Program Follows Young Prostitutes to the Suburbs : Vice: Children of the Night is moving its center to the Valley as streetwalkers and runaways leave Hollywood.

Children of the Night, known nationally for helping youthful runaways and streetwalkers escape Hollywood’s seedy boulevards, is closing its Hollywood office and moving to the suburbs, a move that reflects the district’s decline as a center of prostitution.

The organization’s move to Van Nuys in a week follows the migration of prostitution to the suburbs as well as the institutionalization of Children of the Night, started by chance in 1979 by Lois Lee. Then a graduate student in sociology, Lee is now a favorite of talk show hosts plumbing the sensational stories of teen-age prostitution.

Lee began her effort to help wayward youths in Hollywood by giving brief refuge in her apartment to some of the teen-age prostitutes she met while conducting her research. By the start of next year, she will preside over an organization that will have grown to include a 24-bed shelter in a refurbished Van Nuys post office, a $1-million annual budget and a full-time staff of 22 devoted to the shelter, street counseling, administrative duties and a 24-hour telephone hot line.

Since Lee began documenting prostitution for her dissertation more than a decade ago, police and community crackdowns have forced many pimps and prostitutes to move on--to escort services, massage services and to other arenas, including suburban communities in Orange County and the San Fernando Valley.

“I’ve seen the Sunset Boulevard of 400 to 500 prostitutes (a decade ago),” said Los Angeles Police Lt. Pete Durham of the Hollywood Division’s vice squad. “Now I’ll buy you a steak dinner if I can find 20 prostitutes on the boulevard.”

With the opportunity in Van Nuys to set up its first shelter, and fewer youths in need of counseling services in Hollywood, “it makes so little sense to stay here,” Lee said. “In the last two years we haven’t pulled a lot of kids out of Hollywood.”

In 1982, when Children of the Night started leasing space in an office high-rise at Highland and Franklin avenues, it helped 500 youths. Last year, 143 new youngsters went to the Hollywood center, out of the 801 children the program dealt with altogether. The rest were either callers to the hot line or youngsters associated with the program from previous years.

“The pimps are skipping Hollywood altogether,” said Lee, a fast-talking, media-wise 39-year-old whose experiences with Children of the Night were turned into a TV movie five years ago. “They’re going to Orange County, San Diego, Hawaii, Alaska.” And, no, Lee laughs, her staff counselors are not going to Hawaii, but they do hit streets in Orange and San Diego counties and next year plan to branch out to the Bay Area and Washington and Oregon.

Children of the Night will also continue to send counselors to Hollywood, which for all its tawdriness remains something of a magnet for young runaways with stars in their eyes. This week Lee’s staff put a 13-year-old girl on a flight home to Spokane, Wash., from which she had run away last year with friends, escaping, she said, a sexually abusive stepfather.

The girl had arrived in Hollywood at the age of 12 “because she wanted to be a star,” as another youngster in Lee’s office explained, and wound up living with a man in exchange for sex. Apparently tired of her, the man called Children of the Night.

Police statistics trace a dramatic drop in prostitution during the 1980s as officers, responding to community complaints, stepped up patrols and arrests in Hollywood. In the first seven months of this year, Los Angeles police say the Hollywood Division made 1,033 prostitution arrests of both males and females, compared to slightly more than double that during the same period in 1983.

In the meantime, some of the offenders have turned up in suburban areas where they had been rarely seen before. “We had a big prostitution problem last summer for the first time ever in this city,” said Sgt. Tom Boylan of the Costa Mesa Police Department. “One reason is there’s a lot of money to be made out here and police in Hollywood are cracking down, so girls found it easier to come out here for a while. They move around a lot.”

In Orange County, police say prostitutes started showing up in strength on Harbor Boulevard, a commercial strip that runs from Costa Mesa to La Habra, after the push to clean up Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympics. A few years later, the problem had become so pronounced that the FBI was investigating it, and today police say the stepped-up enforcement has driven streetwalkers from many Orange County communities.

Also contributing to a suburban migration of prostitution, Lee suggested, is urban violence. “With the gangs moving into Hollywood, it makes it very difficult. You don’t want to put girls on the street where they’re going to be beaten up and raped and robbed.”

Children of the Night’s Van Nuys shelter, scheduled to open around Christmas in a renovated post office purchased for $899,000 in cash, realizes Lee’s long-held dream that the program have a shelter of its own. Finding bed space is not easy, especially for young hustlers.

Indeed, when Lee called around looking for a place to send the 13-year-old for the night, she found no takers.

Lee insists the move to Van Nuys is not an abandonment of Hollywood but an expansion to a building where 11- to 17-year-old boys and girls who are sexually abused, in prostitution or pornography can return to normal lives in a quieter, less tempting setting.

Van Nuys, a community with its own prostitution problem, seems to have no qualms about the arrival of Children of the Night, which is renting a house there for its operation until the shelter is ready. “People have really welcomed us in the area. I’ve been invited to join the Chamber of Commerce,” Lee said.

In the new facility, the staff will not only house and feed up to 24 youngsters, it will also provide counseling and a classroom, where high school equivalency instruction will be offered, and the staff will man its 24-hour hot line and do administrative work.

What’s more, the organization in October will operate a new toll-free number in California and is expanding its emergency transportation program for youngsters in need of immediate help.

“We were poor for so long,” says Lee. She eschews government funding--”I want flexibility”--and instead operates on private donations from sources ranging from heavy metal groups to the Lawrence Welk Foundation.