“Commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors not only are illegal activities, but also result in immediate and long-term physical, mental, and emotional harm to victims and survivors.”
Commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States are frequently overlooked, misunderstood, and unaddressed domestic problems. In the past decade, they have received increasing attention from advocates, the media, academics, and policy makers. However, much of this attention has focused internationally. This international focus has overshadowed the reality that commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors also occur every day within the United States.
Commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors not only are illegal activities, but also result in immediate and long-term physical, mental, and emotional harm to victims and survivors. A nation that is unaware of these problems or disengaged from solving them unwittingly contributes to the ongoing abuse of minors and all but ensures that these crimes will remain marginalized and misunderstood.
In September 2013, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies published the report Confronting
Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Sex Trafficking of Minors in the United States [1]. The purpose of that report is:
- to increase awareness and understanding of the crucial problem of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States;
- to examine emerging strategies for preventing and identifying these crimes, for assisting and supporting victims and survivors, and for addressing exploiters and traffickers; and
- to offer a path forward through recommendations designed to increase awareness and understanding and to support efforts to prevent, identify, and respond to these crimes.
The IOM/NRC report includes chapters on specific sectors with a role to play in addressing the problem. Because the report is lengthy and broad in its reach, the IOM/NRC, with the support of the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, decided to develop a series of guides offering a more concise and focused perspective on the problem and emerging solutions for several of these sectors.
The intended audience for this guide is the range of actors within the legal sector that may interact in some way with victims, survivors, and perpetrators of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors. The legal sector is understood to comprise two justice systems that operate in different but related realms: the adult criminal justice system and the juvenile justice system. Both systems encompass federal, state, county, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies; police officers and investigators; probation officers; parole officers; corrections officers; prosecutors and defense attorneys; victim advocates; and judges—all of whom have roles to play in responding to these crimes.
“The law in most states allows prostituted minors to continue to be arrested and charged with crimes instead of treating sexually exploited minors as victims of crimes.”
An extensive body of federal and state laws is aimed at protecting children from abuse and exploitation. (Chapter 4 of the IOM/NRC report provides a detailed accounting of these laws.) All states, for example, have provisions in their criminal statutes, often referred to as “age-of-consent” and “statutory
rape” laws, specifying in effect that below a certain age, a child cannot legally consent to having sex and must be treated as a victim of a crime [2]. Federal law on sex trafficking similarly recognizes children as victims (for example, “consent” of a child is not a defense for sex trafficking charges under federal law). Nonetheless, commercial sexual exploitation of minors often has been viewed through the lens of prostitution laws, which have roots in societal efforts to prohibit and prevent commercial vice. As a result, the law in most states allows prostituted minors to continue to be arrested and charged with crimes instead of treating sexually exploited minors as victims of crimes.
As of 2013, nine states had adopted “safe harbor” laws to ensure that prostituted minors are treated as victims. This change in law is consistent with child protection principles enshrined in many other areas of law. The IOM/NRC report stresses that laws on commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors and enforcement of these laws at the federal, state, and local levels should be based on a child protection framework. The report urges that such laws be crafted to provide as much protection as possible, such as by extending the reach of their protections to all minors under age 18 rather than limiting them to minors under age 16. The report also suggests that consideration should be given to a range of prosecutorial tools and services for minors that have been used to address other issues of harm against children. Such an approach would be consistent with child protection principles and goals of federal and state laws regulating treatment of minors. A more complete explanation of how to strengthen the law’s response to these crimes is included in Section 7 of this guide.
Following this introduction, Section 2 provides definitions of relevant terms, a set of guiding principles, a summary of what is known about the extent of the problem, and an overview of risk factors and consequences.
Sections 3 through 5 describe some noteworthy examples of how law enforcement personnel (Section 3), attorneys (Section 4), and the juvenile and criminal justice systems and the judiciary (Section 5) respond to commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors—although the IOM/NRC report emphasizes the need for further research to determine the effectiveness and broader applicability of these approaches.
Section 6 describes multisector and interagency efforts to combat these crimes in which the legal sector plays an important role.
Finally, Section 7 presents strategies for making progress in identifying, preventing, and responding to these crimes, based on the recommendations offered in the IOM/NRC report.
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