THROWAWAY CHILDREN

Anita was 14 and a student at Ferndale Middle School when she became a
prostitute.

Shandra, a sophomore at Smith High School, also turned to prostitution
at 14.

Anita and Shandra were among dozens of underage girls -- some as young
as 12 -- who sell sex to survive on the streets of Greensboro and High
Point. They represent a growing and largely hidden subculture unknown
to most people, including, apparently, the police.

But they are well-known to street outreach workers, teachers and
counselors trying to save them. And they are known to much older men
- -- drug dealers and thieves, as well as businessmen -- who prey on
them with virtual impunity.

"I call them throwaways," says Olivia Rowe, who operates a home for
troubled teenage girls on North Dudley Street in Greensboro. "They've
been used and abused and thrown away all their lives."

A U.S. Justice Department study published in 1998 estimates that
hundreds of thousands of teenagers are involved in prostitution
nationwide. Richard Estes, a University of Pennsylvania professor of
social work, recently published a study estimating that 300,000 to
400,000 children under 17 are involved in the sex trade. The study
concludes that the largest group of these children are runaway,
"throwaway" and homeless children who resort to "survival sex" for
food, shelter and clothing.

Rowe believes as many as 60 teenage girls work as prostitutes in
Greensboro on any given day. Half that number may be working in High
Point, she and other counselors estimate. Counselors for the nonprofit
Youth Focus estimate that about a fourth of the approximately 200
girls sheltered each year at the agency's emergency facility in
northeast Greensboro are prostitutes.

Counselors John Spruill and Tricia Thompson say the Youth Focus
shelter, called Act Together, took in 17 girls between the ages of 11
and 17 from April 1 through May 18. Nine told Thompson and Spruill
that they were prostitutes.

"That was unheard of 10 years ago," Spruill says.

Yet, Greensboro and High Point police say that if there's a teenage
prostitution problem in Guilford County, they are unaware of it.
Greensboro Police Chief Robert White says his department has no
indication that teenage prostitution is a "major, systemic problem."

High Point detective Carlene Dix, who works with teenage runaways and
delinquents, says, "If anyone knows of underage prostitution going on,
they aren't sharing it with us."

Juvenile court counselors say child prostitution is one of Guilford
County's most troubling problems. But, they say, they're reluctant to
share information with police for fear the girls would stop talking
with them.

Chief juvenile court counselor Dianne Campbell says police should take
the initiative and question teenage girls they pick up as runaways and
delinquents. "Instead of just transporting them, they ought to
question them about what they've been doing and how they've been
living," Campbell says. "They shouldn't wait for the girls to start
talking."

Campbell, however, says she expects the 22 juvenile court counselors
in her office to pass on to police any information from teen
prostitutes about "the adult predators who use and abuse them."

Court counselors and others who work with these girls say they are
among the most vulnerable and tragic in the Triad, children in the
bodies of women, aching for affection and structure, and ripe for the
pimps and predators who are eager to pretend they can provide it.

They may be white, African American, Hispanic or Asian. Most come from
communities steeped in poverty. Many have known wretched home lives in
which their mothers are prostitutes and one or both parents are drug
or alcohol addicts.

Counselors say almost all are emotionally, physically or sexually
abused, and flee to the streets where the abuse continues,
administered by "johns," pimps and drug dealers. Some are beaten and
raped. Many carry sexually transmitted diseases, and some, barely 15,
already have had multiple abortions.

Some pair up for protection, always looking for the next meal and a
place to sleep. Some live with older prostitutes and learn from them.
Some find pimps, much older men they call their "boyfriends."

They have one thing in common, Rowe says: "They are all trying to
survive. That's why they call it survival sex."

Anita, which is not her real name, has been used, abused and discarded
for as long as she can remember. Authorities placed her in Rowe's
group home last spring after she was picked up as a runaway.

Her mother is a crack addict who turned to prostitution long ago to
support her habit. Anita began running away when she was 13. She was
14, she says, when she turned her first trick.

"It was what my momma did, and we needed the money," she says during
an interview at Rowe's group home, shortly after returning from
another school day at Grimsley, where she is a freshman.

Anita, now 15, says she had sex with many men -- some more than two or
three times her age.

Not once, however, did the police pick her up for prostitution. And no
customer of hers was ever arrested, although almost any one of them
could have been charged with numerous felonies, including rape.

Like many young prostitutes, Anita hung out with drug dealers who had
lots of cash, fancy cars and a taste for teenagers. Anita also knew
well-heeled, seemingly respectable businessmen whom she met through
her mother. These men, who she says paid her as much as $200 for a
"date," took her far from the streets of her childhood and out of
sight of the police. Each would tell a friend about her.

"You'd meet one, and he'd call his friend in High Point about you, and
then he'd call his friend in Greensboro, and he'd call his friend in
Winston-Salem, and that's how it worked," she says.

Anita, like other teen prostitutes, had little to fear from police,
other than being picked up as a runaway. Most teen prostitutes are
never arrested, which is why crime statistics don't provide an
accurate official estimate of their number, locally or nationally.

An indication of the increase in teen prostitution is what public
health authorities say is an alarming rise in the rate of sexually
transmitted diseases among teenage girls, especially chlamydia, to
which teens are extremely vulnerable. The disease attacks the cervix,
which is not fully developed in young teenagers, and can render them
sterile.

It is the leading sexually transmitted disease among teenagers in
Guilford County. Chlamydia rates in Guilford County far exceed those
in the state and the nation, and they are more than double what they
or alcohol addicts, and often are prostitutes themselves.

"The grandmothers do the best they can, but it's too much for them,"
Rowe says. "They burn out or get too old."

Shandra says she was 13 when she and a girlfriend left home a few
months after her grandmother died. She was gone for most of the next
two years, living where she could and selling sex for food, shelter
and clothes.

"You have to always be thinking about what you're going to eat and
where you're going to stay, and what kind of dude you're getting in a
car with," Shandra says. She said she always carried a box cutter for
protection. Shandra has appeared in juvenile court six times for being
a runaway. She says she has had two miscarriages in the past year.

Court counselor White says girlson her caseload often disappear during
the furniture market in High Point. That weeklong event, known as the
International Home Furnishings Market, is held in October and April,
when High Point plays host to thousands of furniture buyers and
manufacturers.

"Before the market, they look like little girls, and then they're
gone," she says. "When you see them again, you just know. They're
wearing new clothes and jewelry and different hair styles that make
them look years older."

White says during the market a couple of years ago one of her girls at
Ferndale Middle School failed to keep an appointment. White looked for
the eighth-grader at the school. "They told me she wasn't there
because it was furniture-market time," she says.

Joy Davis, a teacher at Ferndale, remembers the girl. "She was 14 and
trying to fit in, like everybody else," she says. Davis said the girl
became a stripper at a local club. She had a child, and Davis believes
she got married. She would be only 16 or 17 now, Davis says.

Twenty is old for a prostitute, says Dianne Blanton, a juvenile court
counselor in Greensboro. Blanton says she has seen prostitutes at 14
"who could have been models. Four or five years later, they look like
old women."

That pretty much sums up Pamela's life. Pamela, 36, of High Point, is
small-boned, almost petite, and from a distance she could pass for a
teen. Up close, the lines in her face and the sadness in her eyes are
testimony to the ravages of a lifestyle that has enslaved her for 22
years.

Pamela, which is not her real name, knows what poverty and drugs can
do. She has been a prostitute since she was 14.

A brother raped her when she was 6, Pamela said. She remembers sitting
on men's laps in the liquor house her mother ran in the Clara Cox
public housing community in High Point, where she grew up.

Pamela says she was addicted to cocaine and heroin by the time she was
15, and she's been prostituting herself ever since just to pay for her
habit. Life is "hard as hell," she says.

Pamela carries on a street outreach ministry of her own. Like Rowe in
Greensboro, she distributes condoms to teenagers in High Point. The
kids have a name for her: Momma Condom.

"I try to tell 'em they need to get out while they can, but they don't
really hear me," she says, pointing out row after row of liquor and
crack houses on High Point's east side. Dix said most teen prostitutes
she knows stay with the drug dealers.

"They like it because those guys spend money on them and give 'em
drugs," she says. "I tell them it's going to get awful bad real quick.
I wish they'd listen."

Rowe wishes they would listen, too, especially kids like the one she
saw recently walking along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Greensboro.
Rowe can't get her out of her mind.

"She looked like she was dressed in a little school uniform," she
says. "Pretty blue plaid skirt and long knee socks." But it was no
school uniform. It was an outfit designed to impress potential
customers. She still had an innocence about her, but she also had the
walk and the look Rowe recognized immediately.

"I can't stop thinking about her," Rowe says. "I wonder how she got
there and if some man has her holed up somewhere. I could tell I could
still get through to her. The hardness hadn't settled in yet.

"I could still find a little piece of her heart."