The victims deserve better: What's being done about child prostitution?

Whenever I fly to Las Vegas on a Friday, usually from Bob Hope airport in Burbank, there usually are women who are getting on the same flight dressed in a manner that indicates that either they are commuting to work or Halloween is near, and it's not always October.

On one flight, purely as a result of "accidental" eavesdropping, I confirmed what my business partners had already guessed: the women were, indeed, commuting to work. These women -- and I'm not saying this has been scientifically studied, at least not by me -- are prostitutes. At least for the weekend. At least in Vegas where, though not legal, prostitution is overtly tolerated and encouraged.

A small amount of investigation (what I won't do for my readers) revealed that some of these women are California college students during the week and some are dancers in the numerous strip clubs in Vegas. Not all of them have sex for money, but a good number of them do. The fact that they apparently make that choice themselves gives some of my male friends the notion that prostitution is a "victimless crime."

If anyone needed more than former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's recent fall to show that claim to be false, the Oakland Tribune provided it in a series by Kamika Dunlap and Barbara Grady that ran in late April and illustrates how children live nearly as slaves in the sex trade.

"In the past 10 months, at least 170 kids between 11 and 17 have been referred to a local counseling agency because they'd been peddled on the streets for sex," the first story in the series dispassionately reports about what's happening on some of Oakland's streets. That might be the only dispassionate sentence in the entire collection. Read it for yourself and I'll wager any consideration of prostitution being victimless will evaporate.

But that's not my point.

In December of last year, San Francisco TV station KGO reported on the child prostitution problem and the arrests of eight minors, calling it, "Oakland Sees Spike In Child Prostitution: Some As Young As 12-Years-Old." A cursory web search found stories and studies going back to 2001. In July of last year, other stations reported on more than 130 prostitutes, some of them minors, being arrested in the Bay area during "Operation Strikeout," at the time of baseball's all-star game in San Francisco.

In January, Assemblyman Sandre Swanson (D-16th; Oakland), in whose district much of the child prostitution occurs, introduced AB 499. This bill would identify minors involved in prostitution as victims instead of criminals. It passed the Assembly 66-0 in January. The bill would allow the children to be helped rather than put in the criminal system. This, the experts say, is vital to treating the problem. The bill is now in the Senate. Since January.

So, what is happening with this legislation? Is the California Senate doing anything? Nothing if you believe what you read in the papers or watch on TV, which has been nothing since April. That's my point.

We've heard more about $4.00-a-gallon gas, Lindsay Lohan, and shark attacks - almost all important issues, to be sure -- than we have about dealing as a society with the fate of a reported "at least 170 kids" in Oakland.

One can guess that in Los Angeles, in San Jose, in San Diego (where young Mexican girls have ended up as sex workers after being kidnapped and taken across the border) there are more children in peril. Some of the child prostitutes travel from Oakland to Vegas on the dates of big events. There's a circuit, it turns out.

Nothing about any of that in the news either.