A Businessman’s Charity Uses Education and Dedication to Aid Teenagers

“You’re so pretty, you should be a model.”

“You’ve run away from home? I’ll give you a place to stay.”

“Come with me. I can take you away from your problems.”

In shopping malls, at concerts, and on the Internet, children who are troubled or just a little lost get recruited into prostitution and pornography with lines like those, says Susan L. Breault, executive director of the Paul & Lisa Program, in Essex, Conn.

The number of kids who are successfully enticed is escalating, according to experts, but the youngsters who have seen Ms. Breault’s presentations are at least armed with the information to know better.

At more than 150 schools and 20 universities, mostly in the Northeast, the Paul & Lisa Program has tried to dissuade young people from ever going into the sex business.

“It’s not a happily ever after,” Ms. Breault warns each classroom audience.

Started in 1980, the charity was one of the first groups in the United States to put child involvement in commercial sex at the center of its program.

It began after Frank N. Barnaba, then a sales executive with a water-treatment company, was stranded in a snowstorm at an all-night restaurant in Connecticut. He met a young woman there, the Lisa in the group’s name, who “opened up like a ton of bricks about her life.” He and his wife helped the girl — who had worked in massage parlors and as a prostitute — get into therapy, out of sex work, and off drugs, but Mr. Barnaba was away on business when Lisa, 19, went to pick up money owed to her. She did not return, and was later found dead.

“I went crazy,” Mr. Barnaba says now. When he emerged from a deep depression, he consulted with officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who suggested that he start a nonprofit group for kids involved in prostitution as a way to do something positive in Lisa’s memory.

Since then, the Paul & Lisa Program — the Paul is for St. Paul’s Church, in Westbrook, Conn., which provided initial funds — has become a recognized leader in providing education on the child-sex trade to both children and people who work with kids, like police officers, teachers, and social workers.

The group also offers judges an alternative to handing out jail sentences for people arrested for prostitution. The five-day series of lectures, discussions, workbook exercises, and relaxation sessions attempts to give sex workers the confidence and the resources — including treatment referrals — to redirect their lives.

The Midtown Community Court, in New York, now runs the alternative-sentencing program created by Paul & Lisa, and the charity is providing the program itself in Hartford and introducing it in Waterbury, Conn.

Paul & Lisa also ventures out onto the street. At night once a week in Manhattan, Mr. Barnaba, who is the group’s president, accompanied by four volunteers and sometimes Ms. Breault, approaches prostitutes to see if they would be receptive to leaving the sex trade. “You can’t save everybody,” Mr. Barnaba, 66, says. “So we try to zero in on young people who still have hope and who really want to leave.”

Shelter and Therapy

Among the charity’s success stories are former prostitutes who are now medical doctors, psychologists, and nurses, he says. But that kind of turnaround comes only after years of work.

First, Mr. Barnaba tries to find homes for his clients, whether they be with grandparents, with friends of the charity’s, or with programs like Children of the Night, a Van Nuys, Calif., organization that shepherds former prostitutes off the streets. The group then tries to set its clients up with therapists, paying all fees, and to place them in jobs.

With such a small number of people trying to rescue prostitutes on the street, Ms. Breault, a former corporate secretary to Mr. Barnaba, says that for her group, prevention is key to making a big dent in the sex trade.

“Your first line of defense has got to be education and awareness,” she says, “because everything else is catch-up.” That’s a point she’ll be making as a steering-committee member of the new U.S. Campaign Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, which involves more than two dozen groups from around the country.

Classroom Programs

The Paul & Lisa program offers its Sexual Exploitation Prevention Program to school systems in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, and has helped to spread similar efforts in Canada.

In it, the speakers — usually Ms. Breault and a volunteer, although sometimes Mr. Barnaba attends — describe the types of appeals pimps and pornographers make to vulnerable kids, and they talk in plain terms about the daily lives of sex workers, including the violence they face and the demands pimps make on them. They also show slides of some of the young people they have worked with on the street, including kids who did not escape the trade.

And they describe the newest venues for child involvement in commercial sex: the Internet, where pornography is easily available and young people are easily recruited for online and offline sexual deals, and escort services, which, Ms. Breault says, are increasingly luring teenagers and college students to their rolls.

The speakers’ goals are twofold: to prevent students from getting recruited by the sex industry, and to discourage them from becoming customers themselves.

Explaining that most of the people who work as prostitutes and pose in nude photographs were in abusive situations before they turned to sex work, Ms. Breault tells anyone who might think of buying sex to reconsider. “This is just a revictimization,” she says, “and the money they are spending doesn’t help to support the girl, but goes into the pockets of a child exploiter.”

Laura Barnitz, program associate at Youth Advocate Program International, in Washington, and a coordinator of the U.S. Campaign, says that Paul & Lisa excels at challenging the images of the sex trade that children see in popular culture. “It is very important that young people understand that a lot of the glamorous mythology about prostitution is not real,” she says. “And that they also understand that choices that may seem innocent in social settings may lead to very complicated consequences.”

Winning Credibility

In its gatherings with students, the group distributes a guide to keeping children safe from online pornography, which is intended for sharing with parents, and a prevention magazine it publishes for parents and teenagers called Risk.

But speakers from the Paul & Lisa Program get much of their credibility with the students from knowing the prostitutes in the slide presentation they give, says Joseph A. Gargano, a business teacher at a high school in suburban New Fairfield, Conn. “It’s not just a Jane Doe up there, but it is Susie or Sally,” he says.

Mr. Gargano started inviting the Paul & Lisa Program to his school 15 years ago after he saw a workshop by the group at a law conference; he is now on its board. “The kids are astounded by what they see at the presentation,” he says. “They think they live in a utopia and it can’t happen to them.”

Ms. Breault would like to develop a workbook curriculum and a CD-ROM that could be used in schools across the country, but she has had trouble attracting the money necessary for such a project. Paul & Lisa receives some support from community foundations, corporations, and the Connecticut state government, but most of its $125,000 annual budget comes from individuals.

It is especially hard generating money for the group’s street-outreach program. “Nobody wants to help you save a person like this, because they have the feeling that these are really the scum of the earth,” says Mr. Barnaba.

But that doesn’t stop Mr. Barnaba from doing the work he started in Lisa’s name. “You spend your own money because you can’t walk away from these kids,” he says. “They need you.”