"Teen Jane Doe" - 14 yo - Beaverton/Portland OR

When a Beaverton police officer
pulled over a white Chevy Astro van for failure to signal a lane change
at 1 a.m., he found a 42-year-old man at the wheel and a girl in the
passenger seat.

The routine traffic stop might have ended
there were it not for the alert officer, who became suspicious when the
girl claimed she was older than she looked and gave a false name.

Soon,
a Portland detective called to help discovered that the girl was 14 and
had been having sex with the 42-year-old man. The girl also disclosed
that a relative had been forcing her into prostitution in Portland in
exchange for money and drugs.

"That's how we found her," Portland Detective Cheryl Waddell said.

Sex-trafficking
of children is considered a growing problem in the United States. Local
law enforcement say they rarely see the compulsion of a minor into
prostitution by a relative, but national experts say it occurs, and, if
the relative is addicted to drugs, not surprising.

In this
case, the prostitution began when the girl was 13. The girl's relative,
James Edward Alderson, 29, was accused this week of compelling
prostitution. Police say he solicited men to have sexual relations with
the girl, often in sheds behind friends' homes.
MCSO~James Alderson
"He'd
pass her around to just anybody, and he got her hooked on crack
cocaine," Waddell said. "Most of these men were low-level drug
dealers."

The girl turned over her pay, whether it was money
or heroin or crack cocaine, to Alderson, according to police and
prosecutors.

Waddell, a sex assault investigator, called the
case "highly unusual" and Portland police Sgt. Mike Geiger, a
supervisor of the bureau's sex assault unit, agreed. "As far as family
members doing this, that's definitely the exception, not the rule."

About 293,000 American youth are being trafficked for sexual exploitation, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

The
majority tend to be runaway or abandoned youth who live on the streets,
have been abused or are from families that have abandoned them and
become victims of prostitution as a way to support themselves,
according to University of Pennsylvania researchers Richard J. Estes
and Neil Alan Weiner, authors of Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S, Canada and Mexico. The average age of entry into prostitution within the U.S. is 12-14 years old.


Parents and older siblings have also forced minor relatives into prostitution, their research showed.

Lois Lee, founder and director of a 24-bed Los Angeles shelter for child prostitutes called Children of the Night, says she's not surprised a relative is compelling a child into prostitution, when drugs are a factor.

"It's
very common for people addicted to drugs to do anything they can to get
the drugs, including selling children for sex," Lee said. "It's not
about sex. It's about the drugs."

In this case, the girl had
run away from her mother's home, and reconnected with a relative who
was living on the streets, police said. Her mother had reported the
girl missing in March, and distributed flyers with her daughter's name
and photo. But police said the girl would remove the flyers, and use a
fake name so she wasn't caught.

The girl was discovered during
a Nov. 8 traffic stop when Beaverton Officer Jered Luto found the girl
inside a van with motorist Albert Anthony Champagne, 42. Champagne,
married with three teenaged children between ages 13 and 19, told
police he'd been trying to help the girl, knowing her relative "was
selling her," according to court papers.
MCSO~Albert Champagne

Police
say the girl was having sexual relations with Champagne, who faces a
third-degree rape charge. He has pleaded not guilty.

Alderson
was arraigned this week in Multnomah County Circuit Court. He's being
held on more than $250,000 bond. Police arrested him on New Year's Eve
while he was sleeping in a car outside his father's home, police said.
Alderson also faces unrelated allegations of possession of heroin,
second-degree theft and providing false information to police.

Now, police and other relatives are working to get the girl help.

Unable
to find suitable services locally, Waddell said the girl is expected to
travel to Lee's 24-bed Children of the Night shelter in California,
which provides intensive residential treatment, schooling and drug
counseling for child prostitutes.

"We, in Oregon, don't have good, secure facilities for child victims," Geiger said.

Lee
said there's only about 40 secure beds in the country for child
prostitutes. She says there's no magic to her shelter's services. "For
the first time in their lives, they get to be kids. There's no hokey
pokey magic wand that's going to take away their pain," she said. "All
we can do is create distance."

James Pond, who moved his nonprofit agency Transitions Global to
Hillsboro in 2007, recognized the need, and had hoped to open a secure
22-bed shelter in the Portland area for child victims of sex
trafficking.

But Pond says that's on hold. "There just wasn't
the money to get it going," Pond said, estimating that $1.5 million was
needed for start-up. "Even if we could get it going, sustainability of
the program was questionable."

Instead, he's continuing to
educate the public about the problem of human trafficking and advocate
for more services, working closely with the federally-funded Oregon
Human Trafficking Task Force.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, along with Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced legislation
last month that would create block grants worth $2.5 million annually,
renewable for two additional years, that would be allocated to six
pilot programs to provide shelter and services such as drug treatment,
counseling and job training for teenagers seeking to escape
prostitution.

Pond supports the bill, but says he'll applaud when the money is approved.

"The problem is it's a long way down the road," Pond said. "I'm glad he did it, but it's got to be a much broader effort."