The central Illinois truck stop was chilly and dark on the November morning last year when Mary Bohanan was arrested for prostitution. Handcuffed in a Bloomington police squad car, the year-old squirmed in her tight miniskirt and crumpled knee-high boots.
Blond-tinted curls fell around her face and dark liner rimmed her tired eyes. It was just after 5 a. As police frisked her pimp, she expressed fear that he might spot her through the squad car window and punish her for getting caught. He can see us? Instead she fell into a world of sexual exploitation that seems to be accepted as a fact of life at some of the large residential treatment centers that get millions of taxpayer dollars each year to care for Illinois' most destitute and troubled young wards, a Tribune investigation found.
The prostitution emerges against a backdrop of violence at the facilities where the threat of sexual coercion is common, residents frequently square off in fights, destroy property, abuse medications and attack peers or staff, government records show. Teenagers who were prostituted told the Tribune they would run away to escape the turbulence and brutality β then do what survival required on streets where they had no money or life skills. At the facilities, experienced residents introduced others to pimps, escort websites and street corners.
Some disappeared into this world and never returned. Rock River promises close supervision and intensive therapy to youths with behavioral and mental health problems, but state records show that Bohanan was repeatedly attacked by tougher girls β punched in the face, hit with a chair and taunted by a peer who poured a carton of milk on her bed. There's fighting, there's sexual acts going on with the peers.
Girls come out worse and have more mental problems. Bohanan started running away to the streets, according to Department of Children and Family Services records. Some Rock River staff were aware that Bohanan was being prostituted when she left the bed facility. In one incident, Rockford police brought her back with a large bruise that she said came from a beating by a local pimp, government records show.
