 "Photo: Jeffrey McWhorter/The Daily Texan")
In late April, two police officers staked out a North Austin house, hoping to arrest a man they suspect introduced an 11-year-old girl to her pimp.
Austin Police Department Officer Gilbert Cardenas said that if more officers had been available to cover the house or if he and his partner hadn’t been distracted by drug dealers who kept mistaking them for clients, Joel Vega — or someone who looked similar — might not have slipped out the back door and disappeared.
Since the APD issued warrants for Vega and Fernando Luna, the girl’s suspected pimp, on April 30, police have hit at least three homes, checked out several false sightings and questioned the suspects’ relatives, neighbors and acquaintances — all to no avail.
For several months in 2008, Luna allegedly rented the girl out to dozens of men in exchange for cash and drugs — the only case of child prostitution in Austin that Detective Tina Schaan, the investigator on the case, can remember.
“It’s in every city across America — no matter how big or how small,” said FBI Agent Patrick Fransen. “If you have prostitution in your city, you have child prostitution.”
In early 2004, Fransen was still working in the FBI’s violent crime units in Houston, investigating extortions, kidnappings and several cases involving adult prostitution.
“The more I looked into it, being in the field I was in, I started thinking some of them might be kids,” he said of the prostitutes.
Now Fransen is part of an FBI task force fighting child prostitution in Houston, one of 24 the agency has created across the United States since 2003. The program has recovered 31 child prostitutes in Houston this year alone and located hundreds across the U.S. since 2003.
“That’s good but it’s barely a drop in the bucket,” said Steven Wagner, who directed the human trafficking program at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services between 2003 and 2006.
The program Wagner oversaw receives $10 million in annual funding to assist an estimated 20,000 people, many of whom are child prostitutes, trafficked into the U.S.
But Wagner said no similar program exists to assist American children prostituted within their own country — who outnumber international victims by a factor of 10 or more.
“There’s still a disbelief that this is a problem in the United States,” said Richard Estes, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania. “We still want to think it’s Mexico or Thailand or the Phillipines. We don’t want to think American kids are engaged in prostitution.”
In 2001, Estes published the only extensive study of U.S. child prostitution so far conducted. His team spent more than two years interviewing nearly 1,000 victims, social workers, law enforcement agencies and pimps in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
The study concluded that about 200,000 U.S. children — boys, girls and transgender people from every ethnic and economic background — are at risk of being prostituted each year. The FBI estimates that the average victim begins service at age 12.
“Ninety percent of all the kids we identified are American nationals,” Estes said. “They’re kids who run away.”
Advocates for the victims of child prostitution have tried for decades to convince authorities that funding and forethought are needed to combat the problem. Only a handful of programs across the country specifically cater to U.S. children rescued from the sex trade.
“They don’t want to go back home,” said Maria Trujillo, who directs the Houston Rescue and Restore Coalition, which trains police and social workers to identify and rehabilitate child prostitutes who fall into their custody. “They’re looking for love, attention and affection. That’s what they’re running toward.”
The program helps police and juvenile probation officers distinguish child prostitutes — who often look older than their age — from the older crowd by looking for such red flags as overly rehearsed stories and tattoos — even cattle brands — their pimps sometimes use to mark them.
The training is voluntary, but Trujillo said she hopes that might change soon.
A bill under consideration in the Texas Legislature, authored by state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, would create a task force to study how law enforcement and state service agencies can better combat child prostitution in Texas and mandate that every incoming law enforcement officer be trained to identify victims.
But the bill would not address what experts say is a total lack of facilities in Texas and almost every other state to properly care for rescued children. Currently, police in Texas can only remove victims from the street by arresting them or placing them in shelters, where staff members are not trained to handle victims of child prostitution. Many children simply run away from these shelters after a few days and return to their pimps — sometimes with new recruits.
Lois Lee runs Children of the Night, a 24-bed shelter near Los Angeles that has rescued more than 10,000 children from prostitution for 30 years.
She said the program is the largest of only three in the U.S. designed specifically to rescue and rehabilitate children from prostitution, and many experts consider it a model for the kind of long-term care facilities children need to get off the street.
With 25 full-time employees and about 150 volunteers, the program provides rescued children with food, shelter, medical care, counseling and education for as long as they need — sometimes several years. Many children have completed high school, and several have gone to college while in the program, Lee said.
“We’re in the business of raising kids,” she said.
But such programs are extremely rare and very expensive. Lee said Children of the Night failed last year to raise $400,000 of the $2 million in private funds it depends on annually and must now “do what it can to survive.”
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