Rescuing Trafficked Youth: Building a House for Kids With No Home (Series Part 7) | Oakland Local

Rescuing Trafficked Youth: Building a House for Kids With No Home (Series Part 7) | Oakland Local


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Rescuing Trafficked Youth: Building a House for Kids With No Home (Series Part 7)
Published on Friday, May 07, 2010
Last updated on 07:05AM, Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Stickers on a girl's locker at MISSSEY show a chaotic emotional landscape. Photo by Alison Yin.


This is Part 7 of an eight-part, four-day Oakland Local investigative series on youth sex trafficking.


A 14-year-old from Southern California was kidnapped near her father's home and brought to Mexico. There, her kidnapper forced her into commercial sex.

Police found and arrested the trafficker. However, the girl was far too traumatized to be released back to her father -- and to the tough neighborhood from where she was kidnapped.

Luckily, a faith community at Oakland's First Covenant Church recognizes that kids like this need special care and therapy before they can be expected to resume the lives they've led before...

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"She is our first girl," said Kathy Wilson, development director at New Day for Children. So far, this group has raised about $300,000 to run a residential treatment facility for commercially sexually exploited children.

The facility (on 250 rural acres in far northern California) will provide schooling, recreation, medical care, counseling and therapeutic treatment to this girl -- and to others like her whom the New Day board hopes to rescue. This program is actually "tucked alongside" an existing residential treatment program for troubled teenagers on the rural campus. New Day uses the physical space and school in the existing facility but provides its own program.

The traumatized Southern California girl was referred to New Day by state law enforcement authorities because of the extreme hardship of her situation.

"As is the case with a lot of these girls, she was terribly abused by her birth mother, and her father did not want her back," said New Day Chairman Jon Blankmeyer.

New Day is ready to accept two more girls, and is working with state and local authorities to ensure that the first kids in the program are those in the most dire need of housing and treatment due to trauma suffered in the commercial sex trade.


The "detox" process
According to Wilson, girls rescued from sexual exploitation need very special care to detoxify from that experience.

"They need specialized counseling, they need parenting. They need to be given their childhoods back. They need time to heal since they have post-traumatic stress disorder. One way to think about it is that they are like war veterans," she said.

Wilson explained that, if these youth are simply picked up and released again, they go back to the streets, and often to their pimps, because they are accustomed to being exploited. Often, they might have an emotional bond with the exploiter.

"Even if they do have a family to go back to, they've been so brainwashed by the pimp," they are vulnerable, she said. "This girl, her brain has been so twisted that she thinks of her pimp as her boyfriend," Wilson continued. And, unfortunately, it is not difficult for a pimp to track down his girls or youth once they are released back to their neighborhoods.

Many professionals in law enforcement, social work and government say rescuing sexually exploited kids and bringing them to a "safe house" for a while is likely the best way to rescue them. But this costs a lot of money.

Politicians, such as Oakland City Councilwoman Jean Quan, have been working with Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Sharmin Eshraghi Bock and state Assemblyman Sandre Swanson (D-Oakland) to get government support for a safe home for exploited young women.

"Getting them out of town might be the best thing," agreed Oakland Police Department Vice and Child Exploitation Unit Investigator Jim Saleda. But he lamented the city will likely never have enough money for that.


Law enforcement: Not enough
The faith group at First Covenant Church of Oakland has been raising money for eight months to bring children who have been traumatized by commercial sexual exploitation (and often by kidnapping) to a safe residential treatment facility.

They decided to focus on girls instead of youth generally because, at least in Oakland, the vast majority of kids exploited for sex are girls.

Wilson, of New Day, said the church got involved in this problem because "it is so horrific."

"It is modern day slavery," she said. "We must be modern day abolitionists."

New Day's Blankmeyer elaborated, "Law enforcement itself can't solve this" problem because its causes stem from society - from poverty, from popular culture as portrayed in the media and from a dearth of positive options for youth. He added that it's helpful that local and state law enforcement personnel have generally become more aware that sexually exploited youth are victims. But police can't provide the family structure these children often lack, Blankmeyer said.

Wilson agrees. "It's frustrating for law enforcement because they mount these big expensive sweep operations. It's great if they can get the pimps put away but the girls might be right back on the streets again."


Funding the solution
Talking with many experts and researching what might be most effective to rescue these youth from a life of bondage, the First Covenant congregation decided to focus its donations and fundraising efforts on creating a safe house.

So far, New Day has enough resources to support three girls. Its goal is to support as many as two dozen. The program will grow slowly, commensurate with the money it can attract, Wilson and Blankmeyer said.

"We need massive community support," because it costs $3,500 a month for each girl to reside there, Wilson said.

New Day now has 50 financial backers, including individuals, other churches and some nonprofit organizations. They include:

Redwood Chapel, Castro Valley
Living Waters Church, Berkeley
Intervarsity Church, Berkeley
Regeneration Church, Oakland
First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley
Crossroads Church, Concord

NEXT in this series: Part 8, Trafficking Solutions Hindered by lack of Funds in the Great Recession...

COMPLETE SERIES INDEX: Youth Trafficking in Oakland



This story was produced under a fellowship sponsored by the
G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, a project of Tides
Center.

We also would like to thank Robert Rosenthal and California Watch for their support -- as well as our reporters Barbara Grady and Sarah Terry-Cobo, and photographer Alison Yin -- for their amazing work.

Support more independent quality reporting like this! Please donate to Oakland Local on Spot.us. We are seeking additional support for continued coverage.

About Barbara Grady

Barbara Grady is a freelance reporter who often writes for Oakland Local. Before her current stint of writing about social issues for various news and non-profit organizations, Barbara was on staff at the Oakland Tribune and, earlier, at Reuters. She's a recipient of a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists for a series published in 2008. Contact her at barbgrady1@gmail.com
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