It’s one thing to debate whether prostitution — an adult’s consensual choice to provide sexual services for money — should be legal. But the enslavement and sexual exploitation of children for profit is an entirely different issue.

Unbeknownst to most of us, it’s happening right here at home. It’s called domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST), and Los Angeles County has begun a new chapter in the story of our efforts to eradicate the practice.

Kim Biddle, who hails from Orange County and took her Master’s in Social Work from USC, first came face to face with sex trafficking of children while working for the International Justice Mission in Thailand and Cambodia. But eventually she learned that such problems are far from confined to the Third World.

“Through that work I realized how predominant a problem it is in the United States — and that a lot of organizations, funding, and initiatives/policy were not really focused on it in our own country and our own children,” she says. “And so I felt compelled to be a voice for the voiceless here.”

Biddle’s “here” is not just the U.S. in general, but Southern California in particular, which she labels as one of the top three hubs for DMST. “Because of [the area’s] diversity, it’s able to hide people well,” she says. “[…] And there’s a lot of money, a lot of events. It’s definitely a hot spot […] and a prime place to recruit children.”

So it was that in 2010 Biddle founded Saving Innocence, a nonprofit organization with a mission “To rescue and restore child victims of sex trafficking through strategic partnerships with local law enforcement, social service providers, and schools, while mobilizing communities to prevent abuse and increase neighborhood safety.”

Later that year Michelle Guymon and Hania Cardenas of the L.A. County Probation Department were becoming aware of DMST through their work with the Interagency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, work that opened their eyes to this lesser-known side of the sex industry in the U.S.

“We’ve always had these kids in our system,” Guymon says. “And I — like everyone else — just saw these as kids who chose to be involved in prostitution. To me, it was just another kid who came in with a specific crime. I never really thought of them as being sexually exploited. […] One of my not-so-proud moments [in talking with the girls was how] I always focused on their sexual-abuse history as why they were working the streets. It never even occurred to me that they were being sexually exploited [in the present tense]. […] Over the last 18 months it’s been my ‘a-ha’ moment about changing the way we see kids who have been arrested for a prostitution.”

It was through the efforts of Guymon and Cardenas that Supervisor Don Knabe became aware of DMST.

“These two gals out of Probation have just done an incredible job of putting this whole thing together,” Knabe says. “I was shocked when I got this briefing, ’cause I thought, you know, ‘Maybe that happens in some other country or something, but not here in Southern California.”

The Probation Department, along with the Juvenile Justice Court, applied for and received three one-year grants from the California Standards Authority, which will provide over $1 million to combat DMST and help survivors. With the funds L.A. County has already opened a new courtroom dedicated to sex-trafficking issues — “to help make sure these kids don’t just get their hands slapped and go back out there and get pimped away by these thugs again,” says Knabe.

The grants have also enabled the County to contract Saving Innocence, a move Biddle says will help to create “a collaborative effort with local FBI and LAPD.” And much of that effort will focus on training local law-enforcement personnel to process the problem.

“Most dispatchers at 911 would not know what [human] trafficking is,” Biddle says. “Most of the dispatchers at the Department of Children and Family Services wouldn’t know what trafficking is. I’ve had people try to call and report child abuse because they’ve seen a child being prostituted out, and [the dispatchers] don’t know how to handle that, because in these systems these kids have been improperly categorized as delinquent, runaway youth. And yeah, they obviously have left home — whether that was by kidnapping or coercion — but these are kids that have been brainwashed, they’ve been tortured, they’ve been raped; they’re being forced to sell themselves between five and 20 times a night to strange men beginning at age of 11 years old. In those circumstances an adult is not going to be able to function properly, much less a child, whose brain isn’t as developmentally capable. […] If you were to call 911 and say, ‘There’s an 8-year-old on the side of the street,’ they would probably send somebody to check it out. But if you’re saying [that a prostitute] looks a little young to be out there, they’re just not going to respond in the correct way. They just don’t understand the dynamics of human trafficking.”

“People see these as kids prostitutes,” Guymon agrees. “If you don’t change people’s awareness, things won’t change. […] With our kids, we arrest the ‘prostitute,’ and we don’t go looking for anybody. Because on some level we think our job is done.”

Of the 300 people who Guymon has trained about the problem in Southern California, “There hasn’t been one of them that walked away from that saying, ‘I knew that.'”

One of the facts that most don’t know: the average age of entry into the sex-trafficking world for a child forced to sell herself on the street is 12. “I refuse to believe any 12-year-old has grown up wanting to be a prostitute,” Guymon says.

“Obviously most of these kids have very, very low self-esteem,” Knabe says. “These pimps come out, basically tell them they love them — they’ve never heard that before — and then force them to sell their bodies. […] It’s horrific to think that these vile pimps and scumbags do that to these young women.”

Biddle points out that it’s not just law enforcement that needs to be retooled, it’s also the judicial system.

“Most of the trafficking cases that we’re seeing in L.A. are still be prosecuted as pimping and pandering cases, which is a misdemeanor crime,” she says. “Of course, all of these guys are also raping the children that they’re selling, and so that’s what’s really giving them a lot of their [jail] time. […] And we need to criminalize the correct criminals. Because right now it’s more likely for the children to be arrested than the actual trafficker or pimp to be arrested — or even the buyer, or ‘john,’ to be arrested. So I think a shift in emphasis on who we’re criminalizing, and to really equip the people who know how to catch these predators. […] I know a lot of law enforcement in the area that would love to spend more time and more emphasis on cases like this, but they just can’t because they’re restricted in how many hours a week they’re able to work or what type of cases they can focus on because of […] how [human trafficking] cases are seen right now.”

But Saving Innocence places just as much focus on what happens to survivors after they have been rescued. Those efforts include:

  • Providing long-term treatment, mentorship, and case management support
  • One-on-one visitation and life-enrichment workshops weekly for children in juvenile halls
  • Court advocacy for survivors and helping them to navigate the legal system
  • Providing support and resources for families of survivors
  • Overseeing survivor-run prevention programs in high-risk areas and schools
  • Overseeing quarterly survivorship leadership programs (a service open to all survivors of DMST)

“We follow the girls long-term,” Biddle explains. “We really see it as a long-term, lifelong relationship. […] We want to be a place of continuum for them, [because] they’re bounced around in the system a lot. A lot of them come from broken homes or environment where they don’t have consistent relationships. So we try to provide that for them.”

Knabe says that although the County has learned much about DMST over the last year, there is much more to know and do.

“I tell everybody, ‘What we don’t know is what we don’t know,'” he says. “So the purpose of this task force and this grant is to start [processing] the numbers that we’re dealing with here in Southern California. And I’m being told it’s a very, very significant issue here because of the ports, because of the border, because of LAX, because of the weather, because of a lot of different things. And so we’re trying to get our arms around it.”

Biddle says a reprioritizing of law-enforcement and judicial resources — particularly as concerns the “War on Drugs” — would be a great help in combatting the problem.

“I think there needs to be a much greater emphasis in funding directed to DMST,” she says. “We designate so many government dollar toward the ‘War on Drugs,’ but we’re neglecting that gangs nowadays are more likely to be involved with the selling of girls, because you can sell a girl 20 times a night, and you can only sell a drug once. So it really is the fastest growing crime, and we need to put more emphasis on supporting the already-existing systems with law enforcement and the FBI, who are already trained to do that job well.”

Knabe agrees: “[DMST] is a related problem, because [often] these girls wind up on drugs, too. So it’s an easy transition to use some of those resources to deal with this whole human-trafficking issue.”

Whether it’s law enforcement, the courts, the victims, or the general public, education is key to eradicating DMST.

“I’ve raised the issue with Metrolink and [asked them] to report back on what we can and can’t do,” Knabe says. “It’s no different than dealing with terrorism, [as far as] making everybody aware [of] what signs to look for — because [traffickers and victims] do use public transportation. [… We want people] to be able to recognize [such a situation] so they can alert the authorities to check the situation out. We’re trying to do a lot of thing to heighten the awareness of it.”

“A lot of these cases are brought to law enforcement and the FBI because of the ‘Good Samaritan’ reporting,” Biddle says. “They’re noticing something strange — that the girl on the corner looks just too young to be out there. Police have said they’ve seen girls as young as 9 years old being forced to prostitute on the street. So I think it’s a mental shift for the general public, as well, to know, ‘Hey, let’s think about this. They’re children — they’re not choosing to sell themselves. This isn’t a child’s dream come true. There’s something going on here. There’s a trafficker or there’s a game that’s been sold to them.’ There’s a coercive nature to this crime that I think if people understood the level of brainwashing that’s being done to the children, people would be more likely to take notice and report — especially if they knew the proper hotlines to call.”

Biddle suggests concerned citizens call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at (888) 3737-888, which will connect them 24 hours a day to FBI or other law-enforcement trained to handle DMST issues.