Judges' Comments
	"She provided a voice of the voiceless, the untold number of children used and abused by individuals and by the system itself. She didn’t merely try to gain the readers’ sympathy for the victims, she changed attitudes about an awful problem."
	Selling Atlanta's Children

It started with a single telephone call: A judge phoned to say that young girls were appearing frequently in local juvenile courts for prostitution or related charges.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Jane O. Hansen spent five months following up on that call, and her findings were unsettling: More and more young girls in Atlanta were being exploited as prostitutes, and the justice system was treating these girls as criminals, not victims. Many judges felt compelled to keep the girls locked up in youth jails because there was nowhere else to keep them safe. And the real criminals -- the pimps and johns who exploited these girls -- were rarely even arrested.

The symbol of this imbalance was a young girl, only 10 years old, whose feet were shackled as she wept before a judge and asked for lenience.

Hansen documented the stories of half-a-dozen of these girls to illustrate how police, prosecutors and the courts had failed them. She found that police in Las Vegas and other cities had identified techniques and marshaled resources to address the problem. And she discovered that telephone chat rooms were being used to recruit young girls into the city’s sex-for-hire trade.

Her reporting in "Selling Atlanta’s Children," published Jan. 7-9, 2001, produced immediate results. The legislature made the pimping of children a felony and appropriated money for programs to serve prostituted children. Atlanta police reorganized to create a child-prostitution unit. And two young girls featured in Hansen’s articles returned to their families.

Hansen’s intense reporting and compassionate writing touched her readers and made a substantial difference in her community.

As a general assignment reporter, a Metro front columnist, an editorial writer and now again as a reporter, Hansen always has spoken for the children of Georgia.

She was a co-winner of the 1990 Selden Ring Award for her investigative series about child abuse entitled, "Suffer the Children."

Hansen joined the Journal-Constitution in 1982 after graduating from the Columbia University School of Journalism. She served in the Carter White House from 1977 to 1981, preparing issue briefings for the President’s appearances away from Washington.

The Manchester, N.H., native graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in psychology.