Sisters Offering Support

Pimps have made their way to Kaua’i, according to an Honolulu Police Department undercover detective who said over the past two years she’s arrested at least half a dozen Kaua’i girls who were working in massage parlors and strip clubs on O’ahu.

She said that though she’s seeing fewer young girls on the streets, those 16-year-old Kaua’i girls told her they were bored here and wanted something else to do-this was a factor in their “recruitment” into commercial sexual exploitation, or CSE. CSE and prostitution, defined as the offer to exchange sex for something of value, is illegal in Hawai’i. The 38-year-old officer, under the HPD’s Morals and CSE Unit for about five of her seven years with the department, walks the streets dressed like one of the working girls, making arrests on prostitutes, pimps and customers.

Representatives from the O’ahu-based group Sisters Offering Support traveled to Kaua’i this week to show middle school and high school-aged boys and girls the facts, and maybe give them some ways to prevent it from happening to them and their friends.

SOS Executive Director Lorraine Faithful said that CSE is not about sex, it’s about power and control, and pimps use brainwashing techniques to get that edge over easily influenced teen-agers with low self-esteem.

“What kids are exposed to today is the media,” Faithful said, calling movies, television and MTV the exploiters that tell kids the myths involved with the business.

Media tells that CSE is a choice, they can make lots of money, they can quit anytime they want,” she said. The truth is, no one chooses to be victimized. No one chooses to have sex with 5, 10, or 20 strangers a night, she continued.

If anyone was told that CSE causes a person to be exposed to disease, sleep deprivation, sexual, physical and emotional abuse, unwanted and high-risk pregnancies, to be arrested and jailed, to lose a sense of freedom and identity, and live in constant fear-no one would want to enter that world, Faithful said.

Entry into CSE doesn’t start overnight, as a survivor named Marces proved when she shared her story with the group. Her story is extreme, but she and Faithful showed that CSE can happen to anyone.

Marces was 16 when she was first befriended by a pimp, though at the time she didn’t know what a pimp was. It started off slowly, she said. He started complimenting her on her looks, he gave her his phone number, bought her gifts, and she took rides in his car.

Marces, who was a virgin at 16, didn’t have sex with him until he “needed a favor” months later, she said. She ended up in Hawai’i and found SOS from an outreach program thgough the court system. “I’ve had a long life in this,” Marces said-but she’s since found a steady job and does education work with SOS, and has been on her own for about five years.

Teen-age boys, too, are at risk for being recruited. Their role as “street soldiers” is usually not to work the streets as prostitutes, but to run drugs and money, and to watch the girls, said the HPD officer.

The officer listed other tactics that pimps use to recruit kids. They are invited to all-night ecstasy or drinking parties, where one might get gang-raped. The girl is then threatened that her attackers have a videotape of the party and will show it to her family and her school.

Criminal sexual exploitation does not always mean walking the streets as a prostitute. The Internet is another tool for exploiters, she said.

“We know that perps are in chat rooms,” she said, adding that some have computer software that can turn on and off computer-controlled video cameras, or “webcams.”

Again, CSE is not an overnight process, even in chat rooms or private messages, one-on-one conversations that are not monitored, the officer said.

By gaining information about the child, in the guise of friendship, trust grows between them and they may decide to meet in person. For an adult to go somewhere in the interest of sex with a minor is illegal.

Thousands of students at Kaua’i High School, Waimea High School, Waimea Canyon School and Chiefess Kamakahelei Middle School saw the SOS presentations.

Gail Konishi, the Parent-Community Networking Center facilitator at CKMS, said she has been getting good responses from teachers and students.

But just 10 people showed up to an evening meeting at the school Wednesday night. About half of those were somehow connected to the Department of Education. A grandmother of a 10-year-old, the parents of a boy in middle school, and a mother of a girl at CKMS were among the others.

For more information, please access www.soshawaii.org or contact Sisters Offering Support at P.O. Box 75642, Honolulu, HI 96836. Also, try the Hawai’i Center for Crimes Against Children at http://www.hicac.org, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at http://www.nmcec.com.

If you or someone you know is being exploited, call the police department, or a 24-hour sexual assault hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or the NMCEC hotline at 1-800-843-5678.

A 16 year-old’s true story

Marces was 16 when she and her recently-divorced mother moved to a new town and walked to school every day, when she was first noticed.

“I saw this guy driving a nice car pull up behind me, he started saying ‘you are so cute, you are so pretty,'” she related. She wouldn’t get in his car, at first.

“I started liking the compliments he was giving me,” she said-she started looking for him when she walked to school. He gave her his phone number, and she started calling him. He bought her little trinkets or clothes and having her nails done. Soon, she started riding in his car.

He got her a fake ID and took her out to clubs, and she started making up stories to her mother about her new look and her whereabouts.

One of her school friends told her the guy she was hanging out with was a pimp. “At the time I did not know what a pimp was. I didn’t know what prostitution was, but I saw them, I would never do that,” Marces said.

He told Marces: “I have more respect for women who sell their body than those who give it away.” Soon, he introduced her to his “girls,” who called him daddy and told her she was pretty.

“One day, he came to me and he was looking all sad. He told me he was in love with me and his girls left him … because of me,” Marces said. Then, her boyfriend asked for a favor: Have sex with someone who owed him money.

“How can you ask me to so something like that?” Marces remembered. She was still a virgin. He persuaded her-not because of the money and time that he spent on her, but she thought she loved him, too, she said. She said she believed if she worked on the street, he would take the money and start up a business. Then, her pimp showed her what to do.

“That’s when I turned my first trick, and it felt nasty,” Marces said.

Her second or third day on the street, she got into a car with a man, but she had no idea a second was in the back seat, waiting to hit her on the head with a crowbar. They dragged her into a field where they raped her and stole her money.

She was picked up by a trucker, but given a choice of being dropped off at the police, hospital or hotel room, she chose the hotel, hoping to be protected by her man.

“He said I was stupid for letting the money get stolen. He beat me with a wire hanger until I said I belonged to him and would never leave,” Marces said. He made her take a shower, change her clothes and go back out there, and then someone followed her to make sure she didn’t try to run away.

In time she found out that her pimp’s girls had never left him, it was a trick to get her in.

“We’d rather come home with ‘fresh meat’ that not enough money. We’d catch them going to school, walking, buy them something, clothes, jewelry,” Marces said.

“I felt like it was the only thing I knew how to do,” Marces said. She was so deeply depressed that she tried to kill herself, and started doing drugs and drinking all the time.

They moved from city to city across the United States, Marces said, until she found an offer to work in Hawai’i.

Turned out he was a drug dealer and she ended up working in massage parlors in Waikiki. When they finally got busted and had to go to court, Marces said someone gave her a newsletter from SOS.

“I didn’t know that there were people who could help … When you’re on the streets for so long, you don’t trust anyone,” she said.

But when she met the person whose testimony was written in the newsletter, she realized she wasn’t alone in having the same feelings and experiences. She agreed to volunteer at SOS because she was too embarrassed to be called a “client,” but after five years away from the street she has her life back together and works for SOS and a health food store.

Marces’ final lesson: “It could happen to anyone.”