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.

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When did our ancestors first use fire? That’s been a long-running debate, and now a new study concludes the earliest firm evidence comes from about one million years ago in a South African cave.

The ash and burnt bone samples found there suggest fires frequently burned in that spot, researchers said on Monday.

Over the years, some experts have cited evidence of fire from as long as 1.5 million years ago, and some have argued it was used even earlier, a key step toward evolution of a larger brain. It’s a tricky issue. Even if you find evidence of an ancient blaze, how do you know it wasn’t just a wildfire?

The new research makes “a pretty strong case” for the site in South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave, said Francesco Berna of Boston University, who presents the work with colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One expert said the new finding should be considered together with a previous discovery nearby, of about the same age. Burnt bones also have been found in the Swartkrans cave, not far from the new site, and the combination makes a stronger case than either one alone, said Anne Skinner of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the new study.

Another expert unconnected with the work, Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in The Netherlands, said by email that while the new research does not provide “rock solid” evidence, it suggests our ancestors probably did use fire there at that time.

The ancestors probably brought burning material from natural blazes into the cave to establish the fires, said Michael Chazan of the University of Toronto, a study author. Stone tools at the site suggest the ancestors were Homo erectus, a species known from as early as about two million years ago.

The scientists didn’t find signs of fire preparation, like a hearth or a deep pit. But Berna said it’s unlikely the fires were simply natural blazes, such as from lightning strikes.

That’s because the evidence shows repeated fires burned deep inside the cave, he said. The cave entrance is almost 30 metres away, and because of changes in the cave over the past one million years, the entrance was apparently even farther away when the fires burned, he said. In contrast, he said, the bones at Swartkrans could have been burned by a natural fire in the open before winding up in that cave.

The scientists also found no sign that the Wonderwerk cave fires were ignited by spontaneous combustion of bat guano, which they called a rare but documented event.

Berna and colleagues describe animal bones that show discolouring and a chemical signature of being heated. They also report microscopic bits of ash in excavated dirt from the cave, indicating burning of light material like leaves, grasses and twigs. And they found evidence of heating in samples of fractured stone.

Several lines of evidence suggest the material was heated within the cave rather than blown or washed in from outside.

It’s not clear what the fires were used for. While the burnt bones suggest cooking, the ancestors might have eaten the meat raw and tossed the bones into the fire, Berna noted. Other possible uses might be warmth, light and protection from wild animals, he said.

by Ian Drucker

As Christians we hear many sermons, messages and preaching about salvation. “This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3-4).

The message of salvation by God’s grace, through our faith in Jesus Christ, is the foundation or cornerstone that brought each of us to where we are in our spiritual journey. Yet, it is only the beginning. Satan’s ultimate goal in this battle of “Spiritual Warfare” is our spiritual destruction. Once he realizes that we can not be destroyed, because of our faith in Jesus Christ, he will focus on getting us to sin. His desire is for us to fall to temptation, and sin against God. That is because when we sin it hurts God.

I believe and I know from my own campaign of spiritual warfare that there is often a disconnection between an understanding of salvation, and a sure knowledge that we can live victoriously for Jesus. When I first became a Christian I concentrated so much on the fact that I was a sinner in need of a savior, that I disregarded the call to live my life in a manner pleasing to Jesus. I had, in a sense, a fatalistic attitude. I accepted the fact that I was a sinner so much so, that I believed that I would continue to sin. Satan took advantage of this, of course, and deceived me into thinking that it was OK for me to indulge in my sinful desires. This did, to some degree, contribute to the rationalization of my continued sin (my addiction to Internet Porn).

Don’t get me wrong, I know that I am responsible for my sin. We are all responsible for our own desires, thoughts, words and actions. I know, as indicated in James 1:14, that my own evil desires led to my being dragged away and enticed. In addition, please understand that there is a huge difference between falling to an occasional temptation, and willfully continuing in a repetitive pattern of sin that has become a major part of life (as in my case). I lacked a complete understanding, which hindered my growth in the early stages of my walk. Therefore, I was not equipped well enough to fight the good fight. I did not have the proper perspective or an adequate understanding of all that Christ had done for me through His work on the cross. I took it only as an issue of salvation. Unfortunately for me, this resulted in a continuation of my repetitive sin (my indulgence in Internet Porn) for many more years.

I want all Christians, especially those struggling with an addiction to Internet Porn (or any addiction for that matter), to understand that salvation is just the beginning of your new life. Rejoice in the fact that you are a child of God, and share this good news with anyone that you can. However, do not subscribe to the same way of thinking that I did when I was a babe in Christ. I want you to know in your heart and believe that you can, through Jesus, be victorious over a repetitive pattern of sin or addiction. More than that, I want you to know that you are called to live in a manner that is pleasing to God. You must give up your addiction! Consider Ephesians 2:1-10. Before we walked with Christ we were dead in our transgressions and sins, and we followed the ways of the world and the ruler of the Kingdom of the air (Satan). Now, we are dead to sin and alive in Christ. We must now do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The sooner you are exposed to and believe in this, the sooner you will be successful in battle. Realize that when you became a Christian you became a spiritual warrior for Jesus, and you now live to please Him.

“Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs – he wants to please his commanding officer” (2 Timothy 2:3-4).

You must understand that by putting on the Armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-20) you will be properly equipped, and you can be victorious against the enemy.

Hello, my name is Ian J. Drucker. I will be writing a column for this publication on the subject of Internet Porn. I am the President of IMD Ministries, which I founded with my wife (Marti). I will be sharing a lot about my life, my personal struggles with this addiction, how my addiction impacted my marriage, and most importantly how this addiction drove me to my knees in prayer begging God for deliverance.

Yanicke Sharpe
Plz make a fare vote on who rock this dress better!

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Andrea Fluffy Jones
SHARPE LOOKS VERY SHARP

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Nna-ydujeaturheartout Sharpe
DI ONE PAN DI LEFT TTEK DI CAKE

38 minutes ago · Like

Yanicke Sharpe
THIS SHIT FACE GAL IS SO BRITE THINK SHE CAN WALK IN MY SHOES IN LOOKS,SHAPE R DRESSING!!!!!!! SHE MUST B HAVING A LOOOL

21 minutes ago · Like

Nna-ydujeaturheartout Sharpe
i meant di one pan di right sorry cuzz!!! lol

Hiccup for Beenie Man
Cecelia Campbell-Livingston
Tuesday, April 03, 2012

DANCEHALL artiste Beenie Man’s performance on this evening BET’s 106 & Park will not happen. The Grammy-winning deejay was expected to perform Gunshot with hip-hop artiste Nicki Minaj.
The track is the first single on Nicki Minaj’s new album Pink Friday and was recorded at Anchor Recording Studio in St Andrew a few weeks ago.
Beenie Man, whose real name is Moses Davis, is the holder of a valid United States visa. However, he has no work permit, which is needed for this evening’s performance.
The artiste’s publicist Claude Mills told the Jamaica Observer that the deejay has no intention of violating his visa, so he will miss the performance.
“If he had gone ahead and performed on 106 and Park, it would have been a clear violation of his visa,” Mills said.
He said Beenie Man had been invited some time ago by Minaj’s team to perform on the show with her. His management team agreed, not knowing it would have posed a problem.
According to Mills, on Sunday, a visa consultant advised them on the issue.
“Whenever you do a live performance on BET or MTV, you are paid a performance royalty and that would be deemed work,” the publicist explained.
106 & Park has been a strong promotional avenue for Jamaican artistes looking to break into the mainstream media. Had Beenie Man performed on the show today, it would have been his third appearance.
In April 2010, the visas of several highprofile dancehall artistes including Beenie Man, Bounty Killer and Mavado were cancelled by the United States. No reason was given for the cancellations. Beenie Man was reissued a visitor’s visa the summer of the same year.
Beenie Man is currently working on his new album.
“He will be dropping some hot tracks and he also has some international collabs lined up for the album,” Mills said.
He is enjoying fair amount of airplay with the single Wine Wine which features Boom.
In 2001, Beenie Man won a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album with his effort Art and Life.
On Friday, the deejay will be in performance in Portland; two days later he will be in action at the Cran Wata Boston Jerk Festival. Easter Monday will see Beenie Man at the International Kite Festival in St Ann, then later on in the evening he is scheduled to perform in St Catherine at the Portmore Seafood Festival.