When prostitutes are children
A 40-year-old man is caught having sex with a 15-year-old. One would expect he would be charged with statutory rape or child sexual abuse. One would expect, if convicted, he would serve hard time and have to register as a sex offender.
One would be wrong.
If the 15-year-old is on a street corner in spike heels, and the 40-year-old is in a sedan with a pocketful of cash, the teenager is more likely to be locked up than the adult. She is likely to land in juvenile hall. He is likely to pay a fine, go home and spend one Saturday at an eight-hour “john school.” Or the cops won’t arrest him at all; telling him this is his lucky night.
We are a society that is so protective of children that we can arrest parents who don’t strap their kids into car seats. Yet in most cities in America, a child who sells herself for sex is cast out of the protective circle of childhood. Because she is paid money, the thinking seems to go, she suddenly has the capacity to consent to her own sexual abuse.
“We should be looking at it completely different,” said Jasmine, who walked the streets starting at age 16. She asked that her real name not be used. Jasmine was put on the street by a boyfriend whom she loved enough to sell herself so they could pay for a hotel and food.
“Girls aren’t out there by choice,” she said. “It’s hard for people to understand it’s not a choice.”
San Francisco is taking the lead in trying to help many people understand.
District Attorney Kamala Harris has promised to charge johns caught with underage girls with statutory rape or sexual child abuse. “It’s sexual exploitation of youth. It’s child abuse for money,” she said.
Harris teamed up with Assemblyman Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, to write a bill calling for enhanced sentences for adults convicted of a sexual offense committed with a minor for money.
The proposed law is fine as it goes. But under it, district attorneys would have to charge the adult with a sexual offense against a minor — instead of solicitation — in order to seek the enhanced sentence. And most district attorneys still treat young girls on the street as criminals instead of victims.
San Francisco filed its first such charge just last spring. A 41-year-old man was charged with statutory rape for paying to have sex with a 14-year-old. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years’ probation in exchange for testifying against the girl’s pimp.
“A bill like this starts to create a philosophical shift in how we respond to child prostitution,” said Norma Hotaling, founder and director of SAGE, a San Francisco advocacy group for girls and women caught in prostitution.
Jasmine was arrested when she was 17 and spent 45 days in San Francisco’s juvenile hall. After her days in lockup, where she connected with SAGE, she moved to transitional housing, where she was given food and clothing. “I didn’t need to go out on the street anymore to support myself,” she said.
Jasmine is 20 now, and a SAGE case manager and counselor. Six months ago, she met a girl who had just been picked up for prostitution. She was 11.
“These men need to go to jail because they’re having sex with minors knowing that they’re minors,” Jasmine said. “If you give some of these guys hard sentences — real prison time, not county jail — you’d have fewer of them cruising the streets looking for young girls.”
The idea of childhood sometimes seems like a chimerical thing, a pink and yellow dream we want to surround with soft pillows. There is no place in that picture for a 15-year-old girl in a black miniskirt rattling off the prices for various sex acts. She is, in that moment, the perversion of childhood.
It doesn’t mean she isn’t still a child.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is joanryan@sfchronicle.com.