Helping Girls as Victims, Not Culprits (Clyde Haberman, NY Times)

This article appeared in the New York Times Metro Section on July 8, 2008

Helping Girls as Victims, Not Culprits
By Clyde Haberman

Miranda’s story is typical, and yet not.

It’s typical of many girls who run away from home, only to land in the arms of older men whom they mistake for protectors. Most adults would recognize these men for what they are. They’re pimps.

She was all of 14 when she fled her mother’s house in Brooklyn and found herself “in the life” — the world of the street hustler. “I didn’t really know what I was getting into,” said Miranda, who, for reasons that should be obvious, avoided giving a last name or even a true first name.

Before long, she was arrested for prostitution. It would not be her last run-in with the law.

At least this pimp did not beat her. Her second pimp did, knocking out a few teeth and sending her to the hospital. Miranda was 16 then. She had tried going back home, but her mother lost patience with her and kicked her out. “I thought for a while that I was crazy, and I was the child from hell,” she said.

As we said, her story fits a familiar pattern with girls and sexual predators. Not necessarily typical is the way she reversed direction, with help from Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, or Gems, a Harlem-based organization that each year offers counseling and other assistance to more than 200 of the city’s Mirandas.

At 18, Miranda has just graduated from high school and is looking at possible colleges. That she is firmly on an educational track at a normal age is no small accomplishment, given her rough past. “I feel like a lotus,” she said. “A lotus starts in muddy water but grows into something beautiful.”

Also not typical are her journeys to Albany to urge that lawmakers rethink how the state deals with children — girls, in the main — who become sexual prey. Her efforts and those of others paid off a couple of weeks ago when the Legislature, by unanimous votes in both houses, passed the Safe Harbor for Sexually Exploited Children Act.

Instead of being treated as criminals, as they are now, girls age 15 and under would be viewed as victims the first time they are arrested for prostitution. They would be classified as “persons in need of supervision,” or PINS, and offered social services and protection from their pimps in a dormitory-style shelter.

Essentially, the Safe Harbor bill brings state law in line with federal statutes governing foreigners who make it to the United States in the clutches of sex traffickers. Those non-Americans are dealt with as victims, not criminals.

“Now, people born in Brooklyn will get the same treatment as someone born in Ukraine or Thailand or wherever,” said Mishi Faruqee, director of the youth justice program of the Children’s Defense Fund in New York.

It is not clear, however, if Gov. David A. Paterson will sign the bill. A spokeswoman said only that the governor would look at it once it is formally sent to him.

Were Mr. Paterson still in the State Senate, “this would have been an issue he would have been all over,” said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit group that focuses on prison policy. But groups like his worry that the governor might be leaning toward a veto, in part to avoid a new multimillion-dollar expense in tough times. And despite those unanimous legislative votes, an override of a veto cannot be assumed, said Assemblyman William Scarborough, a Democrat of Queens. He is a chief sponsor of the measure, with State Senator Dale M. Volker, a Republican of western New York.

A prominent opponent of the bill is the Bloomberg administration, although it has stopped short of urging a veto, publicly anyway. City Hall agrees that the girls are victims, said John Feinblatt, the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator. But “the PINS process has no teeth,” he said, and so keeping these children firmly in the court system is preferable.

“Our thought was that the best way to reach them was not through decriminalization but rather using the leverage of court-ordered services,” Mr. Feinblatt said in an interview.

His assessment of the legislation was a lot harsher in an article that he wrote for The New York Post in June under the headline “NY’s Pro-Pimp Bill.” If it became law, he wrote, girls would find it relatively easy to run right back to their exploiters.

He’s wrong, says Rachel Lloyd, who founded Gems a decade ago and is its executive director. Born in England, Ms. Lloyd was “in the life” herself as a teenager. In part, the problem is one of perception, she said. “These are not kids with cancer — they’re not the kids people feel the most empathy for.”

Can’t these girls be quite a handful, though?

Ms. Lloyd is not convinced that they are all as tough as many might think. “Whatever your stereotype is,” she said, “when you sit down and talk to them, you see that a kid is a kid.”