The STOPLight

A tour of the streets, Part 2

The following dialog took place between Chris McTavish, former director of the street program for Lutheran Social Services in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the audience after she spoke about homeless youth at Central Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. This is a continuation of a story in the April 1992 STOP Light.

Q. What is your success rate in getting these kids to be functioning, accepted adults who have a life?

A. Most of our kids leave prostitution. It’s not because of us, although I hope we have some impact on some of our kids. Inevitably, they either get kicked out of prostitution because nobody wants them; or they leave prostitution by having a baby (although girls actively prostitute while they are pregnant); or they get killed. So, most all of our kids do leave prostitution. Young boys especially are getting killed out there. It’s difficult to get response to this because no one wants to deal with it. There are people who work really hard to have young kids available for sexual services. There are people who specifically want young kids. When the kids get to be 19-20 years old and have been involved in prostitution on the street for a few years, people don’t want to buy them.

Q. Why don’t kids in prostitution look at normal ways of earning money?

A. Our kids welcome the opportunity to earn a living in ways that are nonexploitive. I don’t think any of us three streetworkers have ever recommended that a kid to get a job at McDonalds. These kids have the same dreams other adolescents do. We try to figure out a way to make those dreams come true. One of my kids wants to be an interior designer so we’re having lunch with an interior designer next week to talk about interning. No, they don’t want to do janitor work and I know that’s not what you are implying, but usually that’s the option offered to them. "You could wash dishes or dean up at the Metrodome (for four dollars an hour)." Our kids don’t want that just like most kids don’t. They really do want to work and they do want the sexual abuse to stop. The biggest thing we try to do, is to let them know that, yes, this is sexual abuse. They aren’t hearing that most places they go. What they are hearing is, "You made a choice to be out there on your back; I don’t know why you did, but you did." They aren’t getting the validation and affirmation that they are being sexually abused.

Q. Are you advocates for the kids?

A. Once a kid hooks up with one of us they essentially hire us to advocate for them on whatever level they need. This could be legal, medical, systems advocacy, and so forth. We work for them. if they want education or a job, we try to help them navigate through that system. There are many incredible agencies in the Twin Cities. There are many, many professionals who are sensitive to this issue and who are doing a great job. I don’t want to make it sound like we are the only ones out there. We try to go with the kid through the system so they do not become re-victimized through ignorance around the prostitution issue. We case manage the kids closely.

Q. How big a case load do you have?

A. We have what we call front burner kids and back burner kids. When our kids are in crisis — well, they are always in crisis — but sometimes they have one crisis after another in their life and then we work really closely with them. Daily, we work with a case load of about six or seven kids that are having really heavy issues. Our case loads are as big as 50 to 60 kids that we know and they know us. In our program, if a kid is doing fine, we are there for them to call at any time, but we’re not actively working with them. We are on-call seven days a week, 24 hours a day by voice pager.

Q. Do you have a safe house?

A. Yes. The street program just spun off two new programs. One is a safe house in St. Paul for emergency safe housing for six kids. It is incredible to have it available. We also have a scattered-site housing program for kids in transition who are trying to launch into adulthood. In this program, we put them into their own apartment and subsidize their rent. (Central Lutheran Church played a part in that by paying for the first apartment for a young person in our program.) The kid moves into the apartment and learns survival skills, daily living skills like how to budget, how to buy food, how to clean house, how to really stabilize. Then the program moves away from the kid so he or she is left in the apartment and doesn’t have to leave after six months (like most other housing programs). Right now, there are 46 kids being housed by that program. We also work closely with other services for youth in the community like Teenage Medical Services and The Bridge for Runaway Youth and many more.

Q. What about medical case management?

A. Medical care for homeless people is rotten. Period. Preventative health care is a hard thing to get across to anybody. For adolescents, it is especially hard. They wait until their illness has reached a crisis before they seek medical care. We spend a lot of time trying to get medical care for our kids. This is a key issue on the street. And dental care. One kid I know had a filling fall out of his tooth so he went in a dentist’s office and asked them to fix it. They said, sorry, you don’t have insurance. So he took a screwdriver and broke off half of his tooth. I asked if he was in pain and he said, "not as bad as it was." Another guy who has been on his own since he was ten — now he’s 20 — still has braces on his teeth. He used a hammer and screwdriver to take off the front bands but the whole inside of his mouth is still full of metal. This is something people never think of. Also, many of our kids cannot see. Their eyes have been bad forever. They’ve never had an eye exam. Nutrition plays a part in that, too. A lot of kids on the street eat out of Dumpsters; not all of them, but a lot. They are not getting the right nutrition. Then, when you finally figure out they need glasses, you can’t get eyewear. At some places you can get free frames but they’re really ugly and the kids won’t wear them if they’re not fashionable. You can yell and jump up and down about that all you want, but face it. They are adolescents. They are concerned about their looks and they won’t wear them —unless they’re really "geeky" and then it becomes a fashion.

Q. I don’t know the breadth of the problem. Do you have any idea what numbers we are talking about? How about kids coming from outside the Twin Cities?

A. The last study we looked at said on any given night in the Twin Cities there are 1,200 homeless youth. Most people say they don’t see kids sleeping on the sidewalks. But homeless youth are different from homeless adults. Many homeless adults have chronic issues like chemical dependency. Most youth haven’t reached that point yet. Also, there are so many adults out there waiting to exploit them. Kids mean big money on the street, so you don’t see them out sitting on the sidewalk. Adults take advantage of them. There are people who hang out at malls looking for runaways. Pimps are very busy people. Homeless youth aren’t visible. Also, you can’t pick them out in a crowd by how the dress.

Q. If you could have the police do whatever you wanted about prostitution, what would it be?

A. When you look at the face of prostitution on the street, who is breaking the law? The pimps aren’t. They are just standing there. It’s the kids and customers involved in prostitution who are breaking the law. We want to see law enforcement officers going after the adults who are exploiting these kids. The police are working on that. I think they’ve heard us. We’ve done a lot with lawmakers about this issue and feel we’ve been heard. We don’t work closely with the police. The reason for this is that our kids are terrified of the police, If they see us having a close relationship with the police, they won’t trust us. Many of our kids are involved in illegal activities at the hands of adults. The stolen check-passing on the streets is adults running the scam with kids actually doing it. Many of our kids end up doing it. We would want to tell cops to go after the adults.

Q. How do you think pimps get to be the way they are? Do you think they themselves have been victimized? What causes them to become pimps?

A. I will give my biased opinion. I never see pimps as victims. That’s because I just don’t like pimps at all. My heart’s not big enough to go out to pimps. What we see with pimps is that it is a generational thing. If the dad was a pimp, the son becomes a pimp. Some of it is racism. (Racism is alive and well out there.) A lot of them are taught it in the family. It is a very difficult trade to learn. You have to be smart. The dumb ones don’t make it. It is a "profession" they work very hard at.

Q. Do kids who have been abused become abusers as adults?

A. Some of our kids will inevitably become abusers. We won’t see it because we work with them at the time they are still being abused. It is a cycle. I’m so close to our kids that it is really hard for me to think about them perpetuating this.

Q. Where do you find your best hope?

A. With the kids themselves; in them. We have tons of hope, otherwise we wouldn’t exist. We operate on hope. Within each of our kids are the resources to launch successfully (whatever success means for them) into a life they want to lead. They have the potential to do it. Our program is weird in that we give our kids a chance to be kids. Not prostitutes. Not sexually abused kids. Not incest victims. We try not to label them. Let them pursue what they want in life. We are there for them 100% -- sometimes 150 — to back them up by being what everyone of us needs in our life — a person who won’t exploit us, who is there for us. We often call ourselves the "parent program" because in many ways we provide a parent role for them. A parent role that for some reason they were ripped-off of. Our hope is in the kids.

Q. What can we do to help you realize that hope?

A. Let the media know you are not interested in exploitive coverage. Don’t buy into the stereotypes about prostitution. Don’t be afraid to talk to kids on the street. Let them know there is a community of adults who care about them. They truly are all of our kids. Take an active role in letting them know that. Get kids who are privileged and have families and resources — get those kids to reach out to kids who aren’t privileged. It’s about access. These kids need access to community — a loving community— not a community that exploits them.

by Joan Hendrickson, STOP Light editor

In 2002 our organization changed its name to Adults Saving Kids. Prior to that we were called A-STOP (Alliance for Speaking Truths On Prostitution), STOP (Speaking Truths On Prostitution), or Grassroots Ministry Alliance.