Child Prostitution in Atlanta
Here's that story I read (New York Times) about child prostitution in Atlanta. Doesn't look like the city cares.
October 19, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Young, Cold and for Sale
By BOB HERBERT
Atlanta
The girl approached me on a desolate stretch of Metropolitan Parkway, about halfway between the airport and the clustered lights of the downtown skyline. The night was unusually cold and she was shivering a little. She told me she was 15, but she didn’t look more than 12.
It was bad enough that the child was outside at all at midnight. The fact that she was turning tricks was heartbreaking. I explained that I was a reporter for The New York Times and asked if she would wait while I went to get someone to help her. She looked surprised. “I don’t need any help,” she said.
I had already spent a night traveling with undercover vice cops, and they had pointed out the different neighborhoods in which under-age prostitutes, some as young as 10, roamed the streets.
“The girls are exploited in every sense of the word,” said Lt. Keith Meadows, who heads Atlanta’s vice unit. “The men are all over them — the pimps, the johns. The girls get beaten. That’s common. They’re introduced to drugs. And the pimps take all the money. It’s sad.
“I would say that in most cases, the girls never knew their fathers. A lot of them were abused at home and they end up in the clutches of these pimps, putting their trust in someone they shouldn’t have.”
Atlanta, for a variety of reasons, has become a hub of child prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation of children. The overall market for sex with kids is booming in many parts of the U.S. In Atlanta — a thriving hotel and convention center with a sophisticated airport and ground transportation network — pimps and other lowlifes have tapped into that market bigtime.
“These guys are even going into rural Georgia and getting these girls and bringing them into Atlanta,” said Alesia Adams, a longtime advocate who has worked with the courts and social service agencies to assist young girls who are lured into the sex trade.
Kaffie McCullough, the project director of a federally sponsored intervention program, said Atlanta’s juvenile prostitution problem “is a lot bigger than anybody would really like to know.” The sex trade in Atlanta is “a huge, huge, huge industry,” she said, and the involvement of kids under 17, which is the age of consent in Georgia, is a substantial part of it.
Stephanie Davis, the policy adviser on women’s issues for Mayor Shirley Franklin, agreed. “Sex tourism is coming south,” she told me. “There is advertising that I’ve seen on the Internet and other places that actually targets the New York market, urging men to come to Atlanta for the day and fly back home that night.”
The risks for pimps and other exploiters of children are low, and the payoff is often enormous. Demand is increasing for younger and younger prostitutes, in part because of the cultural emphasis on the sexual appeal of very young women and girls, and in part because of the widely held belief among johns that there is less risk of contracting a disease from younger prostitutes.
For the girls, life on the street can be hellish. A study released last fall by the Atlanta Women’s Agenda, an initiative of the mayor’s office, noted that the girls are always highly vulnerable to rape, assault, robbery and murder, not to mention arrest and incarceration. Added to that are the psychological risks, which are profound.
The girl who approached me on Metropolitan Parkway had walked alone across an empty, rundown parking lot. The usual practice, I had been told, was for johns in cars to pick up the girls and then drive behind an abandoned commercial building, of which there were plenty in the area.
The girl said she had a “boyfriend,” which is the word the girls use for their pimps. When I asked if her boyfriend knew what she was doing, she said, “He told me to do it.”
She lifted her chin and proudly showed me a cheap necklace she was wearing. “He gave me this,” she said. “He loves me.”
I tried to think of a way to bring the girl to the attention of some social service agency, or even the police. But taking her into my rented car, even if she had been willing to go with me, was out of the question. I looked around, hoping to spot a passing patrol car.
The girl’s bangs fluttered as the wind picked up. She looked cold. “I gotta go,” she said.
Another story, same city, same author, same source:
November 20, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Bought and Sold
By BOB HERBERT
Atlanta
When Mayor Shirley Franklin recently announced that the city would be cracking down on the pimps and johns who prey on under-age prostitutes, she also disclosed publicly for the first time that she had been molested when she was a young girl.
Speaking at a gathering of reporters, local officials and civic leaders, the mayor spoke frankly about the incident, in which she was abused at the age of 10 by the father of a girlfriend. She then asked how many of the women in attendance had endured similar experiences. Several women in the room raised their hands.
One of the most tightly kept secrets in the U.S. is the extent to which children are sexually exploited, not just by child pornographers and compulsive pedophiles, but by men who are viewed by their relatives, friends and neighbors as quintessentially solid citizens.
In an interview on Friday, Ms. Franklin told me: “It seemed appropriate to reveal my story in that setting, because what we were trying to do is demonstrate that this can happen to anyone. Not only can it happen; it does happen to a lot of children.”
Atlanta has become a major hub of commercial sex in the U.S. It’s a full-fledged sex-tourism destination, with thousands of strippers, prostitutes and other sex workers accommodating an endless stream of johns from around the country. Under-age girls (some as young as 10 and 11) are a significant part of that trade. Many of them were already carrying the scars of sexual molestation when they got into prostitution.
A study of the commercial sexual exploitation of girls in Atlanta, released a year ago by the Atlanta Women’s Agenda, an advisory group formed at the mayor’s request, said:
“Atlanta, being a convention and sports event center, has a thriving ‘adult entertainment’ industry: strip clubs, lingerie and sex shops, escort services, massage parlors. At the same time, Atlanta generates its own lost battalions of emotionally and physically abandoned children and is a magnet for such children from outlying areas. These children are vulnerable to the pimps and their recruiters, but the pimp would have no interest in the children if there were no demand.”
Ms. Franklin, who is 61, is trying to jump-start a cultural change that will expand awareness of the widespread sexual exploitation of children in Atlanta and foster an attitude throughout the city that it is not to be tolerated.
It is beyond unusual for a mayor, especially the mayor of a city that depends as heavily on tourism as Atlanta, to shine a spotlight on a problem as repellent as child prostitution. I asked the mayor why she went ahead with such a high-profile campaign, which includes a “Dear John” initiative that has flooded the city with posters and public service announcements declaring that the men who “buy sex from our kids” will no longer be tolerated.
“We take the position in my administration that the best way to solve a problem is to face the facts,” she said, adding: “We know the problem is here. It’s happening on our watch. It’s unacceptable behavior, and we are not going to stand for it. So look for us to do everything in our power to change it.”
It won’t be easy. Law enforcement agencies have a notoriously poor record when it comes to prosecuting and putting away the pimps, traffickers and johns in the child sex trade. And there are very few resources, financial and otherwise, to help the kids once they are identified.
The mayor acknowledged the heavy lift that will be required: “Normally, by the time girls become prostitutes, there are a lot of other experiences that they’ve had, and you can’t turn that around with a pat on the back and a new set of clothes. There’s a great deal of psychological damage. They’ve lost trust in adults. They’ve lost self-confidence. Many of them have lost the will to do anything differently. They’re demoralized.
“So we’re just getting started. And we’ll be asking for a lot of help.”
The last time I was in Atlanta, about a month ago, I rode with the police as, among other things, they looked for a 15-year-old girl who had become a prostitute and was being used by her pimp to recruit other young girls. I remember looking at a circular with a picture of the child. She had the saddest expression on her face.
Over the weekend I checked with the cops to see if they had found her. “We never did,” said Lt. Keith Meadows, who heads the city’s vice unit. “We have reason to believe that she might have been trafficked out of the state.”
When I read these articles I was shocked!
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