Thursday, May. 29, 2008

Police find underage prostitutes online, try to lead them from life

SACRAMENTO -- If she tried hard, 14-year-old Jasmine could have sex with nine men a day. She'd start posting ads online at 2 or 3 p.m., in time to set up appointments with early commuters.

She'd finish by 5:30 a.m., exhausted and disgusted. The money, about $100 per trick, went to whichever pimp was profiting from her lost innocence.

In September, Sacramento police Sgt. Pam Seyffert and her vice unit picked up Jasmine at a Good Nite Inn near California State University, Sacramento. They'd found her the same way so many men had: on craigslist.

Well known as a free online community bulletin board, craigslist has gained the dubious distinction of being a popular site for pimps to market young girls to customers, or johns.

The young prostitutes often are disguised behind photos advertising older women, Seyffert said, and almost always claim to be at least 18.

Some prostitutes and johns in Stanislaus County also have taken the sex trade off the streets and moved it to the Internet, said police and sheriff's officials.

The Modesto police special investigations unit monitors prostitutes and johns who seek out each other on the Internet, police spokesman Sgt. Craig Gundlach said.

"The special investigations unit is well aware that prostitution is occurring on craigslist," Gundlach said.

Stanislaus County sheriff's spokesman deputy Royjindar Singh said most of the younger prostitutes are more familiar with the Internet, which has resulted in a criminal trend that can be more elusive for law enforcement.

He said most prostitutes who surf the Web to find johns in Stanislaus County are teenage runaways from other areas. They move, sometimes in groups, from Stockton to Modesto to Fresno, making appointments with johns.

"They have a laptop computer, they hang out in a motel room for two weeks, then they move on," Singh said. "They're doing it all online. They never even go out on the streets."

It is difficult to estimate how many children are being pimped, locally or nationally. In 2003, the FBI reported about 1,400 juveniles were arrested nationally on suspicion of prostitution.

Most believe the problem is much larger than that number suggests.

What Seyffert knows is this: In Sacramento, the trade in sex with underage girls is thriving. From 2005 to 2007, her department picked up at least 65 girls, and she believes many more are out there.

As prostitution increasingly moves to the Web, she said, the girls are getting harder for police to find.

For this report, The Sacramento Bee interviewed three prostitutes, ages 14 and 15, along with experts, police officers and youth advocates. The newspaper is using pseudonyms for the girls because they are minors and sex crime victims.

In the shadows

Since August 2006, Seyffert and her team of four plainclothes detectives have teamed with FBI agent Minerva Shelton to find underage prostitutes and place them in another environment. They post pictures of the girls they've found on a wall in their office on Freeport Boulevard. A few smile; most look sullen. One has a black eye.

"We've opened a Pandora's box," Seyffert said.

She worries that the girls face new dangers as teen prostitution moves from the strolls of Stockton and Del Paso boulevards to the Internet. Posting from motel rooms, girls are less visible to the police and community. They can't rely on gut instinct to decide if it's safe to accept a "date."

Frequently, the detectives said, pimps pass girls along a multicity circuit; their ads go up in Oakland one week, then Sacramento, then Reno. The unit has recovered girls shipped to Sacramento from Minnesota, Texas, Wisconsin and Montana.