Two years ago, Los Angeles County probation officer Michelle Guymon was asked to help child abuse experts study human trafficking. She imagined a globe-trotting break from 23 years in the trenches managing law-breaking teens. "I figured I'd be traveling the world," she said. But Guymon never left home. The human trafficking victims she studied were local girls forced into sex — not much different from the hundreds she'd encountered in juvenile hall, locked up and punished for working the streets.
"That was an 'aha' moment for me," she recalled.
Guymon had spent years in the county's probation camps "working with young girls who had come into the system as a result of a prostitution-related offense. But I never really saw those girls as being sexually exploited."
"I had more of a judgment thing: 'You need to quit that. This is not a good thing to be doing.' I thought I was a good therapist, but I missed it," she said.
"I didn't make the correlation with the girls I had been working with: These are the girls being sexually exploited. This is not just some bad choice they made."
That was then. Now Guymon is serving on a county task force charged with translating that insight into policy. Its goal? Finding ways to keep young girls out of prostitution, and young prostitutes out of the criminal justice system. Treating them, finally, not as criminals but victims.
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