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Norma Hotling Speech:
Protecting Our Children – Working to End Child Prostitution
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Office of Justice Programs-U.S. Department of Justice
Presented by Norma Hotaling, Director and Founder, SAGE Project,
Inc.
December 13, 2002
My name is Norma Hotaling and I am the co-founder of the First
Offender Prostitution Program (FOPP), the Executive Director
and Founder of the Standing against Global Exploitation Project,
Inc (SAGE) and a founding Steering Committee Member of the
U.S. Campaign to End the Commercial Exploitation of Children.
The First Offender Prostitution Program and SAGE has been
awarded the very prestitious1998 Innovations in American Government
from the JFK School of Government at Harvard, and the Ford
Foundation, the 2000 Peter F. Drucker Award for Innovation
in Non-Profit Management and most recently the Oprah’s
Angel Network-Use Your Life Award. These awards are for the
restorative justice programs that we have created for customers
of adult prostitutes, the trauma and drug recovery programs
for women and girls who are victims of violence and are in
the criminal justice system, trafficked women and girls as
well as women and involved in the sex industry and girls who
are being sexually abused through prostitution.
SAGE is organized by and for survivors of abuse, prostitution
and trauma (most of the staff have had criminal histories,
severe drug addictions, and were formerly homeless,) and within
our various programs, we counsel over 350 women and girls
per week. Interwoven in the staff are peer and drug treatment
counselors, therapists, acupuncturists and social work and
therapist interns. The personal knowledge and experience possessed
by many of the staff enables us to effectively provide support
and engender trust without re-traumatizing even the most fragile
of clients.
Through advocacy, educational programs, and
as a direct service provider, SAGE has assisted in raising
public awareness concerning the sexual exploitation and trafficking
of women and girls. SAGE’s direct service programs often
focus on the most exploited victims who are therefore the
highest users of the medical, social, mental health, and criminal
justice systems. As a result of our interventions, SAGE has
assisted over 1200 women and girls in exiting the criminal
justice system, escaping prostitution, recover from abuse
and acquire appropriate services such as medical and mental
health care, substance abuse treatment, housing, legal immigration
status, case management, educational and vocational training.
SAGE is a unique collaboration between law enforcement, public
health, social services and private agencies created to shift
local government’s approach to prostitution, aiding
women to permanently exit the criminal justice system, escape
prostitution and trafficking. SAGE is a dynamic departure
from the previous practice of revolving door arrests of women
and girls with little or no services for women and girls.
The former approach resulted in extremely high recidivism
rates (80% of women arrested are repeat offenders), continuing
sexual exploitation and violence, and enormous costs to the
criminal justice and public health systems. Because the average
age of entry into prostitution is 13-14, the issue is not
only one of violence against women but also the sexual abuse
of children and trafficking in young girls.
The name of this town hall meeting is, Protecting Our Children,
Ending Child Prostitution. What we call “child prostitution”
needs to be clearly, strongly, and unambiguously defined as
sexual abuse on young human beings. This sexual abuse of children
through prostitution is made possible by a society that has
created, sanctioned and institutionalized categories of children
who it is absolutely O.K. to routinely abuse, torture, rape,
and kidnap. The legal, mental and medical health, human rights
consequences of this abuse usually always remains with the
child through being arrested, prosecuted, jailed, placed on
probation and forced into treatment. In essence what, we the
adults, are saying and enforcing through laws, and inappropriate
interventions is that children and youth are consenting to
their own sexual abuse and that by consenting to this abuse
they are a danger to society, they are subject to arrest,
they are the perpetrators not victims and they are to be denied
any services for their victimization. I believe that here
and now we can end child prostitution by renaming and redefining
child prostitution as child abuse and statutory rape.
The use and trafficking of children and adolescents in the
sex industry is widespread around the world and the United
States is no exception. An estimated 10 million children worldwide
are already involved in the $20 billion-a-year sex industry.
This number is increasing by about one million each year.
"The prostitution of children and related health consequences
has been accepted for too long. The time has come to make
them unacceptable," said Dr. Barry Levy of Tufts University
School of Medicine in Boston, Lancet Medical Journal, May
2002. “Child sexual exploitation is the most hidden
form of child abuse in the U.S. and North America today. It
is the nation’s least recognized epidemic,” said
Richard J. Estes, a University of Pennsylvania professor of
social work and the author of “The Commercial Sexual
Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, 2001.”
According to this report between 200,000 and 300,000 US children
are involved in the sex trade and/or trafficked into prostitution.
The exact number is impossible to calculate but all experts
agree it is an epidemic and clearly, the number is rising.
The young boys and girls used for prostitution are deprived
of their basic human rights. In keeping with the international
figures, the prostituted children in the U.S. face an increased
risk of sexual and physical assault, suicide, pregnancy, abortions,
and sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, post-traumatic
stress disorder and death. Seventy-five to ninety-five (75-95%)
of all 13-18 year old girls in our justice systems have been
victims of abuse. Many of these girls have been exploited
for pornography or have suffered or witnessed physical and
sexual violence. For these girls, the average of entry into
prostitution is 13-14, an age at which these girls are entering
an endless cycle of arrest, drug addiction, and violence.
The result is traumatic and profound lack of self-esteem causing
disempowered behaviors: dropping out of school, prostitution,
addiction, selling of drugs, and violence. Their exploitation
is perpetuated by continued reliance on the very people who
have physically, emotionally, and sexually assaulted them.
These children come from all of the populations though preponderance
come from the least advantaged, isolated and disorganized
segments. They are of all races and ethnic backgrounds.
As a result of abuse and neglect, they have
lost the valuable life-skills training that a healthy family
and environment provide. As these children age, and chronologically
become adults their situations remain unrecognized and untreated
and they continue a downward cycle of drugs, re-victimization,
jails and death
Pimps and traffickers are responding to the increased profitability
that results from increased demand. Everyday in densely populated,
urban areas girls of color, ages 10-17 are lured from our
local high schools by violent pimps. Poor and vulnerable Asian,
South and Central American and Russian women and girls are
smuggled, kidnapped, raped, tricked and coerced by traffickers
and organized crime syndicates into the highly invisible,
and mobile sex trade that includes strip clubs, escort, massage
parlors, brothels and street prostitution. Vulnerable and
naive 13 and 14 year old blond, blue eye, white girls (Supply)
are brutally and cunningly recruited from our schools, streets,
shopping malls, chat lines in the mid-west and Canada and
delivered to major cities all through the US to fill the demand
side of sexual exploitation: comprised mostly of educated,
middle and upper class men (Demand).
The police rarely if ever investigate, arrest, prosecute and
sentence to jail or prison the so-called “johns.”
In many cases, in accordance with individual state laws, they
should be charged with sexual abuse and statutory rape and
other applicable laws. At most the police cite the men as
users of adult prostitutes. If a young women admits her age
or if the police know it as being under the age of 18 she
gets taken to jail. The men are let go. They are often told,
“this is your lucky day,” or “Go home buddy,
we don’t want to ruin your life,” never once thinking
of the life of the child that is ruined and changed forever.
Never once thinking of the young mind and body so brutally
traumatized over and over.
We can end child prostitution, but it’s will not happen
until we focus on the sexual abusers of children, the “johns”,
the demand and we can’t just talk about pimps and traffickers
and their complex organizations, well funded networks, brutal
manipulative tactics. We can end child prostitution when we
completely reorganize our definitions, and when we create
major changes in how we respond.
Traditionally, our social response to child sexual abuse has
been either complete denial, or the direction of blame towards
the child. We have documented instances of U.S. judges describing
5 year old children as provocative or promiscuous, and a long
history of shaming girls and boys who are the targets of adult
sexual violence. For most of our social and legal history,
being sexually assaulted or violated meant that the victim,
whether child or adult, acquired the status of a whore—meaning
someone who is, supposedly, without credibility, rights, or
respect. We have begun to shift our relationship to children,
to adult women, and to sexual violence. Policy makers, law
enforcement, and the general public have at least the beginnings
of a clear understanding that rape is truly a crime, not solely
in legal terms, but a crime against the human rights of the
victim, and against all human beings who want to live in a
safe and healthy society.
Our shifting beliefs have been mirrored in practice: it is
a crime for an adult to have sex with a child; it is a crime
to have sex without consent. The perpetrators of these crimes
can at least hypothetically be arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated.
The victims of these crimes at least hypothetically are entitled
to justice, victim’s compensation, and protection. We
have begun to challenge the idea that a person’s appearance,
dress, or social status defines whether or not she or he can
truly be recognized as a victim, or the idea that some people
are either deserving victims, or cannot be recognized as victims.
When it comes to prostitution however, in ideology and practice,
it’s as if no changes have occurred. As long as someone
is labeled a prostitute, whether child or adult, we are saying
it is okay to dehumanize, to mistreat, and to endanger that
person. The children we call prostitutes are in reality the
children who we have designated as acceptable and blame-worthy
targets for sexual abuse. There is not a law that states a
child can consent to sexual abuse and by doing so be arrested.
But still we arrest and deny services. We have created a group
of kids who it’s okay to sexually abuse in several ways:
- We are
incorrectly defining sexually abused children as criminals
perpetrating a crime, rather than as victims experiencing
victimization. When a child tells a court-mandated reporter
or police officer that they have had sex with an adult and
received money, that reporter or officer is and should be
legally bound to report the incident as an instance of child
sexual abuse, but not only does the reporting not occur,
the child is at risk of criminalization and punishment.
-
By focusing on the behavior or supposed wrongs of children,
we are ignoring the perpetrators. We rarely go after the
pimps and almost never go after the “johns,”
and never arrest the men as sexual abusers. Even calling
them “johns”, rather than child sexual abusers
helps misrepresent what’s happening and creates an
acceptable group of children to abuse. This misrepresentation
makes it less likely that we will question the social system
which very organized, complex and well funded and is depriving
children of safety and basic survival resources. As a society,
we are encouraging and enabling the perpetrators of child
sexual abuse; we are creating a group of men who are learning—through
adult prostitution—how to be sex abusers of children,
and often how to be torturers and batterers. Many of these
men bring these behaviors home or into other social arenas,
and most of them continue to prey on children within the
sex industries.
- Studies show that most prostituted
children are integrated into the mainstream sex industry
and tend to be concentrated in the cheaper end of the prostitution
market where conditions are the worst and the concentration
of customers the highest. Although some children are prostituted
by and/or specifically for pedophiles and preferential abusers,
the majority of the several million
men who annually exploit prostitutes under the age of 18
are first and foremost prostitutes users who become child
sexual abusers through their prostitute use, rather than
the other way around.
The world of prostitution whether legal or illegal provides
and arena where laws and rules which constrain sex with
minors can be evaded. Laws and social conventions make it
difficult and dangerous for individuals to buy children
for sexual purposes in non-commercial contexts, but prostitution
potentially provides instant access, often to a selection
of children. Men surveyed in San Francisco through SAGE
and the First Offenders Prostitution Program respond when
asked how a person justifies having sex with an underage
prostituted child, “they don’t even think.”
They know that law enforcement efforts are focused on the
youth/child and not on them. Prevention programs with a
stern message that “age is not a defense, you will
be prosecuted. You will be jailed and you will be required
to register as a sex offender after release from prison.
In short, the message should be, “your life will be
over, and your next victim will be spared.” Of the
6000 men/johns I have worked with, I have found that they
have a lot to lose, they don’t look at themselves
as criminal, and will change their behavior when give the
correct message and very strong limits backed by severe
consequences.
-
Our approach to the sexual abuse of children within prostitution
rarely involves the creation of resources, which truly enable
healing, and recovery, rather than punishment and stigma.
The Office of Victim Compensation and other resources intended
to meet the needs of crime victims deny resources to children
abused through child prostitution, based on the incorrect
definition of these children as criminals. This means that
resources are rarely available in any venue, which does
not involve the humiliation and vulnerability of arrest
and incarceration. If the child is arrested, she or he is
cycled through the criminal justice system, sometimes repeatedly,
intensifying the shame, pain, and vulnerability that make
children easy prey to pimps and abusers, and decreasing
the possibility of helpful intervention or trust.
- Arresting children or even arresting
traffickers or pimps is a very far cry from prevention.
Rather than responding to the urgent needs of children who
are being abused, we are still asking them to prove to us
that they are not one of the “bad kids.” We
need, and sexually abused children deserve, a communal rejection
of the myth that if a girl has lipstick and a mini-skirt
on, and is on the street that she can somehow consent to
sexual abuse and that by consenting to being sexually abuse
it is a crime. When a child sexual abuser says “but
she said she was 18”, we need to be educated enough
to know and completely clear that not know the real age
is not a defense not a defense for either child sexual abuse
or statutory rape. In law enforcement, we have to take away
the right of men to buy children, and this has to be accompanied
by very strong public education and rehabilitation, or these
men will simply seek new victims or take the abusive behaviors
home. Working solely in crisis mode is neither the moral
or ethical approach. These children have already been desperately
hurt and changed. It is important to work on the crisis
end but not without prevention programs for boys, men and
girls and full criminal sanctions focused on the men/abusers/buyers
and the pimps and traffickers.
The following are key components of the kind of systems change
this crisis requires:
- Court mandated
reporters such as law enforcement, probation officers, judges,
lawyers must be educated and required to correctly define
and report child prostitution as child sexual abuse, to
define the so-called prostitutes as abused children, and
to define the so-called “johns” as child sexual
abusers. Mandated reporters need to clearly know what they
are required to report, when they are required to report
sexual abuse, how to report abuse and that to not report
abuse is illegal. After receiving training the mandated
reporters need to be held accountable for not reporting.
-
We also need to recognize the clear links between child
and adult prostitution on a global scale, and not presume
that ANYONE labeled a prostitute is responsible for a system
in which we allow people to buy human bodies. Only by transforming
our relationships to all forms of sexual exploitation and
abuse, whether child or adult, can we disempower a multi-billion
dollar sex industry in which the average age of entry is
13-14, and many adult men are socialized, from boyhood,
to feel entitled to sexual service.
-
We need to utilize our existing laws and child abuse prevention
and treatment resources. There needs to be a mechanism to
move a child from the juvenile system into the family courts
so that whole families can receive services and counseling
and a child can be safely placed in a home and provided
specific care. We need to re-define child prostitution within
its correct legislative frame—child safety. We need
dramatic legislative reform, requiring total decriminalization
of children and increased prosecution of pimps. However
we also need to recognize that the pimps are exploiting,
not creating the problem: we need an intense focus on prosecution
of the customers—the people actually creating the
demand for child sexual abuse, and making it profitable.
Adults who sexually abuse children in prostitution must
face prosecution and consequences already afforded by our
child protection laws, including becoming registered sex
offenders.
-
U.S. federal laws, such as the Mann Act and the Protection
of Children and adults, mostly women) from Sexual Predators
Act, are intended to address the issue of interstate trafficking
in children for prostitution and pornography. However, though
laws exist, they are not being proactively enforced. Existing
state laws regarding the use of children for sexual purposes
vary in content and in the penalties for offenders. Enforcement
and coordination among local, state and federal law enforcement
officials is sporadic at best. Further, many child and youth-service
public and private agencies do not have policies, procedures
or resources to serve victims of commercial sexual exploitation.
In addition, these helping agencies are often unaware of
the federal laws or how to access the support of federal
agencies. The result is: 1) Children and youth are apprehended
and treated as offenders/perpetrators themselves and entered
into the justice system where services are typically do
not exist or are not available to them, or 2) Children and
youth are redirected to service agencies not prepared to
provide the comprehensive treatment necessary to address
the trauma and healing surrounding sexual exploitation,
and 3) Exploitation prevention curriculum does not exist
and, 4) adults who exploit children and youth are seldom
prosecuted. This needs to change.
- Legislative
change absolutely must be accompanied by a web of services,
augmented to include and respond to the torture, kidnap
and extremes of violence that characterize pimping, pandering
and trafficking. Without a safety net and resource base,
taking children out of the criminal justice system only
means returning them to pimps and perpetrators. Don’t
use protection and safety as an excuse to build more and
better services for these youth in detention. Be focused,
vigilant, and logical in our approach. Victims of Violent
Crimes dollars need to be directed toward the rehabilitation
efforts of these children. When they are not, we are clearly
saying that these children and youth are consenting to their
own sexual and physical abuse and that is a crime and they
should be punished and denied services.
- We need
a sustained attention to all the social causes of prostitution,
including but not limited to gaping problems in our social
response to child abuse within families and communities,
extremes of poverty, outdated legal doctrines and practices,
gender inequality, racial stratification, and a horrifying
societal tolerance for the definition of children—any
child—as without value or rights.
I founded SAGE because 14 years ago I was exiting the criminal
justice system. I had been going to juvenile halls, jails,
psychiatric hospitals, emergency rooms and drug treatment
programs since I was 12. No one ever asked me about my life,
about prostitution, being beaten, raped or kidnapped. I
was just a whore, a dope fiend, and a criminal. How could
I get out? No one ever treated me like a person. No one
asked me if I hurt or why.
Like 90% of our clients I experienced sexual
abuse including child prostitution
Like 82%, I had been brutally assaulted
Like 84% I had been homeless
Like most of my clients, I suffered severe symptoms of PTSD
and I desperately wanted to get out of prostitution and a
life that made no sense to me. and girls like myself, if untreated
cycle endlessly, most often until they die, through medical,
mental, social services, criminal justice systems as high
users, costing cities billions.
As a survivor-advocate turned service provider, when I work
with my colleagues in law enforcement, I am often expected to
endorse or participate in finding new ways to criminalize or
increase the incarceration time of children, supposedly in the
name of protection. My sense of ethics, my experiential understanding
of the issues, and my respect for the lives of children and
all human beings require that I reject the idea that people
who are abused are de facto criminals. When I say so, I may
be risking my funding and my ability to be welcomed into coalition
with my colleagues. Rather than talking about creating real
social alternatives to pimps and abusive families, we keep the
focus on how to keep kids locked up longer, increasing their
justified resentment and fear of the system which is supposed
to care for and shelter them.
All children deserve to be humanized, and to be free of sexual
exploitation. The crime we need to confront and immediately
redress is the betrayal and scape-goating of the most vulnerable
members of our society, by some of the most powerful institutions
of our society. When we do this, we will end child prostitution.
We can end child prostitution today by naming it what it really
is the most sever form of child abuse.
Copyright, The SAGE Project, Inc. and Norma Hotaling.
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