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PASSING THE BUCK

Catching up with missing teens before they get into trouble on the streets is essential, and the wider the net is cast, the better. No one jurisdiction or agency has the necessary authority and reach — except the state government.

Florida’s clearinghouse, for instance, collects and disseminates information on missing persons among all law-enforcement agencies in the state, and maintains a Web site with hundreds of photographs. Iowa’s clearinghouse often contacts relatives to get photos for its Web page, says Jeannie Dowd, the state’s clearinghouse manager. Ohio’s clearinghouse, run by the state’s attorney general, has launched a number of innovative initiatives, including one that enlists the help of the state’s truckers.

People interviewed for this article by the Phoenix repeatedly mentioned the need for a centralized effort by the state. But Massachusetts’s Executive Office of Public Safety (EOPS), which includes the state police, doesn’t consider tracking missing persons a state function. "We don’t have the most significant role in that," says EOPS spokeswoman Katie Ford. "That’s handled mostly through the local police departments."

If the state won’t do it, and the local police won’t do it, what about the DSS?

Of those 210 children and juveniles on the December 1 list, nearly half were reported missing by a foster parent or a DSS caseworker. Andrea Magaw, for instance, had been at the state-run residential Walden Street School for Girls in Concord before she was transitioned to foster care. "She was put into the residential [school] because she cannot make decisions on her own," says Magaw’s mother. "They wanted to keep her there, but funding was an issue."

Despite being the legal guardian of so many of these missing children, "we haven’t established a protocol within DSS for when one of our youths goes missing, other than contacting police, family, and friends," concedes Mia Alvarado, DSS chief of staff. "Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to do that."

DSS, along with various local offices and agencies, is now trying to develop protocols for action through a Missing Children Task Force, which Watson is chairing. Its focus, like most local efforts, is on missing girls, who comprise nearly two-thirds of missing teens and are in particular danger of sexual exploitation. Some public grant money has started flowing in, although much more is needed — especially if the effort is to expand beyond Boston to the rest of the state, and to address the quite different challenges of missing boys, adults, and the elderly.

INTO THEIR OWN HANDS

In the face of all this inaction, nongovernmental groups and individuals have stepped into the breach. Through the Licensed Private Detectives Association of Massachusetts (LPDAM), independent investigators have volunteered to help families with missing children. Beginning next month, the LPDAM’s Tom Shamshank will run a training program on finding missing persons for local law-enforcement officials at Boston University. The Molly Bish Center at Anna Maria College, in Paxton, is coordinating similar efforts.

In Boston, one of the most important efforts, specifically for girls lured into prostitution, is the A Way Back program of Roxbury YouthWorks, funded by DSS. It is often DSS’s first call after reporting a missing girl to the police. Anyone unconvinced of the scope or urgency of child sexual exploitation need only chat with A Way Back’s director, Olinka Briceno. "Right now if a kid goes missing, there isn’t much out there aside from family members and us," she says.

Briceno’s official list of missing girls, most under age 15, comes from the Boston office of DSS, but she says that plenty of young suburban family runaways head straight for the city and end up working for sex. A Way Back’s workers go directly out to the streetwalkers. "We might find that she has a friend who goes by Kiki who hangs out at Dudley Station," says Briceno. "So we find Kiki and she says ‘she’s with Diamond,’ so we track down Diamond. That’s how we usually tend to find them."

Boston police and Suffolk County prosecutors now treat underage girls turning tricks as victims rather than criminals; the DA’s Teen Prostitution Prevention Program, launched last summer, has already located some four dozen teen prostitutes, mostly runaways. "Even a year ago, a cop would walk by a 15-year-old prostitute and just tell her, ‘Take your shit and go,’" Monteiro says. "Now they will haul them in and call the NCIC [National Crime Information Center]" to see if the girl is listed as missing.

But finding them has gotten much tougher in the last year and a half, Briceno says. The show of police strength for the Democratic National Convention last summer — a lot of which stayed in place after the DNC left — drove much of the sex trade away from the long-time hot spots downtown, on Dorchester Avenue, and around Ashmont Station. "There are surveillance cameras downtown and in Chelsea. The girls and the pimps know that," Briceno says, and so now they’re starting to work more and more out of hotels and apartments.

But often when Briceno or others close in on a girl, the pimp shuffles her to another city. "They collaborate with each other, and exchange girls," she says. Briceno is currently searching for a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old both thought to be in Washington, DC. Another Boston girl is now in Las Vegas; another in New Hampshire. "The pimps collaborate a lot better than those of us doing this work."

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com.