Leadership's Future: America's Tragic Shame
by Miki SaxonNeglect. Drugs. Abuse. Molestation.
Where do you go when those four words describe your parents and your home life?
Where do you sleep; what do you eat?
When you’re cold and hungry you do what it takes to survive, including stealing and selling whatever you can find to sell—including yourself.
And these kids are as young as 10 years old.
The NT Times ran a two-part series called Running in the Shadows about teen runaways. It should be required reading for every American (part 1 and part 2).
Children on Their Own
This is the first of two articles on the growing number of young runaways in the United States, exploring how they survive and efforts by the authorities to help them.
Many cling together to avoid predators, but many more are seduced by pimps—it doesn’t take much.
“My job is to make sure she has what she needs, personal hygiene, get her nails done, take her to buy an outfit, take her out to eat, make her feel wanted,” said another pimp, Antoin Thurman, who was sentenced in 2006 to three years for pandering and related charges in Buckeye, Ariz. “But I keep the money.”
Out of frustration, Sgt. Byron A. Fassett of the Dallas Police Department started looking for patterns in child prostitution cases.
One stuck out: 80 percent of the prostituted children the department had handled had run away from home at least four or more times a year.
Fasset created a special “High Risk Victim” unit within the Dallas PD that has seen enormous success, both in getting kids out of that life and putting the pimps behind bars.
The unit’s strength is timing. If the girls are arrested for prostitution, they are at their least cooperative. So the unit instead targets them for such minor offenses as truancy or picks them up as high-risk victims, speaking to them when their guard is down. Only later, as trust builds, do officers and social workers move into discussions of prostitution.
Repeat runaways are not put in juvenile detention but in a special city shelter for up to a month, receiving counseling.
Three quarters of the girls who get treatment do not return to prostitution.
The results of the Dallas system are clear: in the past five years, the Dallas County district attorney’s office has on average indicted and convicted or won guilty pleas from over 90 percent of the pimps arrested. In virtually all of those cases, the children involved in the prostitution testified against their pimps, according to the prosecutor’s office. Over half of those convictions started as cases involving girls who were picked up by the police not for prostitution but simply as repeat runaways.
Those statistics are amazing. Here we have a case of initiative taken; leadership shown, and impressive success. Not a fancy approach, but a pragmatic one based on a proven pattern.
So why hasn’t it been applied across the nation?
In 2007, Congress nearly approved a proposal to spend more than $55 million for cities to create pilot programs across the country modeled on the Dallas system. But after a dispute with President George W. Bush over the larger federal budget, the plan was dropped and Congress never appropriated the money.
Just $55 million dollars, that’s all; a drop in the bucket in comparison to most earmarks.
But, in their wisdom, our wonderful, elected leaders in Washington didn’t believe it had enough reelection value to make it worth fighting for—maybe this is what’s meant by throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Of course, these kids can’t vote, may not live long enough to vote, so it’s no big deal to the folks on their perpetual campaign trail.
Your comments—priceless
Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL
Image credit: Franco Folini on flickr
