Tuesday, March 23, 2004 | 10:48 a.m.
With the number of child prostitution arrests rising in Las Vegas, a group of local social service officials is exploring the possibility of setting up a rehabilitation facility to help young prostitutes turn their lives around.
The proposal, conceived by Kathleen Boutin of the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth, is to establish a program in Las Vegas that is modeled after the Children of the Night program in suburban Los Angeles.
Children of the Night operates a 24-bed home for former child prostitutes from across the United States. At the home, the children can attend a private on-site school, receive counseling and learn life skills.
Of the 14 youths at the Children of the Night home last week, five were from Las Vegas, said Lois Lee, the founder and director of the program.
Metro Police have arrested 34 children on prostitution charges this year, as of Monday. They arrested 148 last year, 126 in 2002; 122 in 2001; and 77 in 2000, according to Metro records.
The number of arrests is the reason Las Vegas needs its own home modeled after Children of the Night, proponents say.
"We had over 100 females under the age of 18 arrested for prostitution last year," Boutin said. "We couldn't possibly send all of them to their facility. There's no place for these judges to send them."
Board members of the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth and other social service professionals will be visiting Children of the Night today to tour the facility, ask questions and eat lunch with the girls who are staying there. They want to learn whether such a program would work in Las Vegas.
They are looking at two possibilities: establishing a program housed in WestCare, a nonprofit health and human services agency, which would cost an estimated $600,000; or building a facility, which may cost twice that amount, Candace Kidd, director of the women and children's campus at WestCare, said.
The Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth would do the fund-raising for the program, Boutin said.
While Children of the Night takes in boy and girl prostitutes, the Las Vegas program would accept only girls.
As is the case with Children of the Night, the program proposed for Las Vegas would allow girls who are arrested for prostitution to agree to be sent to the facility instead of being locked up in a juvenile detention center.
Kidd said keeping local children in Las Vegas while they are becoming rehabilitated would be a plus.
"I personally think kids should receive treatment in their own community so they can stay integrated in their community and stay connected with their family," she said.
The concern is to keep the girls in a safe place where the pimps can't find them, she said.
"How do we keep them safe and how do we keep the pimps away?" Kidd said. "I can't tell you we have an answer to that right now."
And, she said, there may be some cases in which sending the children away from Las Vegas would be a positive thing, depending on how entrenched they are in the life of prostitution.
The child prostitution problem in Las Vegas has been on the radar screen of the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth since the agency's inception in 1999, Boutin said.
Five years ago an anonymous benefactor approached WestCare with the idea of establishing a Children of the Night-inspired program in Las Vegas, Kidd said.
WestCare officials were asked to write up a proposal at the request of the benefactor, but, Kidd said, "for whatever reason that benefactor didn't come forward with the money."
After the trip to Children of the Night, Boutin said board members of the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth plan to have a roundtable luncheon to discuss their options.
A 10-year-old local program called Stop Turning Out Child Prostitutes emphasizes rehabilitation and gives juveniles the option of going to Children of the Night after their arrest. Metro vice detectives, the Clark County Juvenile Probation Department and local judges participate in the program.
One of the key participants, Metro Sgt. Gil Shannon, is withholding his opinion as to whether a program similar to Children of the Night would work in Las Vegas.
He did say, however, that Children of the Night has "worked out just fine. They're taking all the kids we can send them. We have a good working relationship with them, they run an excellent program, they are consistent and they've been around for years."
The program is based on behavior modification and removing the children from the environment in which they worked as prostitutes, and that is key in rehabilitating them, Shannon said.
Shannon wondered how the children's behavior could be modified in a city that has billboards, ads on the backs of taxicabs and pamphlets on the streets that are fronts for prostitution.
He compared it to "having an (Alcoholics Anonymous) meeting next to a liquor store."
But having additional resources in Las Vegas to address the problem wouldn't be a bad thing, Shannon said.
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