Photo by Madeleine Bair

On a late August morning in the midst of a northern California heat wave, LaToya Singleton-Smith predicts what the girls will look like this afternoon. “Today it’s hot,” she says. “So you’ll see them with just a few little clothes on.”

Ms. Singleton-Smith is an administrative assistant at the Children Center daycare on 47th Avenue and International Boulevard in East Oakland, and she’s sitting in its 2nd floor meeting room with her colleague Gwen Babaoye. But she’s not talking about the 20 toddlers, including her daughter, who are playing with blocks downstairs. She’s talking about the other children that the staff and clients see every day. The ones outside, walking up and down the sidewalk. The girls who wear their shirts off their shoulders and the boys often seen chasing them down the street. “All day they are out there, ten or more” Ms. Singleton-Smith says. “They are right across the street, or right in front of our entrance.”

Like Oakland, this daycare center has a child prostitution problem. And according to Ms. Babaoye, who has been working here for twelve years, it’s getting worse. Over the past nine months, the prostitutes outside their doors have been increasing in number while decreasing in age. Ms. Singleton-Smith’s observations are corroborated by a more formal analysis of prostitution in Oakland.

According to a report issued in July by the Oakland Police Department, child prostitution has approached epidemic levels. The city is known among law enforcement and pedophiles across the country as the place to find young prostitutes. Even in the Hollywood hit, Wedding Crashers, Oakland makes a cameo in dialogue referring to pimping.

The business of selling sex has received fresh attention with the recent publication of Melissa Farley’s Trafficking and Prostitution in Nevada: Making the Connections, which exposes the human rights violations behind Nevada’s legal sex trade. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has used the psychologist’s work as a platform for denouncing the brothels and strip clubs in and around Las Vegas as degrading to women.

But the selling of sex on International Boulevard is to a Nevada brothel what a liquor store dice game is to a blackjack table in a casino. The teenage girls working in front of the day care center are completely at the mercy of their pimps and their johns.
 
Ms. Babaoye is sympathetic to the prostitutes, the majority of whom are just a decade or so older than the toddlers under her care. From her office window, she can see their male or female pimps watching them from down the street while the girls pace the sidewalks.

The activity causes some unusual hindrances for a daycare center. In a residential neighborhood like this stretch of International Boulevard, a fenced playground makes for a convenient substitute for a motel room. “They come right up to the gate, push the gate open, and turn tricks right there in the yard by our trash cans,” Ms. Babaoye explains, pointing out the window to the play yard where the laughter of three year-olds drifts upwards. “We have to check the yard before kids go out because there are condoms on the street, and drug paraphernalia.”  

Parents have said that they feel uncomfortable having to walk past teenage girls soliciting johns. Recently, Ms. Babaoye recalls, “There was a girl running across the street with no bottoms on; just a camisole, at three or four o’clock in the afternoon. Parents are picking up their children, and you’re just running down the street naked.” 

Nola Brantley, a long time advocate of sexually exploited minors in Oakland, says its reputation as a center of underage prostitution is deserved. “It’s a little hub,” she says.

Exact numbers are hard to come by, but from the OPD’s report and Brantley’s experience interviewing and counseling hundreds of girls seeking to leave prostitution, a few generalizations can be made about the girls Ms. Babaoye and others see every day: the majority are fifteen years of age or younger, most are from outside of Alameda County, and many are from outside of California. The vast majority suffer reproductive health problems, and most have lived in group homes, and have suffered physical or sexual abuse in those homes.

But Ms. Brantley’s favorite number is 95 percent. That percentage refers to the girls she speaks with at juvenile hall who tell her that they want help leaving prostitution. The problem is not one of will, but one of resources. While Oakland and Alameda County are praised for the progressive collaboration between social services and law enforcement to combat child prostitution, most girls who go through the system return to the streets. “In six months, sometimes we see a girl in juvenile hall and under arrest... three or four times in six months,” says Ms. Brantley.

What she wants to see is a safe house where child prostitutes can live for a month to escape the pimps fighting to drag them back to the streets. Without that, many girls now are placed in group homes that perversely become the targets of pimps and predators looking for vulnerable girls.

Oakland’s Measure Y included a challenge grant of $225,000 to go towards the opening of such a safe house. But no such house yet exists. To Ms. Brantley and other advocates, the sum is laughable anyway. It's a fraction of what it would cost to run a 24-hour center, let alone to purchase a suitable space.

Until that center is built, the sight of teenage and pre-teen prostitutes that has over the years become a part of the landscape in many Oakland neighborhoods will stay that way. Ms. Brantley says the problem has become a horrible cycle. When she first started working with sexually exploited minors in Oakland, 80 percent came from foster care. Now, just over half come from foster homes. Prostitution is becoming an option for kids who in the past would not have considered it.

That’s why, back at the daycare center, Gwen Babaoye just wants the problem to move off her block. The center’s staff has asked the city to install cameras watching the street as it did a mile away in the Fruitvale commercial district. To Ms. Babaoye, it’s clear those cameras, installed last spring with much fanfare, have pushed all the unsavory characters to either side of it, including to her stretch of East Oakland. “They’re just going to go where the cameras aren’t,” she says.