13 and 14 year old girls...............real brave................pathetic...............and the US gov just lets it fester...............and was behind it the whole time.............b/c they are recruiting girls for child molesters...........in high US gov positions......



New Girls, Same Danger  

Jacquelyn, a Honduran, arrived to the United States in 2014. She was 14 years old -- the same age Vanessa was in 2010, the year an MS13 in Virginia forced her into prostitution -- when she began to attend a high school in Maryland.
Neither Jacquelyn nor two of her friends, who were also Honduran, spoke a word of English when they started classes, which was not necessarily a problem since the school had a high percentage of Latinos, most of whom were from Central America. The three girls, who soon began to fall behind in their studies, did not lack for friends or, at least, people with whom they could communicate.

What the young teenager -- Vanessa was just 14 at the time -- told police is a story that goes far beyond the parameters of an adolescent escape.

Soon, bilingual social workers from Montgomery County began to notice, via their body language or the idioms they used, that Jacquelyn and her friends were displaying “sexually open behavior,” as one of the social workers called it. The school began to conduct preliminary interviews.
“One of the girls, who was 14 years old, told me she was taking birth control pills, and we discovered she had a very active sex life,” reads one report that Montgomery's government council heard during a meeting in January 2015.
The session was dedicated to discussing the challenges social service agencies faced in attending to the needs of the thousands of undocumented, unaccompanied minors who had crossed the United States' southern border the previous summer and had ended up in Maryland.
During the fall semester of 2014, a student at Jacquelyn's high school told a counselor that Jacquelyn, “one of the new girls that doesn't speak English,” had offered to provide sex in exchange for $25.
The social workers at the school determined that Jacquelyn had made the same offer to other students. During an interview with a counselor, Jacquelyn admitted to everything. After listening in silence for a moment to the counselor, Jacquelyn responded: “Ma'am, thank you for your advice, but I don't know what the big deal is. I have done this with men since I was a girl. That's how I have lived. For me, it's not a problem.”
A follow-up investigation left open the possibility that Jacquelyn has been subjected to sexual abuse since she was very young in Honduras.
“It is very possible, based on what we have seen, that the abuse, which began in Honduras, has continued in the home here in Maryland. This is a girl with profound trauma, who has symptoms almost of post-traumatic stress,” said one social worker familiar with the case.
Jacquelyn's physical description, above all the way in which she dressed, matches that of other Central American youths, who have been interviewed by social workers in Maryland after having escaped from their homes. “Some of the girls talk of having been in houses where there is prostitution in Wheaton -- some 20 kilometers from downtown Washington,” one social workers said.
One of the social workers consulted for this report -- who has attended to at-risk youths in Maryland, New York, and New Jersey over the past decade -- believes that the arrival of thousand of girls to the DC area that have been exposed to the worst forms of sexual abuse has created a sort of “perfect storm” for the expansion of prostitution rings of Central Americans.
“It is not just the gangs. There are also other individuals who take advantage of these girls that leave their homes. In many cases the girls are continue being raped and sexually exploited,” the social worker, who agreed to talk on this subject under condition of anonymity, explained.
Jacquelyn, the Honduran, has been the victim of abuse and rape.
Vanessa, the Salvadoran, had been raped before ending up in the prostitution ring run in Virginia by Alexander Rivas, alias “Casper,” a member of the MS13.
At least two of the adolescents who served as witnesses in the judicial cases against Amaya and Adonay Fuentes had also been abused before being forced into prostitution.
Between 2009 and 2012, the period of time in which the federal courts in Alexandria, Virginia prosecuted Amaya, Rivas, and Fuentes, the MS13 began the evolutionary process referred to by officers George Norris and Bill Woolf, in which the gang transitioned from a culture focused on territorial control and use of violence to one centered on profit-making illicit industries. In the United States, extortion operations are more complicated than in El Salvador. This is why prostitution became an important source of income for the gangs, according to two federal agents consulted for this report.

SEE ALSO: MS13 News and Profiles

“When they saw that [prostitution] was working well for a few clicas or a few gang members, the word got out,” explained one of the agents.
When asked about the prevalence of prostitution rings linked to the MS13 in their jurisdiction, police sources in Prince George's County, Maryland declined to comment about specific cases “in order to not interfere with open investigations.” That means there are currently open investigations into these types of cases.
In any event, the figures show a sustained increase in the number of sex trafficking cases reported in Maryland during this decade. The number of reported cases doubled between 2012 and 2013, and that figure remained stable in 2014. Last year, according to statistics compiled by the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC), authorities in Maryland responded to a sex trafficking case every four days; during the first three months of 2015, it became every 2.5 days.
Victims of sex crimes represent around 70 percent of all human trafficking cases in the world, according to the NHTRC. In Maryland, between January and March 2015, one out of every two victims was a foreigner, like Vanessa, or Jane, or the other girls who belonged to the MS13 in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC. Or like the girl prostitutes who worked in motels and apartments that, according to thug rules, are raped after a long day of work attending to their clients.
*Hector Silva Avalos is a Research Fellow at American University's Center for Latin American & Latino Studies and the editor of Revista Factum, an online media outlet that focuses on El Salvador.