TIM SWARENS

Swarens: Sold for sex — teens trafficked in Indy

Tim Swarens
tim.swarens@indystar.com
Female escorts in Indianapolis, including “New Asian Girls,” are advertised on Backpage.com.

Marilyn Moores pauses as we pore over a thick stack of court records. The files document the sale of girls, as young as 15, for sex.

“This is evil,” Marion County’s longtime juvenile court judge says.

I read through a case file that underscores the judge’s anguish. It details the ordeal of a 15-year-old girl, diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression, who ran away from her home on Indy’s east side last May.

The child, still in eighth grade, soon crossed paths with a man and a woman who lured her to a hotel room. She was photographed and a classified ad, promoting her availability, was posted in the “Escorts” section of a website.

Then, the men — as many as 11 in one night, according to the case file — began to arrive.

She didn’t want to have sex with these strangers, the girl later told investigators. But she was forced into submission.

Men continued to show up at the hotel room, night after night, for nearly a week, until finally her mother was able to find her and secure her freedom. (The pair accused of selling the girl have been charged with a string of felonies, including trafficking of a minor. They are awaiting trial.)

Stop to think about this ugliness: A child was exploited by adults in the worst of ways. Sold for sex. Against her will. To a string of men, fixated on their own desires, no matter the harm they inflicted.

If rape is defined as forcing a person to have sex against her will, then this girl — this lost and wounded child — was raped 50 times or more in less than a week.

And she is far from the only victim of Indy’s teen sex trade.

Judge Moores has piled atop a table records from 16 similar cases, each heard in her Indianapolis courtroom in the past year, each documenting the prostitution of children.

“This is evil,” she says again.

I do not doubt her assertion.

The girls arrive at the shelter on Indy’s east side bearing the deep scars of the sex trade.

Some carry bruises and choke marks, inflicted by customers and pimps. Some bear Taser marks, punishment for breaking rules set by those who have exploited them. One girl, held in a room for days, collapsed from malnourishment as she walked into the treatment center.

Many suffer from sexually transmitted diseases, passed on by the men who purchased them for sex.

George Hurd, chief operating officer of Behavioral Health for Lutherwood, left, and Megan Jessup, COO of Ascent 121, work with victims of human trafficking on Indy’s Eastside.

Others have been so emotionally and mentally manipulated that they’ve come to believe their abusers are their protectors and champions.

“When they come in, the girls are just exhausted,” Megan Jessup says in a conference room at Lutheran Child & Family Services on the east side. “This lifestyle wreaks havoc on their bodies. They work nonstop, and they have to be in a constant state of awareness for survival.”

Jessup, chief operating officer of a Carmel-based ministry called Ascent 121, helps coordinate teams of therapists, doctors, social workers and educators to deliver comfort and healing in the aftermath of soul-crushing trauma.

In 2014, Ascent 121 partnered with Lutheran Child & Family Service to launch IMPACT, an 11-bed unit where victims of trafficking receive intense treatment. It’s a pilot program, launched with support from the state Department of Child Services, and for now, the only one of its kind in Indiana.

George Hurd, chief operating officer of Behavioral Health at Lutherwood, told me he was initially skeptical about how many girls would need such services. His idea at first was to house trafficking victims in the same units as other residents in Lutherwood’s treatment programs. But the number of girls, and their special needs, forced a change in plans.

In the past year, 36 trafficking victims, most from Central Indiana, were sent to IMPACT for treatment. The program works with girls ages 12 to 18, but Jessup said most are 14 to 16 years old. Ascent 121 assisted another 11 survivors of trafficking in community-based programs.

One of them was a 15-year-old former Ben Davis High School student taken into custody in December at an Indianapolis hotel after an undercover police officer responded to an online advertisement featuring the girl.

Her case illustrates how authorities’ approach to prostitution involving teens has changed in recent years. In the past, the girl likely would have been arrested and sent to the juvenile detention center. Instead, police called Family and Social Services to report her as a victim of human trafficking.

A state case manager, dispatched to interview the girl at the hotel, found that she had run away from home a month earlier, and, under the direction of an adult, had been advertising herself online for two weeks. Two men, whom she paid “gas money,” drove her to the hotel to have sex with a customer, who turned out to be the undercover officer.

The case manager reported the girl as a Child In Need of Services case; she eventually landed in Moores’ court and from there was sent to IMPACT for treatment.

That change in approach — recognizing that these children are victims, and not criminals — is the result of years of hard work by advocates to raise awareness about sexual exploitation and to train police and others in how to spot signs of trafficking.

The victims almost invariably are runaways, in many cases fleeing deep dysfunction and abuse at home. Once a girl is on the streets, it often doesn’t take long for predators, both men and women, to find her. (I asked Judge Moores and others: What about boys who are on the streets? The consensus is that boys almost certainly are victims of trafficking, but the cases, for whatever reason, are not being identified locally.)

“They’re preying on the vulnerability of that age group,” Jessup said. “The girls are looking for food and shelter, and money, and love. They know the kids are looking for those things, and they provide them to build relationships.”

But those relationships soon turn to exploitation.

Over coffee on a cold January morning, Abby Kuzma explains how the business of selling sex works in the digital age.

Kuzma, chief counsel for consumer protection in the Indiana attorney general’s office, helped drive efforts in 2012 to pass state legislation that increased penalties for sex trafficking ahead of the Super Bowl in Indianapolis. Since then, she’s traveled around the state to help educate the public and policymakers about the dangers and the frequency of teen prostitution in Indiana.

In the Marion County court records, a common factor emerged in many of the cases — the girls were trafficked on a website called Backpage.com.

“We started tracking Backpage ads before the Super Bowl,” Kuzma said. “At the time, we saw a few hundred ‘Escort’ ads in the state. A survey by the attorney general’s office found 90,000 ‘Escort’ ads in the last year in Indiana on Backpage.”

In 2011, Indiana’s Greg Zoeller and 45 other attorneys general sent a letter to Backpage demanding that company executives explain their efforts to prevent human trafficking and child exploitation on the site. A year later, under pressure from advertisers and anti-trafficking activists, the site’s owner, Village Voice Media, spun off the company.

Backpage officials now insist that ads are monitored to prevent child trafficking. But the case of a 16-year-old girl from Indy’s northeast side is a horrific example of the damage inflicted when that monitoring fails.

A runaway, the girl told a state caseworker that she stayed with older men whom she met on Facebook. One of those men was a predator.

According to court records, the man forced the girl to post ads on Backpage, forced her to charge men for sex, then took the money she was paid. She was later passed on to other men who also used Backpage to prostitute her.

After an arrest for public intoxication last year, the girl reported that while working as a prostitute, she had been beaten and sexually assaulted, and at one point, a gun was held to her head. A psychological evaluation determined that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

She represents only one commercial sex ad on Backpage. Last week, 75 to 100 “Escort” ads were posted each day on the Indy page of the site.

One of those ads, for a girl said to be 18 years old, offered “fresh meat” for $150 for 30 minutes, $250 for an hour.

A single hour passes quickly. The wounds inflicted in those 60 minutes can last a lifetime.

At Lutherwood, I asked Jessup and Hurd an admittedly naive question: Who buys a 15-year-old girl for sex? Do men specifically want girls that young?

The answer, sadly, is yes, in some cases.

And Hurd noted that some men will pay a premium for underage teens.

In one high-profile example, last year’s shocking downfall of Zionsville resident Jared Fogle, it was revealed that the restaurant pitchman had purchased a 17-year-old prostitute in New York City. He later asked her to help him find a younger child. “The younger the girl, the better” was his request.

But often, Jessup said, men don’t want to know the true age of the girls they are buying. Just as they don’t want to know about the pain their exploitation leaves behind.

“I have worked with abused and neglected children my whole adult life," George Hurd said. “But in the year I have done this (worked with trafficking victims) I have been left with very difficult feelings. To hear what these girls have been through, what they have endured, it’s hard.”

It is hard. And it is ugly. It also is real, and it happens every day to children in our city.

Contact Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter: @tswarens.

To learn more

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children provides resources on how to identify and help victims of sex trafficking at missingkids.com.

To help

To learn how to assist survivors of child sex trafficking in Central Indiana, visit ascent121.org or lutheranfamily.org