Children of the Night Find Shelter : Van Nuys: The $2-million facility still needs a state license. Then young prostitutes can move in and stay for 60 days while they try to change their lives.

No, Lois Lee is carefully explaining in an interview at her new $2-million shelter for teen-age prostitutes, she did not choose to open the shelter in the San Fernando Valley because she thinks that it is a snake pit of child prostitution and predatory pimps.

The Valley was chosen as the site of the Children of the Night shelter because the business of teen-age prostitution has changed, requiring Lee’s organization to change as well.

“The prostitution circuit used to hit the major cities,” said Lee, relaxing inside the 24-bed shelter in the historic Van Nuys Post Office building. “The areas they’re in now are the suburbs” and cities not usually thought to have red-light districts.

Places such as Orange County, Monterey, Tacoma, Spokane and Honolulu.

“Today, Honolulu is like Hollywood was in the ‘70s,” Lee said.

It made no sense to remain in Hollywood, where the organization got its start 13 years ago when Lee began taking desperate girls off the street and into her home, eventually becoming one of the most recognizable people in the child rescue movement.

In addition, she said, Hollywood was becoming even more dangerous. “What precipitated the move,” Lee, 41, said in the interview Thursday inside the airy, lushly designed shelter, “was a drive-by shooting. The bullet came flying through the window and just missed one of the staff members.”

Lee’s involvement with teen-agers in trouble started in 1975 when she began research on prostitution in the Hollywood area for her college dissertation in sociology. Ironically, she started as a self-described radical committed to the decriminalization of prostitution.

What she found on the streets changed her attitude, however, driving her to begin working with the youngest and most helpless of the girls, and then boys, on the streets. Between 1979 and 1981, she took 250 of them into her two-bedroom Beverly Hills duplex.

“The kids slept in the living room,” she said.

As her fame grew, she received the Volunteer Action Award from then-President Ronald Reagan and was the subject of a 1985 television movie called “Children of the Night.”

Although Children of the Night has changed over the years--she now has 26 staff members and a $1-million annual budget--the goal has remained the same: Get the teen-agers off the streets. Then get them back into society.

Lee’s goal has long been to open a shelter where she and her staff could work with the teen-agers in a protected care facility. The post office building was purchased in 1989 for $899,000, with an expectation that it would open a year later. Licensing delays, however, prevented that.

Lee said she still needs a community care license from the state, expected shortly, before she can bring the young prostitutes, ranging in age from 11 to 17, into the shelter.

More than $1 million was spent renovating the building and the quality of construction at the new shelter is uncompromising. The entry is marble, and each of the 12 bedrooms has its own tiled bathroom. The architect for the project had recommended something less expensive but Lee’s volunteer decorator refused.

The shelter, both airy and warm, has large windows and high ceilings that make it reminiscent of a small art gallery. Several sculptures are being placed around the outside. A large black wall with a fountain set into it is in the back of the property and features an inscribed dedication to Lee’s contributors and supporters.

Those admitted to the shelter will be allowed to stay 60 days while they prepare to re-enter society.

Lee is different from many in the helping fields because she is not a great believer in psychotherapy for treating the problems that arise from physical and sexual abuse.

“Therapy is asking, ‘How do you feel about Daddy crawling all over you?’ ” she said. Many of her clients don’t respond to that.

Counselors are on hand at the shelter to talk to the girls and boys, but the heart of Lee’s program is a rigorous schedule of exercise, schoolwork and learning to focus on things outside themselves.

Each night, as part of the shelter schedule, residents will be required to watch the news for an hour.

“I don’t believe we can treat these kids by training them to be helpless,” she said. By getting them to focus on other people’s problems, the clients learn to put their own pain in perspective and get on with their lives.

Lee claims that her methods have kept 80% of the young people she has helped from returning to the streets. Last year, 926 boys and girls called her hot line for help. About a third were sent to other shelters; some were referred to counseling. The hot line generated 27 cases that resulted in the filing of child abuse reports. Three callers were rescued from pimps.

Although Lee is devoted to Children of the Night, several other nonprofit agencies approached her in recent years to see if she might be willing to leave. Her board of directors recently raised her yearly salary from $80,000 to $120,000 to make sure that she stays.

Lee is a formidable fund-raiser. Last year, she raised $1.6 million. Before opening the new shelter, she set aside $1 million, enough to operate it for a year.

Lee has been particularly successful in raising funds from the music industry. Several heavy metal groups hold a benefit concert each year for Children of the Night. Singer Richard Marx recorded a song several years ago called “Children of the Night” and donated the proceeds to the organization.

The song has raised $250,000 so far, Lee said.

To recognize the music world’s help in keeping the organization going, Lee is planning a ceremony at the shelter.

Another organization that has been helpful to Children of the Night is Playboy Enterprises Inc., which has allowed the group use of its mansion. A Playboy executive also serves on the nonprofit agency’s board.

Critics argue that it is a bad symbol for Lee to be involved with a corporation that publishes a magazine selling sex.

“I don’t have a problem with anyone giving us money,” she said. “I work with teen-age prostitutes. I don’t think I have a duty to investigate who gives me money.”

Working so long with such an abused population has had an inevitable impact on Lee. She readily admits that she is distrustful of men. It is men, after all, Lee said, who inflict most of the abuse, first as parents and then as customers of the underage hookers.

“I learned a long time ago that men who pay for sex come from every walk of life,” Lee said. “Police, movie stars, everybody.

“We’re very careful of our male volunteers,” she said. She hasn’t had any problems with volunteers since 1982, when two boys said volunteers had sex with them. Lee reported the abusers to police and they were convicted.

Lee’s caution carries over into her own family. She has a child, but refuses to say how old or identify its gender. When she and her husband, Michael, a real estate investor, left the child with a sitter when it was a baby, Lee marked the diaper so that she could tell if it had been tampered with when she returned.

Now that the child is older, “I like to know where my child is at all times. I don’t know if I’d ever send my kid to an overnight camp.”

She admits that she can be no fun at social gatherings, where she puts the fear of God into other couples by, for instance, warning them not to put their child’s voice on the answering machine. She said pedophiles call random numbers to find those voices, then molest the children.

“My husband kicks me under the table and says, ‘You’re scaring people,’ ” she said.

Lee believes that her attitudes are perfectly justified. Despite all the public concern about family values, she said she hasn’t seen any evidence that things are changing on the street. She said the problem with teen-age prostitution peaked about five years ago and has remained steady since then.

Many of the teen-age prostitutes come from broken families. “Broken families is a big issue,” she said.

Despite the fact that the problem remains, Lee admits now that her dream of opening a shelter for teen-age prostitutes has been realized, she is thinking about moving on.

“In a year, I want to take a look at the child abuse hot line,” she said. At the present time, she said, only 50% of the calls are investigated.

“Every child should be able to call a number and get picked up,” she said.