Any adolescent boy who has done sex work to survive can tell at least one horror story involving tricks. Some boys can tell a hundred of these stories. Being ripped off. Being assaulted. Being forced to commit acts the boy does not want to perform. Being blackmailed. Being threatened. Being thrown out of cars. Being hungry and being fed by tricks who want something in return. Being compelled to perform in front of an entire audience of tricks. Being tied up. Being whipped. Being burned by cigarettes. Being violently fisted. Those are just a few of the stories these boys can tell.

And being raped. Especially in detention.

We do not build institutions that nurture boys. We build institutions that punish them. And then, we often wonder where their anger comes from.

I can tell you where the rage comes from. I was one of them.

I don’t have sex with boys.

I teach them how to survive. There is a difference.

I am fully aware that it is difficult for any of these boys TO GET OFF THE STREET. But that is what I tell them day in and day out. The street will kill you.

The links between sexual exploitation and clinical depression are not secrets.

They do not do well in institutional detention because no one does. No one.

Any analysis of treatment modalities will emphasize early intervention.

I do not believe this paradigm is correct at all.

Once a kid has been sexually exploited, there’s no going back. Rape stays with you the rest of your life, and timelines can be totally irrelevant. There are no educational game plans that are designed for boys at-risk. As human beings, the boys are expendable.

Adolescent boys are reached through other adolescent boys. What helps is to bring groups of them together.

Smash Street does exactly that.

We breeze through community after community. Town to town. Survival is an art. Not a given.

We will teach you where to find food and how to cook it.

We will create group dialogues where safe sex is the primary focus.

We will all discuss what HIV/AIDS treatment is all about. We will articulate what works for us and what doesn’t. There are no cookie cutter answers. Often, there are only more questions. And that is fine.

The goal is to open up. These are boys who can be completely shut down. Many are illiterate. If we are teaching anything having to do with video or photography production, the kid will find himself reading even if he does not call it reading.

None of this is a piece of cake. All of it is difficult. Some of it can be dangerous. They will test you to the max.

We go into a thing or a place, and we do our dog and pony show, and then, we get out.

We will dangle cameras and computers in their faces. They know what we’re doing. We are enticing them to join our cause.

Our cause is called survival. We do not judge. We feel the work is worth it. We know the boys are worth the grief. They are anything, anything but expendable.