King County must protect children against sexual exploitation

Guest column for the Seattle Times

September 12, 2009

The economic recession has been painful for everyone, but we must not allow hard times to destroy our moral compass. King County must not renege on commitments to protect sexually exploited children from adult pedophiles.

I was alarmed by the Seattle Times report that King County may try to save money by abandoning efforts to rescue children from being prostituted by gangs and pimps ["Proposed program for teen prostitutes aground," NWFriday, Sept. 4].

Where are our values?

For more than a year, King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg, juvenile justice experts, human-services professionals and I have worked to coordinate state and local efforts to protect children from being exploited as prostitutes. The King County strategy of steering sexually exploited teens into safe housing and social services is one of the most promising approaches we have seen anywhere.

We've seen too many young lives ruined by a failed system that is essentially a revolving door between prosecution and prostitution where child prostitutes as young as age 11 cycle from streets and alleys to courts and back again. This system does not and cannot work, because children will always be more afraid of violent pimps than of the law.

It is hard for decent people to imagine what these children are forced to endure nightly. Many, even the youngest, are controlled by beatings, kidnapping, drugs, and threats against their family. They are forced to prostitute their bodies for the gratification of pedophiles and the profit of the pimps and gangs who rule their lives. The King County model offers safety to these children. It offers hope.

To make the model even more effective, Satterberg and I urged state lawmakers to give prosecutors an alternative to mandatory prosecution to help them steer sexually exploited children into safe havens where the pimps and gangs can't reach them.

After learning about the realities of life for these sexually exploited children, and about the hope offered by the King County model, our Legislature voted unanimously to give prosecutors the leverage they need.

Tom McBride, spokesperson for the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, was ecstatic. "We're not just in support of this, we're pretty enthusiastic about this bill," he said. "This is exactly the way to do alternatives: You fund them, have standards, and make sure they work."

It is vital to remember we are not talking about the suffering of a handful of children. As the Times article emphasized, violent pimps and gangs control hundreds of child prostitutes in the Puget Sound area.

In recent years, Gov. Chris Gregoire and state lawmakers have enacted some of the toughest — and most expensive — laws in the nation to punish pedophiles. And we rightly have zero tolerance for adult sex predators who pretend their child victims "consented" to sex acts.

But our moral duty to protect children from pedophiles must include protection for the child victims as well as punishment for the criminals. King County must not accept a penny-wise, pound-foolish retreat from the commitment to reduce child prostitution and the suffering it brings.

Melinda Giovengo of YouthCare, an organization serving at-risk children in Seattle, put it this way:

"Let us never forget that these are children. Most have been sexually abused in their homes by family members. Children don't wake up one day and say 'I am going to be a juvenile prostitute today.' They have no intent in these acts. They are mainly coerced participants in something that is far bigger than themselves. They are child victims of one of the darkest crimes in our society; victims of predators who are using them for financial gain and for sex."

We must not abandon these children or our values to save pennies in hard times.