ADVOCATE ORNAMENT

Call 214.560.4203 out on the pink floral comforter of her bed in her White Rock area apartment that would fit perfectly into a little girl’s bedroom.

In many ways, Robin is a little girl, just one that didn’t get to grow up like little girls should. Born to a mentally ill mother, she ended up in foster care after a neighbor reported seeing her shivering day after day without a coat to keep her warm in the harsh Midwestern winters where she was raised.

At first foster care was a step up, a place where her unmet needs were finally addressed. Then, she says, a relative of her foster family began molesting her at age 9. Her blue eyes cast down as she shrugs off the memory.

“Crappy things happen to everyone, right?” she says.

By 13, she was using any drug she was handed to numb the pain. At first, her dealer seemed like a friend, someone who protected her and made sure she had what she wanted. Then he started pressuring her to perform sexual favors in exchange for more drugs.

“He took such good care of me it didn’t seem like a big deal to do it for him,” Robin says. “You do it a couple of times and you start to go numb.”

She began to see herself as an object, not a human. Knowing that her young age made her more desirable on the streets, she soon began sell- ing herself. She met a man online who agreed to fly her to Dallas. No one seemed to notice when she ran away.

She worked for a pimp for sever- al years, a man more than twice her age who beat her and raped her, but also gave her a place to stay and food to eat. Eventually, she made enough money to move in with a friend she met on the streets. Defiantly, she speaks out about what she does for a living.

“This isn’t new — girls have been making money this way for years. Why shouldn’t I?” she questions. When asked what she would do if she could do anything in the world, she rolls her eyes.

“What do you want me to say? President? That’s just not me,” she says, voice thick with cynicism. “Do I like doing this? Not especially, but it’s what I choose to do. I’m not some victim.”

Amanda Jones used to think like Robin. Just like Robin, she was sex-

Dallas Zoo Concert Series

ually abused at home, before turning to the streets as a teenager. She was trafficked for the first time at 15, and spent the next nine years caught in the web of prostitution for a pimp’s financial gain.

“I didn’t ever see myself as a victim,” Jones told KERA radio in an April interview. “You’re just trying to survive at that age, so you don’t see yourself as a victim.”

Jones is now a successful accountant, living in Dallas in a life that is unrecognizable from her time on the street. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t come overnight, but she found support from neighborhood nonprofit New Friends New Life, which works solely with female victims of human trafficking and the sex industry. Of-

MAY 28 The Killdares

JUNE 4 Rich Girls

JUNE 11 Hard Night’s Day

JUNE 18 Satisfaction

JUNE 25 Escape

JULY 2 Rebirth Brass Band

JULY 9 The Landsharks

JULY 16 Limelight

JULY 23 Petty Theft & The Bird Dogs

JULY 30 The O’s fering classes, job training, counseling and even childcare, the organization seeks to give these women the tools they need to regain control of their life on their own terms.

It’s summertime at the Dallas Zoo, and the Safari Nights concert series is back for another wild season. Bring a lawn chair or blanket and enjoy live music, beer, and wine on shady Cat Green. And check out Zoo animals while the sun goes down. It’s free with admission.

“We meet the women where they are,” says Lauren Haskins, development director for New Friends New Life. “No one is court-ordered to be here. The women who come here, they’re looking for change.”

On any given night, about 400 teens are trafficked in the commercial sex trade on the streets of Dallas, according to New Friends New Life’s research. The vast majority come from broken homes, girls who slipped through the cracks by neglectful or abusive parents. But others come from good traditional homes, lured into prostitution by manipulative predators, more and more commonly through social media.

“A big trend right now is boyfriend pimps. They’re the ones who say ‘I love you, I’ll take care of you’,” says Haskins. “Anytime you’re involved in any commercial sexual act under the age of 18, you’re being trafficked. You’ll hear us say this a lot, but a child cannot choose to prostitute herself.”

Situated in a non-descript office building near Central Expressway, the address of which is kept confidential to protect clients, New Friends New Life is working to combat human trafficking from all sides. In addition to helping women reestablish themselves after fleeing the life, they work to educate at-risk youth to be savvy and protect themselves from predators; and they look at demand, encouraging men to consider the potential impact of their actions. “I think the majority of people know human trafficking exists, I don’t think the ma- jority think it’s happening in their backyard,” Haskins says, explaining that her group has worked with girls from a wide swath of neighborhoods and socioeconomic backgrounds.

They are a standing fixture at the Letot Center in Northwest Dallas, a crisis intervention shelter for runaways, children taken by the Department of Family Protective Services and other wayward youth. They work with girls, hoping to catch them before they fall through the cracks and give them the tools needed to avoid street predators. They know, once a girl is back on the street, it’s only a matter of time before she’s at risk.

“After 48 hours on the street, the average runaway will be approached by a trafficker,” Haskins says.

In addition to education, the organization focuses on pushing laws that fight sex trafficking. They’ve set their sights on “johns,” men who are rarely punished for their crimes in Texas, they say. The nonprofit is lobbying for stricter laws that would bring specific consequences to those who pay for sex.

“We see statistics that 85 percent of those buying commercial sex with children get a suspended sentence, they never see jail time, they never even have a jury,” said New Friends New Life CEO Katie Pedigo in the KERA interview. “That’s something we as a community have to say, ‘No more.’ For there to be true systemic change, we all have to come together and say, particularly with a minor, we are not going to look away, we are going to insist that it be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

The Dallas Police Department was recognized nationally for its diligent and delicate handling of child prostitutes. In 2005 the “High Risk Victims” unit was developed specifically to help repeat runaways get into counseling and away from their pimps, seeking to nip child prostitution in the bud. It proved so successful, in 2007 Congress green lit a $55 million program that would have allowed other police departments to create similar units modeled directly after Dallas’ system (it was later dropped from the federal budget amid a dispute with President George W. Bush, according to a 2009 New York Times article).

New Friends New Life works closely with Dallas police and speaks highly of their continued efforts to fight trafficking on the streets. But it takes investments from all sides. That’s why New Friends New Life works from Congress to the classroom, hoping to pull back the veil on this black market industry to make trafficking part of a wider national discussion.

It’s a discussion Robin is conflicted about. She acknowledges there are girls who are abused and enslaved every day, but doesn’t feel she’s ever been one of them.

“My choices are my choices,” she says emphatically.

As she lines up her night of work, four men and counting, her thoughts return to New Friends New Life. “Maybe I should check them out,” she says. “It’s not like there’s a retirement plan in this business. And I’ll be washed up by the time I’m 24.”

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