Teen sex trade victims find help, housing scarce in Texas
Crisis mounting in state’s efforts to shelter young girls
For three months in the fall of 2016, Lena was one of the youngest inmates in the Harris County Jail.
The 17-year-old lived with two dozen women in a single room. She slept on a metal bunk and wore an oversized orange jumpsuit every day. Yet compared to what she’d endured, it didn’t seem half bad.
Lena had felt trapped her whole life. At home, by an abusive adoptive mother. At school, where she wore turtlenecks and baggy clothes to hide her bruises. In one facility for foster kids after another after her mother lost custody of her. And by a series of pimps who sold her for sex after she ran away.
It was no surprise to Lena when she ended up behind bars for offering an undercover police officer oral sex in exchange for money.
“I always wanted older men’s attention … I got addicted to it,” Lena said.
“And the only way I knew how to get it was to lay on my back.”
No one wanted Lena in jail — not the Houston police who arrested her, not the district attorney who pursued the case. In their eyes, she was not a prostitute; she was a child who had been sexually exploited and needed protection and care.
Lena and teenage victims like her end up in jail for one simple reason: There’s nowhere else for them to go.
Texas has just one facility devoted to child sextrafficking victims, called Freedom Place in Spring. It can only afford to treat 20 girls at any given time.
So authorities in Harris County and other big Texas counties who encounter kids like Lena take a gamble they call “arrest and recovery”: arrest them to get them off the street and drop the charges later.
“What options do we have with these girls?” asked Ana Martinez, a prosecutor in Harris County who specializes in trafficking cases. “If I dismiss her case, she’s just walking on the street that night.”
Pimped out
Lena was 13 when she ran away from her first residential treatment center outside Houston. She was restless. She’d been there for nearly a year with no sign of a more stable solution.
Lena bolted from the front lawn of her Houston middle school one morning. Minutes later, as she walked down the street, she ran into a friendly-looking stranger. He promised to take care of her if she made him a little money.
She’d had sex before, and had been sexually abused, a factor that makes kids far more likely to fall victim to pimps. He promised her Ecstasy so she could focus on something else while she was having sex with johns.
“Every time a man told me, ‘I love you, I’m gonna take care of you,’ I listened,” Lena said. “I did everything they wanted me to do.”
Lena stayed in the man’s apartment in Greenspoint along with a few other women he also pimped out. One room was reserved for having sex with clients, whom the pimp solicited from truck stops and convenience stores. Lena said she made $100 or $150 for every trick. She gave all her money to the pimp.
Over the next three years, Lena would have as many pimps. She’d stay with them for a few weeks or months, sometimes moving from motel to motel. Then she’d get scared or decide it was time to move, and return to foster care — then run away again.
Sometimes she felt free and wanted and independent. Other times, she felt miserable.
Police responded to an internet post advertising sex with her and found her in a motel room. They arrested her pimp at the motel next door.
With Lena’s help, police ultimately charged two people with forcing a child into prostitution. But the question remained: What to do with Lena?
Police knew she was a long-term foster kid and a chronic runaway. A medical examination revealed she was pregnant and had three sexually transmitted diseases. She would need months of specialized psychological and medical care.
But she couldn’t get any of it if she didn’t stay put.
So Houston police charged the pregnant, 16-year-old sex-trafficking victim with a crime and sent her to juvenile detention.
No place for teens
Sex-trafficking experts and victims’ advocates agree that Lena didn’t belong behind bars.
“We’re looking at this population in a different way,” said Angela Goodwin, a top official at Texas’ child welfare agency, the Department of Family and Protective Services. “We don’t want to lock them up.”
But across the state, the agency is facing a crisis when it comes to finding beds for kids like Lena.
Texas relies on private contractors to build and run treatment facilities for kids — and pays them very little money to do so. Those companies are then left to operate the facilities at a very low cost or raise money through donations.
The average cost of housing a high-needs child in a residential treatment center in Texas is about $300 each day. Right now, the state will only pay $260. Running a facility that is licensed to treat sex-trafficking victims is even more expensive; Texas law requires additional services, but the state doesn’t pay for them.
Texas child welfare officials have told the Legislature it will take an additional $200 million to pay the full cost of housing children in the state’s care. So far, state lawmakers have not committed to paying for any of it.
Gov. Greg Abbott recently announced that $8 million in federal grant money will soon become available to help some of the state’s most troubled long-term foster kids. Officials in his office say they also have millions of dollars in federal criminal justice money that organizations that serve child victims of sexual exploitation can apply for,They said they still don’t know how much of that they will distribute.
A year ago, Abbott’s office also formed a child sex-trafficking unit that will open offices in regions across Texas.
The unit, designed to help with victim recovery, has a two-year budget of about $6 million in state money to distribute to organizations that provide victims’ services.
But none of those initiatives solve the capacity problem.
For now, the fact remains: While so many child sex-trafficking victims have some connection to the Texas child welfare system, that system has almost no resources to help them. Only the criminal justice system does — and sparingly.
In Harris County, for example, one innovative diversion court pays to house and care for juvenile trafficking victims. It has the funds to help about two dozen kids at any time, and a long waiting list.
Angela Ellis, the judge who presides over the court, struggles with the fact that kids can only benefit from her program if they’re charged with a crime and locked up.
“How do you convince a kid that they’re a victim when they’re in a jumpsuit and they’re shackled?” she asked.
A ‘real life’?
Lena was released from juvenile detention just a few weeks before giving birth to a baby boy. She was sent to a residential treatment center outside of Houston.
Lena still had a lot of trauma to deal with, but she was excited to be a mother. Among the countless pictures she posted on Facebook over the past four years, the ones with her baby in the hospital are the few in which she’s smiling.
But soon after she delivered her son, the state took custody of him. Out of grief and frustration, Lena ran.
“I completely gave up,” she said. “My mind was still stuck in the streets. All I knew was the streets.”
When police arrested her for prostitution a few months later, in the fall of 2016, she had nothing to her name but $50 cash and the crop top and jeans she was wearing.
She was now 17 — old enough to be charged as an adult.
At first, Lena was devastated. But her three-month stint at the Harris County Jail gave her time to think and a chance to participate in a county program for women facing prostitution charges.
Kathy Griffin, the program’s director, said she was amazed at how much progress Lena made. Of all of the young girls she’d met through the program, she said, Lena had one of the best chances of making it.
“She knows she’s got a shot at having a real life,” Griffin said.
But there was a lingering question in Griffin’s mind, one that had plagued Lena’s care from the beginning: Where would she go next?
Lena was still 17, still in the state’s care, and with no place to go. No foster family or residential treatment center had a bed for her. Her caseworker was going to drive her from jail to a 24-hour intake center for foster kids in west Houston, where she’d spend the night on a cot.
She had stayed at that intake center before, though, and she’d run away from it before.
Lena vowed things would be different this time. She promised she would stay put until she turned 18, just a few weeks away. She had a plan. She wanted to finish high school, go to Prairie View A&M University and study forensic science.
“You’ve got to want to change,” Lena said as she left the Harris County Jail on a rainy Friday afternoon. “The test starts when you walk outside. And this is my test.”
Lena’s caseworker took her to Church’s Chicken for dinner, then to the intake center. When they arrived, Lena went to take a shower and her caseworker left.
At 9:50 p.m., Lena walked out. Griffin and her caseworker haven’t heard from her since.
Finding missing teens
Even after Lena ran away, state caseworkers and investigators didn’t appear to make much effort to find her.
No one seemed to notice Lena’s Facebook page, where she left a string of clues. Selfies in hotel rooms. Comments that named roads and neighborhoods. She even invited friends to come see her dance at a strip club in Houston, including the time of the show and the name of the club.
Organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children are experts at analyzing kids’ online presence to help locate them. But Lena was never reported to the center after she went missing — a violation of federal law.
State officials say they reported 82 percent of all foster care runaways to the center in the last fiscal year. But investigators didn’t properly record data for about half of all kids who ran away during that time, according to a spokesman for the Department of Family and Protective Services, so there is no way to confirm the percentage is actually that high.
In late December 2016, Lena turned 18 and aged out of foster care. She posted a selfie on Facebook wearing an elegant white dress, with blown-out hair and shiny red fingernails.
Griffin still hopes that one day, she’ll hear from her.
“What options do we have with these girls? If I dismiss her case, she’s just walking on the street that night.” Ana Martinez, Harris County prosecutor who specializes in trafficking cases