Related article: Fighting sexual exploitation of minors Children selling themselves for sex is big business in the Inland Empire. They do it by the hundreds. Out of fear, and to please, protect and enrich their pimps. These pimps recruit the already vulnerable girls into their stables and then transfer them from place to place in Southern California, and across the nation as far as the Atlantic Coast.
The hottest place for all prostitutes, young and old, in the Inland Empire, the officers agreed, is along Holt Boulevard in Ontario west from Euclid Avenue to Montclair and Pomona, a distance of roughly two miles or more. Another way to find them, they told their audience of lawyers, judges, probation officers and social workers, is on craigslist.
What brings these children to Ontario? The international airport and the presence of giant truck stops in the area where prostitution is rampant, they said.
Note to johns: It is a crime for an adult to have sex with a minor, even if it is solicited. You will be guilty of several felonies. Ontario police have been treating the child prostitutes as victims rather than criminals, but that, too, has its problems. They must be released to their families and most of them run away again to rejoin the pimps. They have begun to concentrate on the pimps but they admit that pimps are hard to pin down and get the evidence to put them away.
Hassling them seems to help. Northern California is doing a much better job. The only suitable place for sexually exploited children in Southern California is Children of the Night in Los Angeles. Ontario police refer children there, but the kids must volunteer for the program, and Children of the Night only has 24 beds. She only worked Saturdays and Sundays so she could stay in school and her parents would not find out.
