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Young, Cold And for Sale
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Source: The New York Times
Author: BOB HERBERT
DATELINE: Atlanta
The girl approached me on a desolate stretch of Metropolitan
Parkway, about halfway between the airport and the
clustered lights of the downtown skyline. The night was
unusually cold and she was shivering a little. She told me
she was 15, but she didn't look more than 12. It was
bad enough that the child was outside at all at midnight.
The fact that she was turning tricks was heartbreaking. I
explained that I was a reporter for The New York Times and asked
if she would wait while I went to get someone to help her. She
looked surprised. ''I don't need any help,'' she said.
I had already spent a night traveling with undercover vice
cops, and they had pointed out the different neighborhoods in
which under-age prostitutes, some as young as 10, roamed the
streets. ''The girls are exploited in every sense of the word,''
said Lt. Keith Meadows, who heads Atlanta's vice unit. ''The men
are all over them -- the pimps, the johns. The girls get beaten.
That's common. They're introduced to drugs. And the pimps take
all the money. It's sad. ''I would say that in most cases, the
girls never knew their fathers. A lot of them were abused at
home and they end up in the clutches of these pimps, putting
their trust in someone they shouldn't have.''
Atlanta, for a variety of reasons, has become a hub of child
prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation
of children. The overall market for sex with kids is booming in
many parts of the U.S. In Atlanta -- a thriving hotel and
convention center with a sophisticated airport and ground
transportation network -- pimps and other lowlifes have tapped
into that market bigtime.
''These guys are even going into rural Georgia and getting
these girls and bringing them into Atlanta,'' said Alesia Adams,
a longtime advocate who has worked with the courts and social
service agencies to assist young girls who are lured into the
sex trade.
Kaffie McCullough, the project director of a federally
sponsored intervention program, said Atlanta's juvenile
prostitution problem ''is a lot bigger than anybody would really
like to know.'' The sex trade in Atlanta is ''a huge, huge, huge
industry,'' she said, and the involvement of kids under 17,
which is the age of consent in Georgia, is a substantial part of
it.
Stephanie Davis, the policy adviser on women's issues for
Mayor Shirley Franklin, agreed. ''Sex tourism is coming south,''
she told me. ''There is advertising that I've seen on the
Internet and other places that actually targets the New York
market, urging men to come to Atlanta for the day and fly back
home that night.''
The risks for pimps and other exploiters of children are low,
and the payoff is often enormous. Demand is increasing for
younger and younger prostitutes, in part because of the cultural
emphasis on the sexual appeal of very young women and girls, and
in part because of the widely held belief among johns that there
is less risk of contracting a disease from younger prostitutes.
For the girls, life on the street can be hellish. A study
released last fall by the Atlanta Women's Agenda, an initiative
of the mayor's office, noted that the girls are always highly
vulnerable to rape, assault, robbery and murder, not to mention
arrest and incarceration. Added to that are the psychological
risks, which are profound.
The girl who approached me on Metropolitan Parkway had walked
alone across an empty, rundown parking lot. The usual practice,
I had been told, was for johns in cars to pick up the girls and
then drive behind an abandoned commercial building, of which
there were plenty in the area.
The girl said she had a ''boyfriend,'' which is the word the
girls use for their pimps. When I asked if her boyfriend knew
what she was doing, she said, ''He told me to do it.'' She
lifted her chin and proudly showed me a cheap necklace she was
wearing. ''He gave me this,'' she said. ''He loves me.''
I tried to think of a way to bring the girl to the attention
of some social service agency, or even the police. But taking
her into my rented car, even if she had been willing to go with
me, was out of the question. I looked around, hoping to spot a
passing patrol car.
The girl's bangs fluttered as the wind picked up. She looked
cold. ''I gotta go,'' she said.
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