Children of Night Gets Girls Off the Street, Back Home

Christina was a prostitute at 12, a mother at 15 and a heroin addict at 16. Now, almost 8 years after she left her house following a fight with her father, she’s finally going home. This time, she says, it’s for good.

Christina is one of the success stories of Children of the Night, a Los Angeles-based project that tries to get young prostitutes off the streets. The organization, founded in 1979 by sociologist Dr. Lois Lee, has served almost 5,000 youngsters, getting 80% of them off the streets and back home.

Organization volunteers work Harbor and Beach boulevards in Orange County because they have become regular stops on the West Coast circuit for prostitutes. The streets, Lee says, are full of young girls like Christina.

Christina (not her real name) knows the streets of Orange County well. It was in Santa Ana where she was last arrested for prostitution, and it was in the Orange County Jail where she decided she had had enough. In a telephone interview just hours before catching a plane back to Seattle, she told her story:

“I was adopted when I was real young,” she begins. “And one day my dad came home drunk and he was mad at me. He said, ‘Since you don’t want to follow my rules I’ll tell you you are adopted and you can find your own parents.’ I was really hurt by that. I was 12, you know. I got hurt real easy. (So) I went to downtown Seattle and met a girl, and from there it was history.”

Scared and alone, Christina latched on to the first person who was nice to her. It turned out to be a pimp named Gerald, the first of what would become a long line of pimps and protectors.

“So I meet Gerald, and Gerald pretty much says, ‘Baby, there is a better way, and if you come with me I’ll show you.’ I was looking for stability, and I figured he would be the person.”

Within weeks, Christina was converted from innocent sixth-grader to prostitute. She immediately went on the circuit with Gerald, driving to Seattle, Tacoma, Wash., Portland, Ore., and Spokane, Wash.

Everything she made went to Gerald. In turn, Gerald bought her food and clothes, paid for their motel rooms and bought her cigarettes.

Take It All

“The pimps don’t let you have nothing,” she said. “They take it all. Oh, maybe some cigarette money. I was making $700 on an average night, anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500 on a good night. But they take it all. You don’t give it to them and you’ve got trouble.”

She also learned, quickly, several unbending rules held by the pimps: no drugs, and keep yourself clean. A drug habit can be costly, and pimps don’t want their girls spending his money on drugs, she said.

As for fear of AIDS, Christina said the circuit girls always use condoms. The pimps see to that.

“They don’t want you getting sick,” she said. “But hell, you can only take so many precautions. You can get it anywhere. It doesn’t have to be a prostitute or a trick.”

In the beginning, she said, she “wasn’t really scared because I didn’t have any bad dates. In my later years I became hard. . . . Things have happened so many times to me. It doesn’t faze me anymore. You have bad dates where someone tries to get their money back or rapes you or hits you. That happens a lot, especially in California.

Jungle Out There

“It’s a jungle out there. It can take your life. Cynthia--she was a friend--she was killed, and another girlfriend was stabbed in Portland. A man chopped Ceci’s head off for taking his briefcase.”

In 1986, Gerald went to prison and, Christina said, she spent 9 months in a youth authority home near Seattle. The partnership broke up, but soon she was back on the streets.

“I got out and met a man named Nate, who was another pimp. I met him in Oregon. Nate took me to San Francisco and Anaheim and Santa Ana, Hawaii, Houston, San Diego and Denver and Colorado Springs and Albuquerque. This is the circuit here in California. We’d keep moving.”

“We’d hit the highway. I didn’t decide anything. I went where he wanted to go and I liked it. Pimps collaborate on where they think it might be going on . . . places that attract money or tourists. I just went where he told me to go.”

Christina said Orange County was on the circuit “because it’s full of people that have plenty of money. At the beginning it was pretty easy, but at the end, just recently, the Santa Ana police got real hard on us.”

Quit Prostitution

Christina then became pregnant for the first time and had her first child. She quit prostitution just long enough to drop the baby off with her parents in Seattle and return. Last July she gave birth to her second child. That one too was dropped off with her parents.

The fathers of both children were her pimps, she said.

Christina said she left Nate 9 months ago and “I’ve been through about four (pimps) since then.” She said it is common for girls to change pimps.

“It’s a law of the game,” she said. “If a woman leaves, she has to go to another pimp. You give him a choosing fee and you go with him. The fee is anywhere from $500, tops $1,000. First of all you look for a pimp that doesn’t do drugs with your money and one who will buy you clothes and make you look good, someone who looks to have something in life.”

“The pimps, they don’t care if you leave. They just say, ‘Man, we don’t chase them, we replace them.’ ”

Arrested in Crackdown

Christina was arrested in a recent Santa Ana crackdown on prostitution. She spent 13 days in the women’s jail and decided she would go home. When she was released last week, she called a 24-hour hot line operated by Children of the Night and was picked up and taken to the group’s offices in Los Angeles.

“There was a pimp who was looking for me. I didn’t want to see him,” she said.

“I’m fed up; I’m through. Eight years is plenty to realize that there is a better way. I’m going back to Seattle tonight.