The STOPLight

A tour of the streets

We serve homeless kids. For whatever reason, their family system has been shattered and they don't have the option of going home. There are tons of people willing to help our kids out on the streets. But the price the kids pay for that help, which is housing, clothing and food, is super high and usually involves sexual exploitation. We are known as a program that works with kids involved in prostitution, both boys and girls. But not all kids on the street are involved in prostitution. Not all kids involved in prostitution have been victims of incest or sexual abuse.

We always say "kids in prostitution" because we don't believe our kids are prostitutes. No kid I've ever met has willingly made the choice to go into prostitution. They have been exploited by adults and been pulled into that system. When you talk to someone who has been involved in prostitution, to salvage some kind of personal integrity or pride, they'll tell you that this is a choice they made. They feel they have to have control over something in their life. After further exploration you find out they didn't have any other choice. We try to get our kids to the place that they realize they had no other choice but to become involved in prostitution.

Perhaps the biggest thing we do is provide a non-exploitive relationship for the kids. It sounds so simple but it is very difficult to do. Most of our kids, when they encounter an adult, think that somewhere down the line there is going to be a sexual relationship or there is a fear of it. It takes a long time for a kid to trust that this is not going to happen. Some of our kids get sexually abused in places that are supposed to be safe for kids — by people who are supposed to be safe for them. The kids are very wary. I respect that because they need to be. It's sad to hear kids talk about counselors who sexually abused them.

Many kids come to us because we work out on the streets. They would not seek services elsewhere because they are afraid of adults — for very good reasons. Most have been exploited by adults, not always sexually, but by getting them hooked up in stolen check stuff, returning stolen merchandise or something like that. They are very mistrustful of adults. The social service system tries to fit the kids into existing programs. First, they want to look at home reunification. The kids keep butting heads by telling workers they cannot go home but they won't talk about why they can't to go home. The system doesn't work for them and they end up on the streets.

On the streets, we have developed a network among kids that's how we meet them. They get to know and trust us after a period of time. We serve about 400 homeless kids each year. We are only four people; a program director and three street workers. We have places where we hang out. By word of mouth, kids know we aren't jerks or johns. We aren't going to sexually exploit them. We can help out with food or housing or just a cup of coffee. Or with some pretty sophisticated legal advocacy if it's needed. Street workers have to learn so much about everything. Our job is to bridge the community to the kids and the kids to the community; to get a kid to a place where he is feeling safe enough that he can go out and look for options.

On the street, we don't jump into the issue of sexual abuse right away because some kids simply cannot deal with it at all. They don't have the consistent support they need. They don't feel they have the love they need to deal with it. They are busy trying to be kids and trying to successfully launch into adulthood. We are very careful about that issue. How and when do you start talking about sexual abuse? We really let our clients direct that because it is such a key issue for many of them. We don't want to put them in a position where they can't survive on the street. These kids don't have warm beds to go home to at night. They don't have support. They are isolated from schools, from almost every place in the community. Knowing that we could do further damage around that makes it tough sometimes.

The LSS street program has a history of working with boys involved in prostitution. For a long time we couldn't even get recognition that this was happening. People would tell us "That is just young gay boys having sec adult gay men." That's not what is. It's boys getting sexually abused daily. There is still a huge misunderstanding about boys involved in prostitution.

The boys involved in prostitution are in such a jam. Not all of them are gay. Boys are involved in prostitution with adult women. You never hear about that. Women do sexually abuse our kids on the street. Most of these kids are simply dismissed as -excuse my language — the "faggots" in the park.

For example, we had a coalition come to us wanting us to deal with the issue of prostitution in the park. What it came down to is they didn't want money exchanged in the park. They thought it was perfectly okay for adult men seeking out sexual services from young boys. That was not an issue for them. It was not sexual abuse and it was not prostitution. We really flipped out.

When kids encounter that kind of stuff from adults, not just the ones seeking to exploit them, but also the system not recognizing it for what it is they get more confused and feel more victimized by us because they don't get the support they need. Boys are raped in the park. Trying to get that acknowledged is next to impossible. There is a kind of culture in the park and in other areas where boys are involved in prostitution. The boys self-medicate to deal with the abuse and the pain. I don't think they identify it as that. They see it as just getting drunk or using other drugs to have fun. But we see it as covering the pain of what's happening to them.

Most of us on the street have developed some relationships with kids that are much longer than program. Some kids tend to be in our lives a long time. Let me introduce you to...

Jan

Jan, a woman who is very near and dear to me. I've been working with her for three and a half years. She is a tough cookie; you kind of expect to get spit on when you meet her. She will scowl and growl at everybody who comes to her but that's just her survival skills. We were talking about how media portrays kids on the street. She said, "The media always says we are all involved in IV drugs or prostitution. But I never was. Sure, I would have sex every now and then to get something, but I was never involved in prostitution." Jan was sexually exploited but is not at a place in her life that she can look at it in those terms. She is trying to stabilize and just live. It is interesting how the kids frame sexual abuse in their minds just to survive. I give them tons of credit because that is survival, core survival.

Christy

Christy was sexually abused at home. When we first met her at age 12, she had already been involved in prostitution and drugs. She contacted us again when she was 17, very involved in prostitution by this time. Physically, she was abused and battered, had chronic pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) and a number of sexually-transmitted diseases. She couldn't stabilize herself long enough to heal physically, let alone emotionally.

When she came back, she was involved with two pimps who were brothers; one was running drugs and the other was pimping Christy and several other adolescent women. We tried to stabilize her but her pull to those pimps was strong, partly because there were threats made on her and on us. She was terrified. She didn't know how to interact with adults on a nonsexual basis. We could see her flailing. Even with us, she was really torn. We got her into treatment thinking if we could get her away, she would have the chance to stabilize.

What happened to her in treatment broke our hearts and made us angry. She had a huge need to talk about the sexual abuse that happened to her on the streets but was told she couldn't talk about it; that she was too sexually sophisticated for the group; that she was recruiting any time she talked to other young woman about it. They did not label her prostitution as "sexual abuse." In their minds, that was "prostitution" — I think their education was lacking. She would call us sobbing and say, "I need to talk about my pain. I need to talk about my pimp, about how much I love him but how much he's done to me. But they won't let me." They put her in isolation. They told her she could not talk to boys because they didn't know what she would do to them since she was so sexually sophisticated. We had a real jam on our hands.

Christy did graduate from treatment, which we thought was wonderful. Her family made a commitment to work together but I think the damage was so severe and everyone too raw to make it work. She ended up back on the street. Every couple of weeks she would call when she had been battered severely by a new pimp. She would call very drunk and physically in bad shape. She had chronic stomach pain from PID. She ended up disappearing on us and we could never get her stabilized.

Recently, she surfaced again. She now has a baby who was born critically premature and she is still out on the streets. Whenever her baby has a crisis, she goes out on the streets and does tricks. She just does not know how to cope, she's been so damaged. She has been raped a number of times and the response we get when we take her in isthat "prostitutes cannot be raped." We get that from professionals! "How can you say this kid has been raped? You can't rape a prostitute."

You'll hear that a lot. I think that spreads into a lot of the services that are provided for youth and adult survivors of prostitution.

Lyle

Lyle was a little fireball who was living on the streets when we met him. He had developed an armor of such foul language and physical threats that you couldn't get near him. I think it was his way of fending off the adults who approached him for sex. He did not know how to respond to any adult because he thought everyone was going to violate him. After working with him for a time, he's now doing really well with his family.

Joe

Joe is physically probably one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen; beautiful facial features and incredible bone structure. The only reason I say this is because it is one of his issues. Over a long period of time, he had been sexually abused by adults in a place that was supposed to be safe for kids in need of services. As a result of this sexual abuse, he absolutely hated himself. He thought the way he looked brought on the abuse. I think he was repeatedly told that by one of the perpetrators. He thought he was hideous and desperately wanted to have surgery on his face. I have never met anyone who hated himself physically that much. A number of times he was raped ("queer bashing" there's a lot of that). Joe would get beat up and would call us. He was getting rather well known in some of the emergency healthcare places and they would totally dismiss him as just being drunk. He was in so much physical pain from being bashed around, and emotionally he was devastated once again and no one would listen to him, so he would drink. I got many calls from him in the middle of the night after he had been beaten and raped.

Joe desperately wanted to be reunited with his family. He wanted to be accepted. He had been so dismissed by everyone. He would try to go home repeatedly and get shut out.

Finally, he went home one time and found a note on the house that said, "We've moved. Don't try to find us." At that time he was 15 or 16.

Read more: "A Tour of The Streets - Part 2"