She identified herself as Patrice Waters, 18 years old. The name, she allowed later, was an invention to protect herself. But the age was genuine, she said, and so was her story. They’re what matter most.
Growing up in Brooklyn, she was mistreated badly. “At 12, I ran away,” she said. “I got raped. I felt alone. I started in the life when I was 14.”
“The life” was the world of a street hustler. Some life. “I thought that my pimp was going to protect me,” she said. “All he did was abuse me.”
That was the extent of her story, a skeletal account that begged for details. But it was enough to get the point. This young woman had done a lot of living in her 18 years, not much of it good.
It was the same deal with Tyesha Smith, 17: fake name, all-too-real story, about a drug addict mother in the Bronx who died when Tyesha was 12. The next major figure in the girl’s life was a pimp. “He forced me into the game,” she said.
The game. The life. Call it what you will. It is sexual exploitation of children too wounded and too vulnerable to protect themselves.
The thing is that if Ms. Waters and Ms. Smith were Thai or Russian and were turned into teenage prostitutes after arriving on these shores, they would be legally judged the victims of sex traffickers. But they are in effect penalized by being home grown, deemed to have committed criminal acts under New York law and subject to arrest and prosecution.
They have seen jail from the inside, they said. They have also begun to turn their lives around in a haven of unspecified location, run by Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, an organization in the city that helps young women — girls, really — who have fallen into the hands of sexual predators.
Ms. Waters and Ms. Smith went to City Hall yesterday to speak up for a proposed state law that would end the practice of locking up kids much like themselves on prostitution charges. Instead, they would be sent to “safe houses” where they could get medical care, counseling and, with luck, new direction.
The Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act, as this legislation is known, “recognizes that these vulnerable children are victims of crime, not perpetrators,” said Katherine Mullen, a Legal Aid Society lawyer whose specialty is juvenile rights.
Like the two young women, Ms. Mullen testified at a hearing that was essentially a pep rally for a City Council resolution urging the State Legislature to enact the safe harbor bill as a sensible next step now that the state has newly toughened penalties for sex traffickers. The bill, affecting teenagers age 15 and under, has cleared the Assembly, controlled by Democrats. Its fate in the Republican-majority State Senate is uncertain, though.
How many children we are talking about is unclear. One survey done for state agencies put the number at about 3,000, most of them girls, some as young as 12 or 13 — even 11 in a few cases. But Mishi Faruqee, who is in charge of juvenile justice issues for the Correctional Association of New York, questioned the reliability of the estimate.
“We believe that number is really an undercount,” Ms. Faruqee said at the hearing. “We really believe it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Others who testified said that numbers alone hardly speak to the abuse endured by these children, many of whom end up selling themselves on the street just to survive. If anything, some said, the problems are far worse for gay, lesbian and transgender kids. Often regarded as outcasts, they can be treated brutally in juvenile detention.
SOME in law enforcement argue against change. They say that charging these children with prostitution encourages them to testify against their pimps and that jail, or its equivalent, is one way to keep them from running right back to the predators. Some county executives fret about the costs of social services for street-hardened kids who may not be easy to tame.
But the dominant view at City Hall yesterday was that it is less expensive to keep someone in a safe house than in a jail. And reflexively making criminals of people is not necessarily the wisest course, even in these law-and-order days.
Sure, a lot of the teenagers are probably tough to take. It doesn’t change the fact that “victims of the sex trade are just that — they are victims,” said Councilman Lewis A. Fidler of Brooklyn.
They are also something else. They are children.
