Experts battle Hmong crisis

On a Friday morning in September, St. Paul police officer Craig Nelson was driving through Frogtown when he noticed a boy strolling along eating a sweet roll.

Nelson pulled over. "Why aren't you in school?" he asked.

The boy shrugged. "I missed my bus," he said.

Nelson put him in the back of his squad car. The boy gave an address -- coincidentally, the same house Nelson was already headed to on his way to check on a runaway Hmong girl. The boy told him that the girl was his sister and that she was back home and attending school. A check of the school district's computers confirmed it, and Nelson scratched another name off his list.

The girl joined 83 other Asian juveniles who had been reported as runaways in the first eight months of the year and were later found. Most of them, authorities say, were Hmong girls.

The runaways either came home on their own, were found by police, or were tracked down by a new police and sheriff's department task force that focuses on finding runaway Hmong girls.

Last fall, the four-person task force started knocking on doors of parents, friends and relatives, actively searching for missing youths. It's a departure from the standard practice for dealing with most teenage runaways, where departments merely enter kids' names into a national database and occasionally check with the parents to see if they have returned.

The task force was formed because so many Hmong girls run away, and so many of them are victimized when they do.

Hmong girls often run away to escape traditional responsibilities at home -- cooking, cleaning and caring for their younger siblings. But studies show that the longer a child stays away from home, the greater the chance the runaway will be sexually exploited.

And runaway Hmong girls face a particular danger: Hmong gangs.

Over the past seven years or so, law enforcement officials, social workers and school employees have tried to address the growing problem. Earlier initiatives faded from lack of money, a fate those involved hope will not befall relatively new efforts such as the task force and an employee training program by the St. Paul public schools.

The St. Paul Police Department and the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office assembled the task force in an effort to stop gangs from raping runaway Hmong girls and working them as prostitutes.

The unit has been so successful, said its leader, Ramsey County Sgt. Bill Snyder, that the organizers want to expand it to all runaway youth in St. Paul.

After a halting start last fall, the unit kicked in full time in January. In the first six months of the year, 137 Asian juveniles were reported as runaways, down 12 percent over 156 in the same period last year.

"Kids that I saw when I first started doing this were reported missing on a constant basis," Nelson said. "They'd come home, leave, come home, leave. We'd be looking for them all the time. We don't see as many of those.

"And I think the word gets out, too. 'Hey, we're out looking for kids,' whereas we didn't do that before."

The idea for the program emerged from the Hmong Youth Task Force in Ramsey County, an ad hoc body of volunteers from law enforcement, schools and community organizations who were determined to stop the rapes and divert boys from gangs.

Besides the aggressive effort to track down runaways, the group also prompted St. Paul schools to train their staff to look for signs of rape and prostitution among their students -- especially Hmong girls.

Task force members squeeze time from their regular jobs to work on these initiatives, and many volunteer after work. The task force itself has neither government funding nor support from private foundations, though, and even some of the most enthusiastic members fear it will wither away.

One Ramsey County Sheriff's Office program to track down runaways got the ax in 1999 just as it was earning trust in the Hmong community. And after-school and summer programs that keep Hmong youth occupied have seen their budgets slashed in recent years.

St. Paul police Sgt. Richard Straka, an Asian gang expert and task force member, said such programs have failed because people haven't cared enough about the victims.

"We've stomped up and down and we've yelled and screamed," he said. "We want to do something about it."

Missing and at risk

St. Paul police say they get more than 300 missing-persons reports a year on Asian youths. Snyder, an expert on Asian gangs, said the actual number of runaways might be double what's reported.

Many Hmong parents won't call police when their children disappear. Some who have called said it did no good, so they didn't call the next time.

Straka, citing his decade of work in the Hmong community, figures that at least a quarter of the runaways end up being sexually exploited.

In the past, police said, they didn't go looking for most runaways. Nearly all of them returned within a week. If police happened to find them, they simply took them to a safe place, but the children often ran away again after officers left. No one routinely asked the children why they ran or what happened when they were on the streets.

Now an officer sifts through missing-persons reports each morning and pulls out the Asian cases. When they find the youths, they ask questions: Where have you been? Who were you with? Was there any drug use or sex involved?

When officers caught up with Jenny Vang, then 17, missing for a few days last fall, they were relieved to learn she was all right. Still, they methodically asked questions and documented her answers.

Her father, Pang Se Vang, had reported her gone. When police arrived at his house to get information about Jenny, he was frustrated. "Kids that grow up in the United States are like animals -- uncontrollable," he said as a Hmong police officer translated.

Officers searched his daughter's room for clues and took a notebook with scribbled names and addresses to guide their search.

Their first stop was to see a friend of Jenny's a few blocks away. No Jenny.

On the way to another house listed in the notebook, the officers stopped to chat with a group of Hmong girls near a St. Paul playground. They knew Jenny, but said they didn't know where she was.

The officers got a call saying Jenny had returned home. But instead of closing the case, they drove to her house and quizzed her about where she had been.

Try, and try again

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher had seen gang trouble coming in the mid-1990s. He recruited volunteers to work with Hmong youths in scouting and tutorial programs. In 1997, he started a runaway intervention program aimed at Hmong children. Deputies called truant children's families, helped them get social services and persuaded many children to return to school.

Fletcher lured Snyder, the Asian gangs expert, from the St. Paul Police Department to oversee the program. But Fletcher dropped the program two years later because of tight budgets.

So Snyder went to Kathryn Santelmann Richtman, a Ramsey County prosecutor who was still upset about the 1998 rape and murder of Pa Nhia Lor, 13, of St. Paul. The girl had been a chronic runaway and truant, and county officials were frustrated by their inability to protect her.

Richtman recalls Snyder sitting down and saying, " 'What are we going to do about Hmong runaway girls?' And he really challenged me to think bigger and better."

They rallied a group that proposed what they called the Ramsey County Runaway Project. It would have paired an officer and a social worker in each of three St. Paul police districts to help find, debrief and counsel runaways and their families.

In their grant application, the group cited a dramatic upsurge in the number of Minnesota runaways in the 1990s. After age 13, girls were far more likely to run than boys.

The Ramsey County attorney's office applied for federal and foundation grants in 1999 to fund the project, estimated to cost $806,000 a year. The proposal fell flat.

"It was an idea whose time just hadn't come, and so we put it on the back burner," Richtman said.

Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner said the Hmong Youth Task Force is an effort to turn up the heat. Gang rape and prostitution of young girls is not unique to the Hmong community, she said. "And our concern isn't focused just on the Hmong community. It just seems like the problem ... has disproportionately affected Hmong young girls and that the consequences of the issue, the fallout of the issue, is aggravated because of cultural issues."

Empty pockets

Members of the Hmong Youth Task Force hope that the entire community will get concerned now. Otherwise, some fear it will fade away.

"It's great that we have this Hmong task force, but at the same time, it's not really institutionalized. It's just all of us volunteers," said Ilean Her, executive director of the Council on Asian-Pacific Minnesotans. The only Hmong women's organizations represented on the task force -- Hmong Women's Peace and the Women's Association of Hmong and Lao -- went under for lack of money.

Fletcher said money for social service programs has been short since the terrorism attacks in 2001. Federal grant money supporting a Hmong youth literacy program dropped from $193,000 in 2000 to $18,000 in 2005, he said. He has scaled back the program from two locations to one.

Budget pressures have constrained investigative efforts, too.

Kevin Navara, a Ramsey County deputy assigned to the Minnesota Gang Strike Force, said just six investigators in the state specialize in Hmong gang rape and prostitution cases. Three are on the Strike Force, which has narrowly avoided elimination for several years.

Over the objections of its officers, the Legislature agreed this year to turn the force into a statewide drug strike force, though the gang unit will be preserved in the metro area.

"You know, we need more money, more manpower," Navara said. With two more investigators, he estimated, "we'd come up with another half-dozen cases a week."

Teaching the teachers

In 2004, task force volunteers began work on a video to train school employees to spot girls who have been sexually exploited.

"Every year, hundreds of our students begin skipping classes, become chronically truant, run away, and far too many of them have been forced into gangs, drugs and juvenile prostitution," Raymond Yu, director of student services for St. Paul public schools, said in the video. "We are talking about St. Paul school girls -- nearly all Hmong -- and some as young as 10."

There's a paradox about Hmong runaways. They often keep going to class even if they don't go home at night. They may miss a day here and there, but school attendance records show Hmong girls are less likely than any other language group to be flagged as chronically truant.

That makes it harder for the county's truancy program to detect a problem with the girls and intervene. Jeanne Hall, who for many years oversaw the school district's truancy efforts, said she noticed that a number of Hmong girls were skipping school, but not enough to activate truancy intervention. That worried her, she said, because trends in the tightly knit Hmong community can catch fire. So the district now works more closely with the runaway task force to find the children.

Jim Bierma, a crisis counselor who helped produce the district's training video, said in May that it was making a difference. Social workers and counselors reported that they had been unaware of how serious the problem had become, he said.

"I know that people have their eye out more," he said. "I'm getting probably double, maybe even triple the number of the referrals for Hmong girls that I used to get."

The video highlights research by the Midwest Children's Resource Center that underscores the horrors Hmong girls go through at the hands of gang members. Laurel Edinburgh, a pediatric nurse practitioner there, applied for a grant to conduct follow-up interviews with the girls and help them obtain services. But the federal Department of Health and Human Services rejected the request in October 2004. At first, she struggled to get by on a $21,000 grant from Children's Hospital Association. Her boss, Dr. Carolyn Levitt, said Edinburgh did much of the work on her own time.

More recently, the resource center, a division of Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, got three other grants totaling $63,000 for Edinburgh to continue her work.

In a recent e-mail to the newspaper, Edinburgh said:

"I continue to have new referrals and girls continue to be raped when they have run away from home ... sigh."

The writers are at dbrowning@startribune.com

and plouwagie@startribune.com.