Oakland struggles to protect children from sex trafficking

Trina describes herself as the kind of young woman who has always attracted older men.

“Anywhere I would go,” she said, “I was just a magnet for creeps.”

She was diagnosed with precocious puberty at 5 and said her body’s accelerated development accounts for the older men in her life: “Always, older men were trying to talk to me because I looked older.”

Born the middle child of five to a mother who struggled to make ends meet with a government wage, Trina was never going to have an easy time growing up in Sacramento, Calif. She was raped repeatedly between the ages of 4 and 7 by a relative. When the fights with her mother started, Trina started running away.

It was just the beginning of a too-common tale of childhood abuse leading young girls into a forced life of prostitution, particularly in Oakland, which is recognized as the West Coast hub of human trafficking, including sexual exploitation. Experts estimate that 50 to 100 girls, many of them underage, line the city’s International Boulevard each night.

Children who, like Trina, suffer from abusive relationships early in life are often unable to recognize or engage in healthy relationship behaviors and are at higher risk of entering violent or exploitative relationships, according to a report by the WestCoast Children’s Clinic.

But what could be an effective tool to save more children in Oakland from exploitation is on hold for lack of funds.

Vanessa Scott — a survivor of abuse and the head of Love Never Fails, a nonprofit aimed at ending sex trafficking of children — hopes to reach kids before an abusive childhood leads to exploitation. With the Love Don’t Hurt program, Scott aims to teach all 2,360 seventh graders in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) how to recognize and cope with abuse and make them less vulnerable to exploitative relationships.

The district is working to “get this information through our girls' groups that are in middle schools and high schools,” said Annette Oropeza, a regional mental health program manager for OUSD, who believes prevention may be the solution. “Just kind of build that into girls’ self-esteem … so that we’re working on prevention from the inside out.”

The school district needs around $40,000 to bring the program to all Oakland Unified schools. In a state notorious for its budget crises and in a chronically underfunded city, the district has raised about $10,000 through private donations, but has been unable to identify a government grant that would cover the full cost of the program. With a quarter of the needed funding in hand, OUSD’s behavioral studies coordinator, Barbara McClung, has hopes for a staggered rollout in January.  

While administrators are “very optimistic,” funding the program will be a delicate procedure. The $10,000 in hand is about half of what is needed for the first phase: orientation for all students and enacting workshops in about half of Oakland’s 15 middle schools. McClung hopes to secure a matching donor for the remainder of the first round.

From there, she hopes that a proven track record and a groundswell of interest will help secure enough funding to launch the program in the remainder of the city's schools.

Once enacted, Love Don’t Hurt will “complete our continuum of services to be able to do the prevention work” in Oakland schools, McClung said.  

Trina (who, because of the stigma associated with her history and fears for her safety, agreed to share her story under the condition that her name be changed) never had access to a program like Love Don’t Hurt. If she had?

“I would have been able to look at what was happening, and I would have been able to get around it,” she said. “I would have been able to recognize what was happening and walk away.”

At 13 she was kidnapped and raped for three days by a group of men. At 14 she was abducted by a man who terrorized her and forced her into prostitution for three weeks.

On her return from a stint at a treatment camp for at-risk youth, Trina “wanted to do better.” She completed her community service in record time and started a nonprofit job. Things with her mom improved.

Weeks later, while goofing around with a friend on a phone chat line for local singles, she met him.

“He told me everything I wanted to hear, and I was just playing with him,” she recalled. Older men had gotten her into trouble before, so she was wary, but she held onto his number just in case.

A few weeks later Trina’s eldest brother beat her so hard that a neighbor called the cops. Her mom blamed her for the argument. Feeling freshly betrayed by her family and craving escape, she called her phone-chat suitor. He picked her up days later and brought her to Oakland.

At first, things were OK.

“I was happy … The man was older, and I thought he was interested in me,” she said.

He bought her a cell phone and took her shopping. She suspected he might be a pimp, but pushed her fears aside.

Trina’s exploitation started soon after she arrived in Oakland. At first she went out only on online calls worth $300 and up. Shifts on International Boulevard were rare. After a month in jail on a prostitution charge, she was sent back to Sacramento with an ankle monitor for two months.

“My pimp started getting restless,” she recalled. “He told me, ‘I need you back. You’re skipping your second month of ankle monitor and coming back here.’”

A few days later he was in Sacramento to cut off the ankle monitor and drive her back to Oakland, where things worsened for Trina. The previous life of online-only, $300-or-more calls looked relatively cushy as her pimp forced her to start working long shifts on International. Monday through Sunday, work started at 4 or 5 a.m., “when all the big spenders are out. The doctors and lawyers.” Three shifts a day spent hopping in and out of men’s cars, with breaks between shifts, made for a grueling work schedule that ran from the predawn hours to midnight.

Then there was the violence.

“When I got back, that’s when he first started hitting me,” Trina said.

She suffered multiple broken bones, dislocated shoulders and black eyes at the hands of her pimp. He often tried to choke her and once beat her so hard that she passed out on the street. The day before her 16th birthday, he dropped off the map with $1,200 — all of Trina’s savings. She thought he might be dead. When he came back a day and a half later, he was high on crack cocaine and had spent all of her money.

Johns had been generous when Trina told them it was her birthday. When she handed over the $900 she had earned since his disappearance, “his eyes lit up like I had never seen before.”

He left for another day to smoke more crack.

One night he tied her to a couch, gagged her and paced around the living room furiously, asking her why he shouldn’t kill her, while holding a butcher knife to her wrist. Trina thanks God for getting her through that night — during which neither she nor her exploiter slept.

Still, she stayed.

“I always said, ‘Yes, Daddy, no, Daddy’” whenever asking for something as simple as a break or to use the restroom, she recalled. Hesitating, she added, “I would tell him I loved him, but I didn’t love him. I tried to make the best of what I had.”

Trina was arrested at least four times while working in Oakland. She recalled arresting officers treating her with condescension and contempt. Even when well under the legal age of sexual consent, victims of commercial sexual exploitation were often treated and charged as adults, and their exploitative situations were often ignored. Victims of commercial sexual exploitation are regarded not as victims but as perpetrators, said OUSD's Oropeza. She said that shifting this awareness is crucial to solving the problem of forced childhood prostitution.

It is starting to happen.

Oropeza said community members and organizations have realized, “Wait a minute, these young women are not the criminals. They are the victims.”

The most successful ballot initiative in California history, Proposition 35, was voted into law in 2012. The law requires stricter sentences for sex traffickers and mandates that law enforcement receive training about sex trafficking victims. Alameda County District Attorney Nancy E. O’Malley noted that over the past year or two, the perception of young prostitutes is turning around. Now when she hears from the community, she said, “It’s not ‘Get these kids off my street’ like it used to be. Now it’s ‘We have a sexually exploited youth out here, please send someone who can do something about it.’”

Still, getting victims off the street is difficult. Even when they’re acknowledged as victims, children picked up off International Boulevard face serious obstacles before they can leave the streets and move on with their lives. Scott of Love Never Fails also spends weekends doing outreach missions up and down the boulevard.

“There’s so much red tape” when getting these young women off the streets, she said. “You have to prove that the person is a minor. The minor has to be willing to say they are a minor, and they have to be willing to trust you enough to say they want to leave. Then they have to be able to stand with you while we wait for police to arrive. And then we need a place to send them. And, oftentimes, where kids end up being sent to is an abusive home.”

Victims are usually sent back through the legal system, sometimes to jail, before they can start rehabilitation.

And victims of sexual exploitation constitute a difficult population to serve. O’Malley said it’s a problem that often gets ignored.

“When we try to shove it in the corner or put it under the rug, or people don’t want to admit that kids are being sexually exploited, then they don’t have to do anything about it,” O’Malley said. “They don’t have to get involved or change it.”

Perhaps this is why none of Trina’s neighbors responded to the missing-person fliers with her face on them. She still doesn’t know who reported her missing.

“The families where I lived, maybe they were scared of him, but nobody ever dropped anonymous tips like ‘Oh, this little girl is here,’” she said.

And on the streets, would anyone report a young prostitute missing, on the chance that they recognized her from the posters?

“When it’s a girl that’s prostituting, they don’t care,” she said. “They figure, ‘Oh, she’s just a prostitute.’”

The pimp’s grip on Trina was strong.

“He owned me,” she said.

Around this time, he started talking about moving her to the country to, in Trina’s words, “keep it all to himself.” When he thought she might leave him for another pimp, he would beat her viciously.

“He wouldn’t let me leave him,” she said. “He would tell me he ‘raised me up from a pup,’” so she belonged to him. “I was what they (call) his ‘bottom bitch.’”

When he was arrested for an outstanding warrant, Trina knew she had to get out or she might not live to her 18th birthday. Around this time, she met a john with whom she immediately hit it off. He listened raptly while she told him her life story and seemed to take pity on her.

“He would always tell me, ‘I want to get you away from here, and I don’t want you to be here anymore,’” Trina recalled, adding that she persuaded him to let her move in with him.

While she would still work for her exploiter occasionally, his spell over her had broken.

“He knew something was wrong because I stopped calling him Daddy,” she recalled.

In desperation, he would threaten Trina’s life. He once waited outside her new home for nearly three hours with a gun. Another time, he faked his own suicide and prompted their mutual friends to notify Trina of his death. He still calls her cell phone every few months, begging her to come back.

These days, life is different for Trina.

At 19, she is engaged. She holds down a food service job and has two new Maltese poodle mixes. Looking back, she isn’t sure how she survived. Prostitution has led her to more brushes with death than she can count.

“It’s hard,” she said. “Harder than working a 9-to-5 job … Every day you go out there, you don’t know what’s going to happen. It amazes me that I’m alive.”

She now often volunteers, sharing her experience with young women in hopes that they’ll avoid the terror and desperation in her recent past. Is it hard to talk about her past?

“It’s not difficult for me anymore,” she said. “My life is so different than it was before. It’s just kind of like a nightmare that I had, that I woke up from.”