The Nation: Youth for Sale on the Streets

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The committee heard from a Minneapolis police officer who had come to Manhattan to coax young Midwest prostitutes to return to their parents or to "safe houses," where they would be protected from their pimps. The officer had failed—largely because publicity about his visit took the girls temporarily off the streets—but he and a few of his previously liberated young streetwalkers told harrowing stories. Two examples:

KAREN, 14, met a pimp in downtown Minneapolis one day at 10 a.m. He bought her breakfast and took her to an apartment and bedded her. Next day she quarreled with her parents over having stayed out most of the night, so she ran off to see her new friend. He said she would have to work the street to stay with him and steal money from her customers so she could get their bus fare to Chicago. Once there, she earned another $800 in three weeks. The two moved on to Manhattan, where she picked up men around luxury hotels, robbing them when she could. Sick of the life after six weeks, she tried to leave her pimp, but he broke her jaw. After hospitalization, she was forced back on the streets by him with her jaw wired shut. When an attempt to kill herself failed, she phoned her parents and fled New York. In ten weeks she had provided her pimp with some $4,000.

CLARE, 16, having run away from home, met a pimp along Minneapolis' Hennepin Avenue and moved in with him. He persuaded her to hit the streets. "He wouldn't let me come into the house unless I brought him $150 a day," she recalled. After she was arrested for prostitution, she and her pimp flew to New York, where she worked for 16 months. She collected at least $100,000, of which she saved only $800. She was arrested 42 times for prostitution and once for grand larceny ("It was a trick who wanted his money back") but never served a day in jail. When she tried to return home, the pimp beat her so badly that she was hospitalized.

The committee also heard from Father Bruce Ritter, a Franciscan priest who founded and runs a private New York City shelter for runaways. He told of the 14-year-old boy who had been held prisoner for six weeks in a Times Square hotel by a pimp, who chased the fleeing boy right into Ritter's center, trying to maim the youngster with a broken bottle.

As a result of the hearings, the New York legislature will consider a bill requiring judges to sentence all convicted pimps, "Johns" and their prostitutes to the minimum jail sentences allowed under existing state laws. Chicago police are cracking down on pimps, charging them with the felony crimes of "soliciting for a juvenile prostitute" and "juvenile pimping." By expanding the Mann Act to apply to boys as well as girls, Congress last month made it easier to combat the transporting of young males across state lines for immoral purposes—a practice in which organized crime is increasingly involved.

But there are no simple answers or ready remedies. Ways need to be found to lure runaways into safe havens where they can be cared for and counseled. Certainly the penalties for those adults who exploit the young for sex must be stiffened—and uniformly enforced.