OAKLAND — Alameda County and San Francisco’s community leaders and elected officials, launched an effort to increase Bay Area awareness about the pervasiveness and myths of child prostitution.
The Bay Area Public Awareness Campaign kicked off the airing of two 60-second public service announcements sponsored by the Alameda Human Relations Commission in partnership with the Alameda County’s Board of Supervisors, Interagency Children’s Policy Council and Youth Uprising.
The PSAs are funded by $225,000 from Oakland’s Measure Y and were created and produced by youth offering “lifesaving options from their peers.”
Oakland Vice Mayor Jean Quan, when she joined the council four years ago, said the issue was “under the surface.”
“This year, we [were heading] toward over 600 arrests of girls under 18,” she said. “We didn’t know [how big the picture was]. We had a woman come in from the Asian [Health] Clinic a year ago who said, ‘We couldn’t figure out why these girls had so many sexually transmitted diseases, and we figured it out that these girls are working as prostitutes.’”
“What’s troubling is that the girls are younger and younger,” said Quan. “The girls that are targeted now are between 13 and 15 years old.”
To compare, older high school girls are less vulnerable. “They know that they have options; they’re stronger,” she said.
One PSA is “Five Girls,” which depicts the tales of four teens in different stages of prostitution. A fifth teen symbolizes “hope, and the option for a better life.” In the second PSA “High Heels,” a young girl is attracted to the streets via the Internet. But she ends up with help providing her with “hope and new direction.”
“The PSAs … [are] a good beginning to spread awareness that these children have a choice. Help and protection is an option,” said Alameda County Supervisor Alice Lai-Bitker in a statement.
Last month, Quan and her council colleagues voted another $225,000 for a safe house for sexually exploited teens.
D.A. Harris: Children Victimized Three Times
“One of the biggest challenges … is educating youth about the fact that they are being exploited and that they are not the ones who are doing the wrong thing,” said San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who specialized in child sexual assaults as a former prosecutor in the Alameda County DA’s office.
“The exploiter is doing the wrong thing. … We seek specifically to protect those youth, not to condemn them.”
Victimized children are victimized three times — by people “in positions of trust,” pimps and the johns. “We will appropriately categorize that child as an exploited youth” instead of being a teenage prostitute. Seeing youth as victims will help prosecute the real criminals — the pimps and johns — as child abusers.
Leland Yee’s AB 3042
The PSA efforts are armed with a 2004 law. Harris, SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation) and then-California Assembly Speaker pro Tempore Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) had jointly authored Assembly Bill 3042. The law protects children from sexual exploitation through prostitution through, for example, greater penalties against johns. Another provision is that treating children as victims would avail them to the Victims of Crime Compensation Fund. Prior to the Harris-Yee inspired law, arrested child prostitutes were viewed as criminals not victims by the justice system.
Veteran columnist has appeared in up to 450,000 households weekly in the SF Independent, Examiner (2000-04) and AsianWeek since 1996. As Editor-in-Chief (2003-07), AsianWeek and Samson received wide recognition from the California Legislature, New American Media, League of Women Voters, GLAAD, Organization of Chinese Americans, SPUR and APA civic groups. Thru the SF Citizens Advisory Committee on Elections, SF Elections Task Force and Chinese American Voters Education Committee, Wong helped boost APA influence from 25,000 in the 1980s to over 50,000 voters by the early 1990s. 
