ONE WOMAN’S ESCAPE

A journey from good student to underage prostitute

LEILA NAVIDI
Lauren, 18, inside her home in Las Vegas on Wednesday, March 14, 2012.

Lauren was 16 in 2010, a good if slightly rebellious student at Advanced Technologies Academy, one of the best high schools in the valley. She went to a party one August night and met Darrell, then 20. She fell for him.

“Nobody made me feel the way he made me feel,” she said recently.

“I don’t know. I guess he said the right words. He got in my head. He did what he had to do. And when I love, I love hard.”

Within a few weeks, she’d ditched school, run away from home and moved in with Darrell in a complicated household in the southeast valley.

He was good looking and funny, and they laughed easily together. They were lovers and best friends.

There were worrisome signs, however, as he could become violent without warning, once slamming her against his car.

Then, Lauren recalled, one night that October, Darrell told her, “If you love me, you’ll put this dress on and put these shoes on, and you’ll go make some money so we can live the way you want to live and get the things you want to get.”

His meaning was clear, that she would become a prostitute for him.

“It didn’t sound good, but the way he made it seem, it was like, this should show him that I really like him, that I have feelings for him.”

She was sent out with another woman who worked for Darrell’s father, who was also a pimp. They all lived in the same house.

After finding a customer in a casino parking lot, Lauren came home with $150 and got in the bathtub. “I just sat there,” she said. “You feel really nasty, disgusted with yourself.”

Pot alleviated the pain, though not much.

Darrell explained the rules: She would work every night except Sunday and Wednesday. He gave her a quota: $500 per night, one way or another.

When she came home with money, he was affectionate. If not, he was cold.

There were also bouts of violence. One time, she recalled, “I guess I said something smart, and I said, ‘I wanna leave. I wanna leave.’ He said, ‘You think you’re going to leave?’ ” He put his gun to her head.

She sobbed at this memory.

On it went. He procured a fake ID for her because, remember, she was just 16 and, as now, looked young for her age. Still, she worked the casinos, including, she said, the biggest and best-known properties on the Las Vegas Strip.

She would often sit at a casino bar and listlessly gamble, waiting to find customers. She believes they must have known she was underage.

“It’s all, all humiliation. When you’re out and about, people know what you’re doing. They’re saying, ‘She looks so pretty, but look what she’s doing? And she’s a little baby.’ ”

She was arrested for solicitation of prostitution on Nov. 24, 2010. Metro Police, which aggressively pursues pimps through its Pandering Investigation Team, asked Lauren to turn in her pimp. She didn’t.

Once out of juvenile detention and back home with her mother, she cut her ankle bracelet and returned to Darrell.

Soon after, they were stopped by police, and Lauren shoved a quarter pound of Darrell’s marijuana into her purse to protect him. She was sent to detention for 30 days.

That year, she said ruefully, she spent Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s in lockup.

This is what she thought about during that holiday season: “I knew in the back of my head that he was doing that to somebody else and making them feel like the way he made me feel,” she said.

Released in January, she went back to Darrell, and soon she was pregnant with his child.

Naturally, you’re wondering why she would allow herself to be abused like this. Lauren does too.

But police and mental health professionals and social workers see these situations all of the time.

Lauren defied her family and court-ordered supervisors, who all knew the root of her problem.

She was sent back out in April. “We were going to have a baby, so I needed to make money.”

This time, Darrell was more careful, creating an online ad, rather than having her work the casino floors.

On her second trip out, she was again arrested, with police apparently relying on an anonymous informant.

“Once I got caught, it was like, ‘Oh wow, this is old,’ ” she said. “I was tired of lying and lying. Once you lie, you have to keep lying.”

And with this simple and yet improbable epiphany, the fight to reclaim herself began.

One woman’s escape from human trafficking

LEILA NAVIDI
Lauren, 18, with her five-month-old son at their home in Las Vegas on Wednesday, March 14, 2012.

By J. Patrick Coolican (contact)
Tuesday, April 3, 2012 | 2:01 a.m.

Lauren – Former Prostitute Part II
Launch slideshow »

J. Patrick Coolican

Sun archives
Part I: A journey from good student to underage prostitute (April 2, 2012)
Life after prostitution: Bill would erase convictions in some cases (March 7, 2011)

In April 2011, Lauren was 17 and again in lockup. She had been charmed by a man she thought was her boyfriend but who turned out to be a violent pimp. He was the father of their unborn child.

“He had me so far gone,” she reflected.

She had been lying for months to her mom, sister and court supervisors, who all suspected the origins of her problems.

“I wanted to tell the truth, but I didn’t want to hurt him,” she said. “I knew if I told the truth, we would be finished.”

This time, after repeated arrests and abuse, something inside her told her this was it. She was finished.

“I told them the truth,” she said.

Her boyfriend, who essentially enslaved her, was convicted of “pandering,” which is the legal term for pimping.

Lauren’s story offers a window into the horrifying world of human trafficking. The Las Vegas Valley has one of the worst human trafficking problems in the nation, with three times the number of juvenile arrests as New York City, despite the fact that we have only one-fourth the population. The wink and nod attitude toward prostitution here gives the wrong impression to tourists and conventioneers that it’s legal, which in turn creates a significant market for traffickers.

Shared Hope International, a group dedicated to eradicating human trafficking and that grades states on the efficacy of their trafficking laws, gives us an “F.” The Polaris Project, which has the same mission, gives us a slightly better grade.

This being Nevada, there aren’t enough resources to help children escape.

A small community of activists, police officers, social workers and others are fighting the good fight, however, and without them, Lauren might still be enslaved.

Youth Advocate Programs, Inc., a national nonprofit group that seeks to keep children out of jail, worked closely with Lauren to help her free herself.

Her youth advocate at the time, Shawnette Roque, spent 7 1/2 hours with Lauren every week. Lauren also attended group sessions and saw a therapist.

The question we all have is why a young woman, who is obviously bright and responsible, would fall victim to this predator.

Alexis Kennedy, a UNLV criminologist and expert in human trafficking, likens it to domestic violence, though to make matters worse, Lauren was so young she wasn’t able to confront her accuser.

“They get swept off their feet, and they don’t have the emotional tools to deal with it. She believed she was in a relationship. That is how they get them,” Kennedy said.

As Lauren said, “I felt like I did something wrong to him because I told the truth, like I should be apologizing to him.”

She slowly began to see the reality, however: that he was treating her, as she put, like “a human ATM machine.”

“Even with the struggle, she became grounded and knew what she wanted to do,” Roque said. “When she set her mind on something, good or bad, she could do it. Once we got her to focus on the good, things started to go well.”

Roque said the unplanned pregnancy seemed to snap Lauren to attention.

“She’s a big time reader. So I’d take her to the library, and she’s reading pregnancy books and telling me things I’d never heard of,” Roque said.

Her son was born last fall. He looks more and more like his father all the time, Lauren said.

Lauren passed her GED and enrolled at the College of Southern Nevada, winning a scholarship from Youth Advocate Programs. She lives with her mom, who is working on starting a nonprofit to help families who are surviving the ordeal of human trafficking.

Lauren’s first goal is to earn an associates degree and become a paralegal, but someday she might like to be a lawyer, maybe prosecuting human traffickers.