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| Ron Hosko, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division, speaks during a news conference at FBI headquarters in Washington, Monday, July 29, 2013, about "Operation Cross Country." The FBI says the operation rescued 105 children who were forced into prostitution in the US and arrested 150 people it described as pimps and others in a series of raids in 76 American cities. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- Declaring child prostitution a "persistent threat" in America,
the FBI said Monday that authorities had rescued 105 young people and
arrested 150 alleged pimps in a three-day sweep in 76 cities.
The
agency said it had been monitoring Backpage.com and other websites as a
prominent online marketplace for sex for sale. Backpage.com said that
it was "very, very pleased" by the raids and that if the website were
shut down to the advertisements, the ads would be pushed to sites that
wouldn't cooperate with law enforcement.
The young people in the roundup, almost all of them girls, ranged in age from 13 to 17.
The
largest numbers of children rescued in the weekend initiative,
Operation Cross Country, were in the San Francisco Bay and Detroit
areas, along with Milwaukee, Denver and New Orleans. The operation was
conducted under the FBI's decade-long Innocence Lost National
Initiative. The latest rescues and arrests were the largest such
enforcement action to date.
"Child
prostitution remains a persistent threat to children across the
country," Ron Hosko, assistant director of the bureau's criminal
investigative division, told a news conference. "We're trying to put
this spotlight on pimps and those who would exploit."
In
Operation Cross Country, federal, state and local authorities
cooperated in an intelligence effort aimed at identifying pimps and
their young victims.
The FBI said the campaign
has resulted in rescuing 2,700 children since 2003. The investigations
and convictions of 1,350 individuals have led to life imprisonment for
10 pimps and the seizure of more than $3.1 million in assets.
In
their efforts to identify child victims, investigators seek help
wherever they can find it - in some cases from adult prostitutes, Hosko
said. He said almost all the victims in sweeps like the one over the
weekend are girls and that the profiles of the victims cut across racial
lines and boundaries of wealth.
Social media are a common denominator in many of the rescues.
"We
are seeing it more and more, kids being put out on the street and being
trafficked because of the Internet," said Detective Angela Irizarry of
the Hayward Police Department not far from San Francisco.
"Many of these
kids come from runaway or group homes and they feel like this is the
only for them to survive on the street."
She
said her department identified three girls, ages 15, 16 and 17 and a
woman seen dropping off two of the girls was arrested as a pimp. One of
the girls was a runaway, another had been missing from a group home for
several months and a third ran away off and on from her family's home,
Irizarry said. The detective said she had not had a chance to speak
with the girls and does not know how long they had been involved in
prostitution, but that one of them "is denying any involvement of the
individuals we had arrested for pimping.
That is typical. Usually these
girls don't immediately give up their pimps."
Irizarry
said a multi-agency, cross-country effort was necessary because local
police departments do not always have the resources to investigate tips
about child sex trafficking.
Last year, five
members of the Underground Gangster Crips contacted teens at school or
through Facebook, DateHookUp.com or other online social networking
sites, enticing the girls to use their looks to earn money through
prostitution.
As for websites, Liz McDougall,
the general counsel for Backpage.com, said that if that site were shut
down to the advertisements in question, the information that can lead to
the rescues would be lost to law enforcement because the ads would be
pushed to "offshore uncooperative websites."
"We
feel very strongly that we're doing the right thing, and we're going to
continue to do the right thing and we congratulate the FBI and
everybody with the task forces involved in the program," said McDougall.
In
earlier sweeps, child prostitution victims have been recovered at major
sporting events - including the NCAA Final Four and Super Bowl, Hosko
said.
In the 1990s, gangs took control of
street prostitution across America; that forced pimps to move girls into
sporting events where security existed, said Dr. Lois Lee, founder and
president of Children of the Night, a nonprofit group that has rescued
10,000 children from prostitution since 1979.
Hosko
said the plight of the young people often goes unreported to
authorities because the children in many instances are alienated from
their families and are no longer in touch.
In Oakland, Calif., police Lt. Kevin Wiley said authorities "always afraid" for the girls.
"They
usually get into this because they are running away from something
else," said Wiley. "You're trying to find out what brought them into
this lifestyle in the first place. It goes way beyond law enforcement to
solve this epidemic."
Pimps operate wherever
vulnerable potential victims can be found. Some are being recruited
right out of foster care facilities, Hosko said.
For
the past decade, the FBI has been attacking the problem in partnership
with a private group, the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children.
John Ryan, the head of the center, called the problem "an escalating threat against America's children."
The
Justice Department has estimated that nearly 450,000 children run away
from home each year and that one-third of teens living on the street
will be lured toward prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home.
Congress
has introduced legislation that would require state law enforcement,
foster care and child welfare programs to identify children lured into
sex trafficking as victims of abuse and neglect eligible for protections
and services.
"In much of the country today,
if a girl is found in the custody of a so-called pimp she is not
considered to be
a victim of abuse, and that's just wrong and defies
common sense," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said during a Senate Finance
Committee hearing last month. Wyden co-sponsored the legislation with
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.
