Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children - United States

United States

In 2001, the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work released a study on CSEC conducted in 17 cities across the United States. While they did not interview any of the adolescent subjects of the inquiry, they estimated through secondary response that as many as 300,000 American youth may be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation at any time. However, the actual number of children involved in prostitution is likely to be much smaller: over 10 years only 827 cases a year have been reported to police departments. Scholarly research funded by the National Institute of Justice and realized by the Social Networks Research Group at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (http://snrg-nyc.org/) and the Center for Court Innovation in New York City used Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS), Social Network Analysis, capture/recapture, and Markov based probability estimates to generate a prevalence estimate for New York City that suggests far fewer commercially sexually exploited children than the 300,000 and far more than the 827 suggested by these two most widely read sources.

Especially vulnerable are homeless and runaways. The National Runaway Switchboard says that one-third of runaway youths in America will be lured into prostitution within 48 hours on the streets and Kristi House reports on their website that 75% of minors engaged in prostitution have a pimp (www.kristihouse.org). This view of adolescent prostitution in the United States as primarily driven by pimp-exploiters and other "sex traffickers" has recently been challenged by SNRG-NYC in their 2008 New York City study which interviewed over 300 under-age prostitutes and found that only 10% reported having pimps. A second study done in Atlantic City, New Jersey, by the same group incorporated an extended qualitative ethnographic component that looked specifically at the relationship between pimps and adolescents engaged with street based sex markets. This study found the percentage of adolescents who had pimps to be only 14% and that those relationships were typically far more complex, mutual, and companionate than has been reported by social service providers, not-for-profits, and much of the news media.