement in a residential treatment program for such
victims, of which there are only three in the United States: in New York,
California and Georgia.
“When America’s child prostitutes are identified by the
FBI or police, they are incarcerated for whatever reason possible, whether it
be an unrelated crime or ‘material witness hold,”’ said Lois Lee, founder of
one of the three centers, Children of the Night in Los Angeles.
“Then they are dumped back in the dysfunctional home,
ill-equipped group home, or foster care, and (often) disappear back into the
underground of prostitution with no voice.”
Child-sex trafficking experts say that victims struggle to
find the care they need once they escape an illicit industry that some estimate
could involve as many as 300,000 U.S. children.
Asked about Lee’s comments, Ian McCaleb, a spokesman for the
Justice Department, said the department “uses a victim-centered approach
that provides victims with the services they need in order to recover and to
fully participate in the criminal justice process.”
A report prepared for Health and Human Services in 2007 then
found four residential treatment centers with a total of 45 beds for child
prostitutes in the United States.
Interviews with the centers show that bed numbers remain low
two years later.
New York-based Girls Educational and Mentoring Services has
12 beds. One of the four mentioned in the 2007 report, The Standing Against
Global Exploitation Safe House in San Francisco, no longer has beds for
trafficking victims, though it offers nonresidential care for victims and helps
place them with foster families.
Melba Robinson, a program manager at Georgia’s Center to End
Adolescent Sexual Exploitation, said the center’s Angela’s House, which usually
takes in girls on probation, is expanding from six beds to eight.
Still, with victims numbering in the thousands, advocates
say there just aren’t enough treatment options to go around.
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
