Treat sex workers as victims

Shauna Dunlap, left, special agent Houston office of the FBI, shown with Ruben Perez, assistant United State Attorney Chief, civil rights/human trafficking unit, in a second floor room where girls under 18-years-old were held under pad locked doors and prostituted against their will at Las Palmas II, along the 5600 block of Telephone Road in Houston. Sex workers should be treated as victims.

It's been estimated that nearly 80,000 young Texans are ensnared in sex trafficking.

People like Amber — the subject of a heartbreaking story by Express-News reporter Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje — who are forced into the sex trade as teenagers.

Amber isn't her real name. It's the name her pimp, Isaac Lynn Williams, gave her when he began selling her for sex on the website Backpage.com. She was 16. Williams, who was 28, would post ad after ad for Amber and another young woman on Backpage, a blatant online conduit for the sex trade.

She was forced to have sex up to 15 times a day to meet her quota. This hell lasted eight months until undercover state investigators rescued Amber and arrested Williams.

These are the broad strokes of Amber's story. She has moved on with her life, relocating to another state. Williams was sentenced to 50 years in prison for trafficking (he has appealed). The website Backpage has been shut down. But underage sex trafficking still thrives across Texas. Remember, 80,000 young people in the sex trade is tantamount to a city.

Texas law rightfully views underage sex workers as victims of trafficking, not prostitutes who have committed crimes. But it can be incredibly difficult to compel victims to come forward because they often move from city to city, and because, like Amber, they face the prospect of threats.

Many minors who are ensnared in the sex trade will lie about their ages and use aliases. But they also often have histories of sexual abuse and drug abuse. They desperately need to be reached, but that is often so difficult even as they live among us.

Because of these factors, it makes sense to also view adults ensnared in the sex trade as victims. Many adults working as prostitutes were likely once working as such when they were underage, just like Amber. And they too often have histories of sexual and physical abuse, as well as addiction.

To help break this cycle, Bexar County offers Restore Court, a voluntary program for juvenile victims of sex trafficking. It includes counseling, drug treatment and other services.

On the other end of the spectrum, Bexar also offers Esperanza Court, which serves those charged with felony prostitution. These are people who have been arrested multiple times for prostitution (and often many other charges). The program is intense. Survivors of sex crimes must commit to counseling five days a week for a year. They often spend months in treatment. They perform community service and do regular drug and alcohol tests.

But in the end, the system still treats them as felons.

There is also an obvious gap: No such court exists at the misdemeanor level. It only stands to reason that if there are specialty courts at the youth and felony levels, there should be a specialty court to serve victims of sex trafficking at the misdemeanor level. Why wait until the felony level to restore someone's life? What if that person had been ensnared as a youth, and the system simply missed an opportunity for change?

This is a complex issue. Most agree that those who do the trafficking — pimps and others — should feel the full brunt of the law, but what about the prostitutes, trafficked or not? On one side are those who would decriminalize prostitution entirely, and on the other are the strict law-and-order types. We believe there has to be a middle ground that recognizes that those who sell their bodies for sex have complex underlying issues that require complex responses. They are victims, and that's what the public debate should weigh most heavily.

One other point about Amber's story screams for reform. Her pimp, Williams, initially received a $75,000 bond, which he made. He then continued to run into Amber and her mother in Killeen, even blocking her mother's car at a McDonald's drive-thru as he demanded Amber drop the charges.

A gunman broke into Amber's apartment the day before she was supposed to testify, spraying the place with bullets. And Williams later absconded only to be found in the Dominican Republic.

All this speaks to the need for bail reform. Bail should be based on a person's risk to the public or a potential for flight rather than a person's ability to pay. That rationale applies to nonviolent offenders who shouldn't be languishing in jail, but it also holds to someone who profited from the repeated rape of a teenager and clearly was a threat to her if released.

Amber's story is jarring, but it's especially heartbreaking because it is so common. Don't just think about Amber. Think about those 80,000 victims in Texas.