Katie Couric Reports: "The Lost Girls"

(CBS)  Behind the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip, there's a seedy underworld.

"So how many dates tonight?" a vice investigative officer asks a girl.

"Seven dates," she said.

"Seven dates - and you're getting 100 bucks a date?" asks the agent.

The girl nods.

"The reality is that a lot of people come to Las Vegas and they think that prostitution is legal," said Lt. Karen Hughes with the Las Vegas vice squad. "So when they come here and it's an adult playground they think that kids are for sale."

Some of the kids are as young as 12 - part of a massive workforce of prostitutes, some 35,000 strong, who operate in casinos, clubs, hotels and the streets along the Vegas strip, reports CBS News anchor Katie Couric.

CBS News spent one night with an undercover vice squad from the city's police department. Six women were arrested in five hours - two of them were under 18.

"How come you're down on the strip this hour of the night?" asked an agent.

"I was just walking," said a girl, sobbing.

"There are a lot of bad things that can happen out here to a girl your age," the agent said.

Tina - who CBS News disguised for her own safety - used to be one of those girls. Raised by an absentee mother who worked as a call girl, she was lured into prostitution by a pimp posing as a rap star looking for girls to star in a music video.

"I remember turning my first trick at 12 years old, and after that it was kind of like a whatever thing," Tina said. "I did it once, I might as well do it again."

By 17, Tina was strung out on drugs, had been arrested several times, and was being abused by her pimp. She hit rock bottom.

"I looked at myself in the mirror one day, and I didn't even recognize myself," Tina said. "I just cried and said, 'What am I doing with my life?' I didn't care about anything. I didn't want to live anymore."

After her last arrest she was placed in a group home where a former prostitute helped her find a job and get off the streets.

Tina's story is hardly unusual. Underage prostitution in Sin City is on the rise. In the last two years nearly 400 girls under the age of 18 have been arrested or detained by the Vegas vice squad. Half the pimps arrested this year had prostitutes who were underage. And these girls are not all from Nevada - 60 percent come from other states across the country.

"I believe now that children have become a commodity for these pimps no different than drugs and running guns," Hughes said. "They're just reusable."

Reusable and caught in a vicious cycle. Because they're underage, the girls aren't jailed. Instead, they're temporarily placed into detention centers or group homes where resources are limited. As a result, 80 percent run right back to the streets and into the arms of their pimps.

For Judge William Voy, this is unacceptable. For the past four years Voy is the only judge presiding over the "teen prostitution court" in Las Vegas .

His frustration shows.

"How is the system failing these kids?" Couric asked.

"We are failing these children because we're failing to recognize the problem," Voy said. "We get one jurisdiction that deals with the problem effectively, they just move them somewhere else. You need a concerted nationwide effort - you need national attention to this."

A small plot of land on the outskirts of Las Vegas is where Voy hopes to build a model for the nation. He wants to establish a specialized safe house staffed by probation officers and social workers who can de-program girls who believe pimps are their protectors - a place where the girls are not permitted to leave.

He's driven by faces he sees every day - part of a generation of young lives already destroyed before they've even had a chance to grow up.

"See that 12 year old, or 13 or 14 year old standing in front of you, and you look at that child and go, 'Oh my God, this is what's happening to you and been happening to you?' I can't let that persist," Voy said.

The recession has put his vision on hold. So the lot sits empty. And in the city of bright lights, countless teens live in the shadows, with the odds against them and nowhere to turn.

Until public funds become available, Voy is looking to the private sector to fund his safe house. To learn more about the safe house, click here.

For more information:

Protection of Sexually Exploited Children (in Nevada)

Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Children of the Night

Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS)

[oncefallen]

I'm surprised they don't charge the teen prostitutes with sex crimes, seeing as how they charge teens for consensual sex. It's ironic that Couric will call teens who engage in sexting or charged for consensual acts with their peers criminals, yet in spite of the vast majority of these girls consenting to sex for money, they're "victims." Go figure. Truth about RSO laws -- www.oncefallen.com

[culturechang]

Its sure is funny how moralist think we can lie our way to a moral nation.

[culturechang]

Oh God, here we go on the estimates again. 300,000??? No way.

In 2000, the federal govt estimated that 50,000 poeple were trafficked into the US annually. They wanted to sensationalize that Human Trafficking law through.

In Nov 2008, the Washington Post was the only news outlet to report that the State Dept admitted to having trouble finding "victims". They had found 1100 in 8 years. By the 400,000 they should have found, they were less than 1% accurate.

Just like Iraq's WMDs, it was all built on willfully propogated and willfully accepted lies. We cannot build any more policy on lies.

[culturechang]

They sure pulled that Las Vegas underage prostitution article off the main CBS page really quick. But they left a link to the video which does not allow for blog comments. It appears CBS did not like the poeple's opinions.

[miliotodc]

What are they running from I wonder. I guess broken homes mostly, abusive dads and mom's boyfriends too I think. Katie doesn't mention what's causing the girls to run away in the first place. Maybe if we focused on that part, we could help them more. But then that gets back to good parenting and so many are lousy at it. Seems to me this story is missing the point entirely: maybe if we spent effort and energy talking about raising them, they wouldn't end up on the streets doin' tricks. I think mostly so they wouldn't.

Lost girls? Yeah right Katie, more like "failed parents" to me. I just find it hard to believe that in general, if a girl is raised in a loving and giving family, she's not going to (easily) turn to prostitution, at least not in her young years. That's the point I suppose: their often not but rather born into an overly promiscuous sex-absorbed society rife with unwanted pregnancies and unfit parents.

Wanna' help them? Foster a culture where good parenthood is celebrated, valued, honored, and emphasized!

[mottasa-2009]

The solution is to offer the deprogramming coupled with a witness protection program and reward that allows these underage girls to turn in the pimps. Then you charge the pimps under laws designed for child predators. The problem now is that the pimps are shielded from prosecution. Legalizing prostitution may have some effect, however there are still dark underbellies to all trades. Do people still deal in guns, cigarettes, liquor? Yes, and they are all legal (if bought from legitimate dealers).

[culturechang]

Well, at least they applied some numbers to this. Typically they just sensationalize one or two of the worst examples. Statistics such as 400 kids under 18 in 2 years are hard to dispute.

Underage girls should not be involved in this. However, this all exists because prostitution is a black market thing. Las Vegas does not have to look far to find an example of a successful operation that protects the women and prevents underage girls from getting in. If you go to the legal brothels of Nevada (outside Las Vegas), you will find a tightly-controlled legal operation that does no allow underage girls to get in. The women are consenting adults and they have protection and health care. This is the 800-pound gorilla that the unholy alliance between evangelicals and man-hating feminists don?t want to accept about prostitution. By not accepting, they clearly demonstrate that they DONT care about the girls or women. They care only for their intolerant agenda.

Laws AGAINST prostitution have been on the books and enforced for many years. The truth is that it has not helped or we would be discussing it here. Applying the law methods, with intensified efforts, is really just doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This is the most difficult thing to convince people of because they don?t want to accept it. By not accepting it, you are providing a fertile ground for more damage.

[tomadams99]

Gee...Couric actually did a story on something worthwhile. First time in how long?? Stupid self aggrandizing woman.

[snowball77]

I would be surprised if anything is done to help these children. We are a nation of hypocrites. We tend to let things fester in a black market rather than face the facts. These children have fallen between the cracks of social support networks. Sounds like they are extorted by the pimps. Maybe some of the gambling money could go to helping these children? I would rather have vices legalized to take them out of a dangerous black market and into pulic attention. But that will never happen as we would rather have a festering black-market rather than face the facts that people want these vices. These street walking children should raise some alarms in our society. Are we any better than other parts of the world that enslave women and children in black-market prostitution? Sounds like we aren't any better off. We turn a blind eye on children being enslaved in the sex trade in Vegas. I assume this also goes on in every major city in the US. I wonder if national service would help keep children from the streets and prostitution and drugs. I wouldn't mind if every teenage spent 2 years in a national service effort so they could get a firm grasp of reality. But I have my doubts that anything will every be done to help kids get a good start. We are more interested in gambling or allowing a black market to become out of control, or a prison system or new laws. We certainly don't want to beef up the social safety net because that would be socialism. No we just want to let things go to hell.

[gunownerdan]

LEGALIZE AND REGULATE PROSTITUTION.
Problem solved!