NEW JERSEY News

The father of a murder victim whose death led many states to pass
stricter sex offender laws will be at the New Jersey Statehouse Monday
to encourage lawmakers to keep child killers locked up longer.
Mark Lunsford is holding a news conference to urge
passage of an Assembly bill increasing the prison sentence for child sex
offenses.
The bill would impose a mandatory 25-year term without
parole for anyone convicted of sexually assaulting a minor. Anyone who
hinders their apprehension or prosecution would face at least a year
behind bars.
Lunsford's third-grade daughter, Jessica, was raped and
murdered in Florida by a convicted sex offender. Jessica's laws are
intended to reduce a sex offender's ability to re-offend.
The bill sponsor, Republican Assemblywoman Nancy Munoz of Summit, will also speak.

Underage sex trade in Atlantic City preys on girls as young as 12
Tue May 17, 2011.

“Lisa” never thought she would be selling herself for money.

The Atlantic City High School senior had been rescued from her
prostitute mother and drug-addicted father when she was just 5 years old.

Taking her from a troubled life in Atlantic City, the Toms River
couple who adopted her were aware of their new daughter’s troubled
past and worked hard to make the girl happy and feel part of a
loving family.There were special dinner dates and regular manicures, family
trips to places such as Disney World and Aruba.At 16, nightmares began to haunt Lisa, dredging up the childhood
sexual abuse she had suffered and making her want to hurt others
the way she was hurting. Still, her parents included her in a trip
to Mexico.But a year later, after running away from three programs meant
to help her, she found herself in an Atlantic City casino hotel
room trying to explain to an older man that the sex her pimp had
promised was not something she wanted to do.Lisa's story is common in Atlantic City.
The FBI says Lisa and the other females in this story are the
victims of sexual crimes and as such are not identified in criminal
complaints. Accordingly, The Press is not identifying the women in
this article with their actual names.Caught somewhere between the casinos’ allure and impoverished
neighborhoods lies a secret Atlantic City, where girls such as Lisa
are used as a product for those who provide a different kind of
entertainment. One in which sex with underage girls is a big
business. Girls ages 12 and 13 — some from the southern New Jersey
area, others from other states — have been found being sold for
sex.That business is spurred by demand, said Dawne
Lomangino-DiMauro, co-chair of the Anti-Trafficking Task Force of
Atlantic County, a county-formed board that provides help to
human-trafficking victims.People often connect “human trafficking” to foreign-born
victims, said Alex Sinari, a founding member of ATTAC. But the
majority are underage Americans, he said. Often, they are teenage
girls forced into the life of selling their bodies mostly to
benefit someone else.Unlike drugs, “you can sell a person over and over and over
again,” said Sinari, who does outreach for Atlantic City’s Covenant
House. “Some are sold 30 times in a day. Raped 30 times a day.
”The most recent state Uniform Crime Report numbers show 16
juveniles were arrested for prostitution or commercialized vice in
2009, down 50 percent from the year before. Atlantic County had six
in 2008 and five in 2009.But those numbers are not complete: Girls sold into prostitution
are considered victims, so they don’t appear in arrest
statistics.“That wasn’t even touching on the children who are brought in
from another state, who are not street-level prostitutes,”
Lomangino-DiMauro said, referring to minors brought across state
lines who are then sold into sex uses by other means, such as
online advertisements. “The numbers are just astounding when you
think about it like that.”In Atlantic City, there has been one pimp arrest since the
beginning of this year and two outstanding cases from last year,
police records show. Often, however, it is the women on the street,
and not the pimp selling them, who are picked up and arrested.
Teen prostitution in Atlantic City is the subject of a study by
John Jay College in New York, Lomangino-DiMauro said. Researchers
interviewed both prostitutes and pimps and conducted a census of
underage teenaged prostitutes working Atlantic City’s streets.
College officials confirmed the study but said the report was not
ready for publication.Within 48 hours of a child taking to the street, she will be
approached by a pimp or exploiter, Sinari said of his experience
working with trafficking victims. “It’s just staggering how
prevalent this problem is.”How they get there varies.
“There are all different types,” Lomangino-DiMauro said. “Some
are runaways who have been lured, some of them are involved in
drugs, some are just on the street and have nowhere to go. Some of
them have been kidnapped.”The street isn’t even where police find the majority of the
girls these days, Atlantic City police Sgt. Rodney Ruark said.
Pacific Avenue has been replaced by craigslist.com and
backpage.com.“There are a few other small escort service websites out there,”
Ruark said of online investigations. “We don’t see them walking
around too much in the casinos.”
‘My first meltdown’
This wasn’t where Lisa saw herself three years earlier, when she
was a successful athlete at Toms River High School South. But at
16, things changed when the demons that haunted her from her first
five years of life started to show.“That’s when I had my first meltdown,” Lisa said.
She was diagnosed as bipolar with borderline personality and
attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders.Lisa’s adoptive mom put her in a hospital and almost lost her
job because she wanted to be there for her daughter. About a year
later, Lisa was put in her first program to get her some help. She
ran away.Two more programs — and two more runaways — later, she wound up
at the Covenant House, a place for runaway teens that gets them the
help they need. Lisa was getting counseling and taking her
medication. She was at Atlantic City High School, determined to
graduate on time. She even found a close friend in ‘Sienna,’ who
also was bipolar. Unlike the kids back in Toms River who used Lisa
to gain access to her backyard pool and the gifts she gave them,
Sienna was a true friend.Lisa was at the Covenant House one day when a girl she knew from
school showed up. The girl said she was thinking of staying at the
center and asked Lisa to help her move in. Lisa went to the girl’s
house and was shown an expensive pair of shoes. The girl asked if
Lisa wanted to make money in the casinos, but Lisa knew what that
meant and said she wasn’t interested. Then, the other girls in the
house wouldn’t let her leave, she said.Eventually, she sneaked out a back window and got back to the
Covenant House.But Lisa soon got in trouble there, too. During an argument with
another resident, she broke rules by making public a private
matter. The two-day suspension left her with no place to turn. So,
she returned to the girl’s home, saying she would work — but just
for one night and just dancing.A few hours later, she was inside a casino hotel room with her
bra off, dancing for an older man. The 25-year-old woman acting as
her pimp was there.The next man expected more.“I’ll make this quick and painless,”
he told her.But as the man tried to have sex with her, Lisa couldn’t hide
her distress.“I really don’t want to do this,” the teen said. Then she began to cry.
Difficulty finding help
Now 18, Lisa still doesn’t know why she didn’t say anything to
the security guard she passed downstairs as she walked the casino
floor. At 15, her adoptive mother had shown her a video on human
trafficking. When the girl in the video passed by someone who could
help her, Lisa wondered why the girl didn’t call out. Looking back
on her own chance to ask for help, Lisa said she thinks she figured
no one would believe her.That was true when she told them about Sienna.
The day after Lisa worked in the casino, she was able to get her
cell phone back from the woman she had worked for and quickly
texted a friend and asked her to come get her. But when “Sienna”
showed up, the focus for bringing in a new working girl fell on
Sienna, an Atlantic City High School senior.Lisa didn’t know Sienna ended up going with the woman. After
getting picked up by someone else, Lisa got a call from Sienna
saying she was with her boyfriend and was going to New York to work
and shop.“Don’t go,” Lisa told her. “There’s trouble there.”It was the last Lisa heard from Sienna. Lisa called Sienna’s
cell number daily for a month — getting no answer — and told anyone
who would listen that her friend was in trouble.“She was strong about graduating,” Lisa said. “I had a gut
feeling that they had her. It was frustrating because I knew she
was out there and no one wanted to hear me.”But Sinari did, and so did
the Covenant House’s lawyer.In March, the FBI found Sienna working in a casino. She had
never gone to New York. The woman she was working for made her tell
Lisa that story, then took her phone, Lisa was told.“I was so emotional when they found her,” she said. “I thought
she was already dead, to be honest.”Now, Sienna is out of the area and in counseling both for her
emotional scars and her addiction that was worsened by the drugs
she was forced to take while working.The misconception, Sinari said, is that these girls — even those
not at the age of consent — are willing participants. Even they
sometimes give that idea.“(Expletive) you, I’m here doing this because I want to,” Sinari
often is greeted with when he first meets a prostituted teen.
“That’s the survival instinct.”“They are not child prostitutes,” Lomangino-DiMauro said. “They
are prostituted children. They are commercially, sexually exploited
children.”The sex-charged youth culture doesn’t help, Sinari said.
Children, not products
“The word pimp has become a superlative in our society,” he
said. “It’s a sordid world. You really have to be aware of what
your kid is doing out there.”One Pleasantville father recently learned that lesson.
“Jennifer” left home one Friday night in February, telling her
father she was staying at a friend’s house. Hours later, Officer
Daniel Corcoran found out what the 13-year-old girl was really
doing when she propositioned the undercover Atlantic City police
officer at a casino.“It was very heartbreaking,” said Ruark, the Atlantic City
police sergeant. “She seemed like she had a good head on her
shoulders. She wasn’t a drug addict or anything.”Her father had no idea
where she was, Ruark said.When Corcoran delivered the news — and the daughter back home —
the father “was very upset ... he was crying,” Ruark said.It is unclear why the girl was there or how she got
involved.“I wouldn’t think that’s something a 13-year-old would come up
with on her own,” Ruark said.But after all he’s seen, Sinari isn’t surprised by anything
anymore.“It just changes the way you look at things when you roll down
the street,” he said during a recent car ride through Atlantic
City.He points to the sign advertising a spa: “When the front door is
in an alley, you pretty much know there’s sex offered.”And there are too
many willing customers, Lomangino-DiMauro
said.“When there’s a demand, unfortunately, the traffickers consider
(the girls) a product,” she said. “What society needs to remember
is, these are children, not products. To stop the traffickers, you
need to stop the demand.”Getting the girls help is another hurdle.
“Some of the children go back to their traffickers because we
don’t necessarily have the funding or the resources to get them off
the street right away,” Lomangino-DiMauro said. “We do have a group
of volunteers who try to assess and work to get them in the right
places.”Lisa, who once wanted to work in fashion, now sees her calling
in law enforcement, helping those like herself.“I didn’t like the law
when I was younger because they would
always take my biological parents away,” she said.But she knows
her mix of street smarts and luck has served her
well, and she’s hoping to help others like her.“I don’t know how my luck
hasn’t run out yet,” she said.But Sinari doesn’t think it’s luck that saved Lisa time and
again.He sees an inner strength in the girl who has a vulnerability in
her dark eyes that belies the tough talk and matter-of-fact
exterior. The same determination that helped authorities locate her
friend.“I think it’s a character thing,” Sinari said. “I’ve seen it go
the other way. We’ve buried people who didn’t make that choice.”
http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/breaking/underage-sex-trade-in-atlantic-city-preys-on-girls-as/article_69dca46c-80eb-11e0-b314-001cc4c03286.html