On teens and sex work and the problems of "saving" street kids

The story in last Thursday's New York Times began:

Twenty-one sexually exploited children have been saved from the streets, and 389 people arrested on charges of trafficking children for prostitution, in what the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls the largest such multistate sweep ever, officials said Wednesday.

The five-day operation, this week and last, spanned 16 cities and involved hundreds of local, state and federal agencies in the work of rescuing missing children, many of them runaways, and identifying networks behind domestic child trafficking for the sex trade. (Susan Saulny, "Hundreds Seized in Sweep Against Child Prostitution" June 26 2008)

It continued:

The sweep was part of an annual roundup to draw attention to the issue. It marked the fifth anniversary of the Innocence Lost National Initiative, which was undertaken by the F.B.I. to address child prostitution and has led to the conviction of 308 people on a variety of federal and state charges. In all, 433 exploited children have been rescued as a result of the initiative, federal officials said.

This is an important story though perhaps not in the way it was intended. It raises questions about the costs and effectiveness of the strategies used to 'save' exploited children and it raises questions about just exactly what those kids need.

For one thing, if this sweep is being used as an example of a great success (and certainly the article makes it sound like it was) then we need to examine what that means. Twenty-one children were "saved" and 389 people were arrested on trafficking them for prostitution. That means that on average 18 adults were arrested per child saved. If that reflected the number of people on average that it takes to traffick one child, certainly child trafficking would be much too labor intensive to be profitable. But that isn't what it represents. In sweeps like this arrests are often made on people who have little or no connection other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Reading further we learn that in the past five years only 308 people have been convicted under the Innocence Lost National Initiative, fewer than were arrested in this one sweep.

On the surface then, only taking the bottom line into account, this doesn't appear to be a successful strategy. It must cost a great deal of money to coordinate law enforcement at the local state and federal level across 16 cities. Why so few results? Why only 21 children "saved" and only 389 arrested?

I keep putting "saved" in quotation marks because the second set of questions I think this article raises is about what these young people really need. The article acknowledges that many are run-aways. They were not taken away by strangers or kidnappers. They left home by choice because of problems or were put out by families that couldn't live with them. They may well be selling sex as a survival strategy occasionally and not being "pimped" in the way we tend to think. They may not want to be forced into treatment or into shelters or into halfway houses. Attempts to do so may drive them further away from help rather than actually "saving" them.

I just finished reading Marni Finkelstein's book With No Direction Home: Homeless Youth on the Road and in the Streets (Wadsworth, 2005) and she addresses sex work among runaways and street youth in ways that make it clear that such law enforcement "sweeps" are not as helpful to young people on the streets as we might want to believe. Thirty-five percent of the 50 young people she interviews said they had done some kind of sex work at least once as a strategy for acquiring shelter, food, money or drugs though only 18% admitted to doing prostitution. Fetish-satisfaction seemed to be more common, from rubbing Leg Rub Steve's leg until he gets off ($150) to letting the "Foot Guy" suck on their toes ($10). One reports being paid to throw oranges at a man, and I suspect this young woman read Rita Mae Brown's classic, Rubyfruit Jungle , but who knows, maybe the orange man really is in New York.

It is clear from Finkelstein's research that these kids (and they range in age from 15-20, having left home at a range of ages between 11 and 18) know how to enter the system and are choosing not to. They may be opting out for many reasons, including distrust, unwillingness to abide by strict rules that shelters and other housing arrangements impose, fear of being returned home, experiences of violence at the hands of authority figures, or rejection of the dominant culture values of stability and upward mobility. Most of the kids she studied did not plan to stay on the streets and many had long-term goals that would require them to leave the streets. They used drop in centers when available for free clinics and free food and such services should be expanded.

"Saving" them by forcing them into shelters or treatment, or by putting them into the juvenile justice system, is not going to be as successful as helping them by meeting them where they are, finding out what they need, and offering services they will use while building trust and helping them form goals and make plans for meeting them.