INTERVENTION KEY TO SAVING TEEN PROSTITUTES

Just call them "Teen Prostitutes Anonymous," Olivia Rowe says.

Rowe, director of REACH, her group home and program for troubled teenage
girls, told the Guilford Teen Prostitution Task Force on Friday that she
has begun holding a "girls' night out" for former teen prostitutes -- along
with a couple of teens who are active prostitutes.

Rowe, about eight of her graduates and the practicing prostitutes will rent
a couple of adjoining motel rooms and go out to eat -- or send out for
pizza -- and take in a movie. "Then we'll have a rap session," she said.
"The cell phones are turned off."

It's a time to save lives, she said. It's the time to help anyone who might
have slipped, or is about to slip, back into a life of prostitution. It's
especially the time to tell the girls who are still mired in that life that
they can quit.

Rowe was one of five members of a task force panel to speak on the trauma
embedded in a victim, especially a child victim, of sexual exploitation and
abuse. Teenage prostitutes are victims, they said, and their trauma can
last a lifetime.

"It can be devastating," said panel member Anita Jones, a specialist with
Cone Behavioral Health Center. Jones and other panel members said the
effects of sexual abuse and exploitation can be so ingrained that they
continue into old age. Studies show that elderly women who were abused when
they were very young often become traumatized when the staff at nursing
homes touch their bodies.

The trauma touches almost every aspect of a child's life, said UNCG
psychologist Jackie White, an expert in the psychology of child violence
and aggression. White said the effects of sexual abuse and exploitation can
lead girls into drug and alcohol abuse, failure at school, serious physical
and mental health problems, violence and crime. "And they don't just grow
out of it," White said.

Early intervention is the key, said panel member Patty Swing, who works
with the nonprofit Family Services of the Piedmont.

Susan Cupito, a panel member and director of the YWCA's teen-parent-mentor
program, said the Y works with 125 teenage mothers. She said there are at
least 1,000 to 1,200 teen moms in Guilford County. The girls need mentors,
she said.

Rowe told the task force about a soon-to-be teenage mom who has had little
or no mentoring. "She is 16 years old, pregnant and has a cocaine habit,"
Rowe said. "So does her older boyfriend, who is pimping her to get cocaine."

Jones said that if teens such as that 16-year-old don't receive the right
kind of help by the time they are 17, the trauma is so embedded it's almost
impossible to remove. "If we don't treat them when they're young, we'll be
paying for them later, when they are in prison, or when they're dying of
AIDS," she said.

The teen prostitution task force was established late last year after a
News & Record article quoted juvenile court counselors and others as saying
that dozens of girls, some as young as 12, work as prostitutes in
Greensboro and High Point. The task force's goal is to formulate plans to
end the sexual exploitation of young girls.