NEW YORK, NY May 09, 2007 —Kids who become prostitutes are treated like criminals or delinquents when they get caught. Some lie about their age and spend a few nights in Rikers Island. Others get shipped off to a number of different state run juvenile detention facilities or group homes. Recently there’s been a push in Albany to treat these troubled youth, some as young as 12, like victims who’ve been sexually exploited. WNYC’s Cindy Rodriguez reports:

REPORTER: Inside a tiny cramped office in East Harlem, Denise Brown has just finished a 3 hour long therapy session.

Brown and Caseworker: So how are you going to get prepared for Monday. Oh I’ll be ready.

REPORTER: Her 26 year old caseworker has found her a GED program and a parenting class to attend. The teenager has a two year old being raised by a relative. Brown has agreed to talk to me but only if her name is changed and her voice is slightly altered.

Brown: I’m 17 years old and I’ve been prostituting since the age of 12.

REPORTER: The teenager says it started shortly after she ran away from home:

Brown: …I was here and there sleeping at other people’s cribs and that’s when I met a john, uh a pimp and he taught me how to work around on the tracks and in the strip clubs. I used to work in the strip clubs too….It wasn’t me. It wasn’t something I liked. It was just something I did to get food and sleep and clothes.

REPORTER: Dressed in jeans tucked into spotted rainboots, and a white jacket over a black t-shirt - Denise is a petite girl with long black hair, large eyes and a deep dimple in her left cheek. One minute she is confident - projecting the image and mannerisms of a streetwise adult, the next minute she is hunched in the corner sucking her thumb and looking down like a scared child. When she speaks of her pimps, young men between the ages of 18 and 30, she is conflicted about her relationship with them:

Brown: Well really, some of them was nice. Most of them was nice. They took care of me. But it aint love. I thought it was. Because if somebody love you, they wouldn’t have put you out there. They wouldn’t let you ruin your body.

REPORTER: As Denise speaks her caseworker rubs her leg to soothe her. She says many of the teenagers she sees are not used to having an affectionate touch from somebody who won’t hurt them. And hurt, both physical and emotional, is how Denise Brown best describes her young life. She has been raped by johns – men she says who should’ve known how young she was, and beaten by pimps who lived off what she and other girls made for them. Sometimes she walked the streets under Queens Borough Plaza from 6 in the evening until 6 the next day:

Brown: I’ll be out there until the morning time….Sometimes you stay out there until they feel like you can come home. Until they feel like you met your needs of getting the money

REPORTER: Denise was arrested for prostitution on five different occasions and has been in and out of juvenile detention facilities and group homes. Recently she was arrested for assaulting another girl, and a judge who saw her prior prostitution record ordered her to attend SAVI, the Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention program. It’s one of two programs that treats young girls in the sex trade by offering them counseling, medical care and other services. Assemblyman William Scarborough from Queens believes that’s where young prostitutes belong not in jails or detention facilities.

Scarborough: What we are trying to do is to get these children to be treated as children to give them an opportunity to redirect their lives.

REPORTER: At a city hall press conference he talked about legislation he’s trying to get passed which prohibits anyone under 18 from being prosecuted for prostitution. The bill also requires the state to provide more services:

Scarborough: To provide them with training, with counseling, with residences if they need it and to give them the opportunity to regain their youth that has often times cruelly been taken away from them.

Reporter: But not everyone agrees with Scarboroughs effort to decriminalize prostitution when it comes to kids.

Feinblatt: Legal leverage helps.

REPORTER: John Fienblatt, the city’s criminal justice coordinator, believes the approach is a mistake:

Feinblatt: We’ve learned it in mental health issues. We’ve learned it in drug treatment issues. And I think we’ve learned it here also in prostitution issues. Sometimes the way to get people …help is to compel them to get help and to have an or else attached to the offer of help and I think if you take that away you’ve lost your legal leverage you’ve lost your coercive power and I think your going to lose more people back to the streets.

REPORTER:And according to a recent state report there are plenty of kids that need to be rescued from the streets. Instead of voting on Scarborough’s bill, the state legislature ordered the Office of Children and Family Services to study what they call child sexual exploitation. The recently released report estimates in New York City, more than 2200 youth are involved in prostitution. Most of them are girls, about two-thirds are African American and 16 to 17 years old. The overwhelming majority were the subject of cases involving child abuse or neglect.

Advocates who work with troubled kids, say the estimate is too low because it only accounts for youth who make contact with social service providers or government offices. Boys and transgendered youth, especially fly under the radar. Another federally funded study in progress estimates there could be even more of them than young girls. Also more than half the organizations who were asked to cooperate with the state analysis failed to do so.

REPORTER: Regardless of the numbers, Feinblatt believes a combination of services with the threat of punishment is what works. Right now DA offices in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn are offering kids services such as counseling and medical care but it’s no where near enough. Housing for youth is what’s needed most. The city has plans to open a shelter specifically for youth who are prostitutes. Feinblatt, a former legal aid attorney, says getting kids services helps win their trust:

Feinblatt: Because in the end what you want to do is make sure that a kid that’s involved in prostitution is available so that we can go after the pimp. So what we are really trying to do is take both off the street. Off the street for the pimp means send them to jail and off the street for the prostitute means getting them out of the life.

REPORTER: Denise Brown refused to name her pimps. She says snitching out on the streets could cost someone their life. The court ordered therapy sessions have helped though. She says having someone to listen to her is what she and other kids need most:

Brown: If we can have people come out and talk to us and have people that show that they care about us. Then us young people would be off the streets. Because a lot of us feel that nobody cares about us and that we’re not wanted.

REPORTER: Brown says she’s confident she’ll never go back to the streets. For now she finds strength in simple teenage ways. She hands me an ear piece to listen to her favorite song - in it hip-hop artist Ciara sings about trading roles with a guy. It’s a call for men to consider what it would feel like to be mistreated. For Brown, empathy is everything. For wnyc, I’m Cindy Rodriguez