Youth for Sale on the Streets

Increasingly, runaway kids are snared into prostitution

In San Francisco last week, a convicted child molester was arrested on a charge of running a child prostitution ring that may have involved 30 boys. Police Sergeant George Huegle, who made the arrest, said that the kids were brought to customers in various parts of the city and were "exhibited like livestock, naked." On both the North and South sides of Chicago, separate rings of girl prostitutes, many of them only twelve years old, are at work. Some of the pre-teens earn $200 nightly. In Los Angeles, police estimate that up to 3,000 girls and boys under the age of 14 are engaged in prostitution. In Houston's Montrose district, teen-agers sell their sexual services in front of once grand but now aging homes.

A new and alarming wave of prostitution by teen-agers and young children has struck the U.S., not only in the big cities but also in the small towns of the Dakotas, the Minnesota iron range, Kentucky, New England and elsewhere. Some of the young prostitutes live at home and turn tricks merely for pocket money. But most are runaways. Typically, they are the products of broken homes and brutality, often inflicted by alcoholic or drug-addicted parents. They take to the streets, use their bodies for survival and then, beaten by pimps and bereft of selfesteem, live in fear of reprisal if they attempt to escape the racket.

New York City has the biggest juvenile prostitution problem. Police estimate that as many as 20,000 runaway kids under 16 are on the city's streets, and many are available for commercial sex. Some 800 pimps prey on these youngsters, provide them with food, clothing and lodging--and demand total loyalty and almost all their earnings in return.

Investigating whether organized crime has moved into juvenile prostitution, the New York State select legislative committee on crime last week heard testimony from young prostitutes and concerned police and social welfare officials. The committee found that the Mafia has begun moving back into prostitution, which it had largely abandoned in the 1930s in favor of more lucrative drug and loan-sharking rackets. Mobsters of the Genovese Mafia family are alleged to control many of the topless and bottomless bars, where youthful dancers are enticed into prostitution. The racketeers are also believed to own quick-turnover hotels where prostitutes work and are expanding their control of New York's numerous massage parlors. In addition, the Gambino Mafia family has a large interest in the child pornography business.

Legislators also uncovered evidence of loose networks of pimps who recruit girls and boys in various cities and move them from area to area in a nationwide circuit to keep a step ahead of police. The youngsters often end up in New York. The most sensational special link the committee found was the "Minneapolis connection," in which young girls from that city, itself a magnet for runaways from much of the upper Midwest, move into New York in such large numbers that a section of Manhattan's Eighth Avenue has long been known as "the Minnesota Strip." Minneapolis police claim that up to 400 juveniles a year from the area are lost to other cities, with most of the youths winding up in prostitution in New York.

The committee heard from a Minneapolis police officer who had come to Manhattan to coax young Midwest prostitutes to return to their parents or to "safe houses," where they would be protected from their pimps. The officer had failed--largely because publicity about his visit took the girls temporarily off the streets--but he and a few of his previously liberated young streetwalkers told harrowing stories. Two examples:

KAREN, 14, met a pimp in downtown Minneapolis one day at 10 a.m. He bought her breakfast and took her to an apartment and bedded her. Next day she quarreled with her parents over having stayed out most of the night, so she ran off to see her new friend. He said she would have to work the street to stay with him and steal money from her customers so she could get their bus fare to Chicago. Once there, she earned another $800 in three weeks. The two moved on to Manhattan, where she picked up men around luxury hotels, robbing them when she could. Sick of the life after six weeks, she tried to leave her pimp, but he broke her jaw. After hospitalization, she was forced back on the streets by him with her jaw wired shut. When an attempt to kill herself failed, she phoned her parents and fled New York. In ten weeks she had provided her pimp with some $4,000.

CLARE, 16, having run away from home, met a pimp along Minneapolis' Hennepin Avenue and moved in with him. He persuaded her to hit the streets. "He wouldn't let me come into the house unless I brought him $150 a day," she recalled. After she was arrested for prostitution, she and her pimp flew to New York, where she worked for 16 months. She collected at least $100,000, of which she saved only $800. She was arrested 42 times for prostitution and once for grand larceny ("It was a trick who wanted his money back") but never served a day in jail. When she tried to return home, the pimp beat her so badly that she was hospitalized.

The committee also heard from Father Bruce Ritter, a Franciscan priest who founded and runs a private New York City shelter for runaways. He told of the 14-year-old boy who had been held prisoner for six weeks in a Times Square hotel by a pimp, who chased the fleeing boy right into Ritter's center, trying to maim the youngster with a broken bottle.

As a result of the hearings, the New York legislature will consider a bill requiring judges to sentence all convicted pimps, "Johns" and their prostitutes to the minimum jail sentences allowed under existing state laws. Chicago police are cracking down on pimps, charging them with the felony crimes of "soliciting for a juvenile prostitute" and "juvenile pimping." By expanding the Mann Act to apply to boys as well as girls, Congress last month made it easier to combat the transporting of young males across state lines for immoral purposes--a practice in which organized crime is increasingly involved.

But there are no simple answers or ready remedies. Ways need to be found to lure runaways into safe havens where they can be cared for and counseled. Certainly the penalties for those adults who exploit the young for sex must be stiffened--and uniformly enforced.

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