Friday, Dec. 5, 2003 | 6:07 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION Dec. 6 - 7, 2003
After arresting a baby-faced 17-year-old girl for prostitution at Mandalay Bay recently, Metro Police vice officers were jolted by her wistful request: "All I want is my dinosaur."
She explained to the officers that her mother had died a few years ago so she had come to Las Vegas to live with her father. She had run away and met a man who forced her into prostitution.
Before her mother died, she had given the teen a stuffed dinosaur toy and the teen wanted to make sure she didn't lose it. Officers took her to her pimp's car, opened the trunk and handed her the toy. It was worn and dirty.
"She hugged the dinosaur," said Sgt. Gil Shannon, a proponent of a special program in Metro's vice unit that combats child prostitution. "It broke our hearts."
For the officers, it drove home the fact that even though she was having sex for money, she was still just a child.
Shannon won't estimate how many children ages 11 to 17 are working as prostitutes in Metro's jurisdiction but he says he knows the total is increasing. He knows because the number of children being arrested on prostitution charges in the Las Vegas Valley is rising.
This year Metro already has set a record -- 142 as of Friday, when three more child prostitutes were arrested.
The higher number of arrests can be attributed to a combination of factors, including the growth of the residential and tourist populations and more effective police investigative methods, Shannon said.
And it seems there are more child prostitutes than ever.
"From what I am seeing overall there has been more of a breakdown in the family structure, more of these kids slipping through the cracks," Shannon said.
"Then there are all the rap songs, videos, clothing, bumper stickers glorifying prostitution," he said. "It's the 'in' thing to be a pimp, to be a 'ho.' "
Especially in Las Vegas. The city's "anything goes" image also contributes to the area's juvenile prostitution problem, Shannon said.
"It's because it's Sin City," he said. "The slogan is, 'What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,' and that might apply to the rest of (what's going on in) the city, but it doesn't apply to juvenile prostitution."
Plenty of activities that are considered illegal and immoral elsewhere are tolerated and even encouraged in Las Vegas, but exploiting children for sexual gratification and greed is not one of them, Shannon said.
Juvenile prostitution has been a priority for Metro, the Clark County juvenile probation department and local judges since 1994 when the Stop Turning Out Child Prostitutes program, nicknamed STOP, was introduced.
Minors cannot legally consent to become prostitutes. They also lack the maturity to consider the potential long-term effects of being a prostitute, authorities said.
STOP, which currently includes five Metro detectives in addition to Shannon, is built on the belief that underage prostitutes aren't criminals but victims of pimps.
That philosophy is what sets STOP apart from efforts at other police departments where officers "arrest them, take them to juvenile hall and call their parents. That's it. It stops right there," Shannon said. "There's no intervention, no after care, nothing."
STOP emphasizes rehabilitation and follow-up. The goals are to arrest the people who got the children into prostitution, to remove the children from the life of prostitution and to provide ways for the children to return to normal lives, Shannon said.
After arresting a child for prostitution, authorities associated with STOP work to gain the youngster's trust -- the same tactic pimps use.
In the rehabilitation phase, police and probation officers try to undo the lies the pimp told the teens and try to convince them that "the pimp isn't the all-powerful, dangerous person they thought he was," said Sally Huncovsky, a supervisor with Clark County Family and Youth Services.
Sometimes the girls are resistant and try to use their sexuality to manipulate male police and probation officers because they don't know how else to relate to men. They "can't conceptualize an adult wanting to do something for them," she said.
Darrell Wiggins, a probation officer who works with juvenile prostitutes, said, "You have to come after them how the pimps do ... I can speak their language, and I try to get across, 'I'm trying to help you. What do you need?' "
Metro officers who work with STOP also have learned how to speak the language.
After they are arrested, underage prostitutes are usually held at the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center for several weeks. During that time, parents or legal guardians are notified and arrangements are made for places for the youngsters to stay if they can't go home.
The detectives who are part of STOP spend a lot of time talking to the juveniles, trying to win their trust, getting them to tell them about their pimps, convincing them to testify against the pimps.
One of the most important aspects of the program is that it gives the youths -- mainly repeat offenders -- the option of going to live at the Children of the Night home in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys, Calif., where they can attend a private on-site school, learn life skills and receive drug and alcohol counseling.
Follow-up studies indicate 80 percent of the children who have gone through the Children of the Night home have not returned to prostitution, said Lois Lee, founder and director of the 24-year-old organization.
Child prostitutes are rehabilitated at a higher rate than adult prostitutes, who often work the streets for years despite repeated arrests.
"With kids they're easier to catch and easier to spot," Shannon said. "Their patterns of behavior aren't set."
Metro's vice offices also bear proof that local authorities are making progress in the fight against child prostitution. The desks are decorated with cards and pictures from former prostitutes who left "the game," the street lingo for prostitution.
The transformations of the girls and the way those changes make officers feel "can be amazing," Wiggins said.
In his office is a photograph of a baby born to a former child prostitute he helped. Sometimes he runs into girls around town and they hug and thank him.
But other times the efforts fail, and cops end up arresting the same girls again.
Metro Police say about 10 percent of the children they arrest for prostitution wind up being arrested again for the same offense.
That low percentage of repeat offenders can be attributed to the fact that many are from other states, and as part of their sentence, they are told not to return to Las Vegas, Shannon said.
Whenever Shannon sees teens who continue to work as prostitutes despite prior arrests, "it makes me think about what I can do better next time," he said.
More arrests made
Since STOP's inception, Metro has arrested more than 800 prostitutes between the ages of 11 and 17, and the number has grown in recent years with stepped-up enforcement.
The juvenile prostitutes arrested in Las Vegas are almost always girls, Shannon said. He could only recall a few boys who were nabbed for prostitution.
Metro arrested 126 underage prostitutes last year, 122 in 2001, 77 in 2000, 90 in 1999 and 88 in 1998, according to Metro records.
Just keeping track of those statistics about arrests of child prostitutes is an important early step in addressing the problem because "you can't manage what you can't measure," Shannon said.
Shannon's ability to recite his jurisdiction's numbers off the top of his head is another indication of the attention that child prostitution gets from authorities in Las Vegas, Lee said.
Police officers at other law enforcement agencies can't quantify their child prostitution problem, which makes it hard to compare the problem in Las Vegas to that of other cities, Lee said.
"Even LAPD doesn't keep hardcore numbers," she said."If you called NYPD, they couldn't give you numbers."
Spokespeople for the Los Angeles Police Department, New York Police Department and Seattle Police Department confirmed Lee's statement. None could provide statistics on the number of child prostitutes they arrested and none has a comprehensive program dealing with child prostitution.
San Francisco, however, recently established a program similar to STOP.
Articles last year in the San Francisco Examiner about the 2001 murder of a 15-year-old prostitute led to an overhaul of how the city handles child prostitution.
The articles showed that although the girl passed through nearly every city agency, she was never detained, prosecuted or counseled about changing her way of life. That prompted city officials to create a child prostitution task force consisting of police, city departments and juvenile probation officials.
Minnesota authorities are trying to address the problem on a statewide level. In 1998 police in Minneapolis broke up a ring that sent child prostitutes to 24 states and Canada.
The bust led to a study that resulted in a legislative initiative designed to address the state's child prostitution problem. Local, state and federal investigators now work together to find and prosecute organized child-prostitution rings.
Tracking the problem is difficult for numerous reasons, starting with the fact that many children arrested for prostitution have fake identification provided by pimps.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimates that between 100,000 and 300,000 children are sexually exploited through prostitution and pornography per year.
And according to national statistics, approximately 440,000 children run away from home each year. Lee estimates that about one-third of those runaways have brushes with prostitution.
Some children arrested by Metro are from Las Vegas, and others have found their way to the area and fallen into the game, Shannon said.
"They're not just getting on the bus and coming to Las Vegas on their own to be prostitutes," he said.
Selling a lie
Busting pimps is key to keeping children away from a life of prostitution, authorities say, and that's why going after pimps is a key aspect of STOP.
Even if children wind up working for an escort service or through referrals from the magazines and handbills that advertise for in-room strippers, "the way they are getting there is they are being turned out," or led into prostitution, "by the pimp," Shannon said.
"The pimp gets them the fake IDs and puts them to work for him either on 'the track' (walking streets for customers) or through those other avenues," Shannon said.
About half of the child prostitutes arrested in Las Vegas are part of the western United States "pipeline" that includes Minnesota, Oregon and Washington, he said. The pimps shuttle children from city to city in those states.
Pimps who put prostitutes in the pipeline can be charged with first-degee kidnapping, Shannon said. If the prostitutes are underage, the pimps can be charged with pandering children. Both are felonies.
They could also be charged with additional felonies: Living off the earnings of a prostitute; providing transportation to a prostitute and living with a prostitute.
But Shannon said pimps are typically convicted of just one or two of the charges and too often they end up back on the streets within a few months, or at most a few years.
To try to ensure that pimps are punished more harshly, Shannon is exploring the possibility of forming a task force with local FBI agents to go after pimps on federal kidnapping charges, which have stiffer penalties.
The task force would have plenty of cases to keep it busy, authorities said.
Huncovsky said she's "never worked with a prostitute who didn't have a pimp."
Pimps are predatory, meeting girls in their neighborhoods, on bus benches, in malls -- anywhere they can find them, Shannon said. They're good at spotting vulnerable girls, Huncovsky said. Most of the time, when the girl first encounters the pimp, she has no idea he has ulterior motives.
"You have a young girl, her mother is at work and her father isn't around," Huncovsky said. "She's 15, the pimp is 25. He will be her boyfriend (at first) and not even talk about pimping."
"If she starts being gone every night of the week, who's going to notice?" she said. "No one is going to notice or care."
Lee said "99.9 percent" of girls are abused and sexually degraded at home before going into prostitution.
"If a kid was beaten with baseball bats it makes them defenseless. They lack the aggression necessary for survival." When a pimp comes along, "they just melt."
The pimp eases into the role slowly, sweet-talking to her and gaining her trust, alienating her from her family and making her financially and emotionally dependent on him. She begins to feel like she owes him, Huncovsky said.
He then introduces the idea of prostitution with the promise of money, glamour and excitement.
The younger the girl, the more impressionable she is and the more susceptible she is to the suggestion of having sex for money. Girls who come from dysfunctional families may be manipulated into prostitution "because they want to be a part of something," anything that remotely resembles a family structure, Shannon said.
"Prostitution is selling a dream," he said. "You're young and probably already a product of abuse. You hear, 'You're going to be rich, you're going to have jewelry, you're going to be riding with daddy.' "
But it's all a lie, Shannon said. The pimps convince the girls they're worthless and confiscate the money the girls earn, handing back only a few dollars here and there.
They take the girls' regular clothing and force them to wear only skimpy clothing. Pimps threaten them, Shannon said, telling them things such as "If you try to get away, I'll kill your mom and dad."
And the girls endure regular abuse by their pimps, Huncovsky said.
"We've seen them beaten up, tortured, burned. We get them in all kinds of conditions."
One watched her pimp kill another girl, Huncovsky said.
The pimp keeps the girl fearful, walking her through casinos and pointing out random men and telling her, "He's on my payroll and he's watching you" to keep her from leaving him, Shannon said.
Shannon said child prostitutes come from all neighborhoods, all economic backgrounds, all educational backgrounds, all races.
Most juvenile prostitutes are in their mid to late teens, but some are surprisingly young.
Several years ago, Shannon encountered an 11-year-old soliciting sex outside a Strip casino. Shannon said she looked like a little girl playing dress-up -- which she was. Her makeup was smudged and her clothes were too big.
She approached Shannon and his partner and asked them if they wanted company. After she was arrested, the girl told the officers her age and said she had ended up on the streets after having trouble at home.
Shannon recalled thinking, "You're a kid. You're supposed to believe in Santa Claus." Instead, she most likely had a pimp.
While the lifestyle is inherently dangerous because it involves sexual encounters with strangers, pimps pose more of a danger to young prostitutes than customers do, Shannon said.
"If you're a little girl standing on the side of the road, and I say run and you get hit by a car, am I at fault or is the car?" he said. "Not only do the pimps say run, they push them."
A Metro Police case from late October was typical.
After running away in August from the home she shared with her mother, a 15-year-old girl took up with an 18-year-old man she considered her boyfriend. They stayed at various motels around Fremont Street and Charleston Boulevard.
The man old crack, according to a police report, but before long, he told the girl she needed to start working as a prostitute so they could get more money.
The teen told police she didn't want to be a prostitute, "but did so because she was afraid that (he) would become angry with her and leave her," the police report says.
In the area of Eastern and Saint Louis avenues, the girl looked for customers while her pimp walked behind her, giving her signals as to who she should get into the car with. She told police he would also warn her if he thought a potential trick was an undercover cop.
She told police she performed 10 to 20 sex acts over the course of two months and never charged less than $50, the report says. All of the money went to her pimp.
An adult prostitute told police on Oct. 31 that the 18-year-old was "pimping out a 15-year-old" and gave a description of the car he drove. Police found the car, occupied by the two, later that day.
When officers questioned the girl about her relationship with the man, "she became upset and started to cry ... She (said he) was making her work as a prostitute." Both were arrested.
Once a girl is caught up in "the game," it's difficult to escape, Shannon said. Getting arrested, which under most circumstances would be a bad thing, could actually be a teenage prostitute's first step toward returning to a normal life.
"Every time you turn a date you lose a bit of your soul," Shannon said. "We find a reason to arrest them because we're trying to save them."
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