Confronting Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Sex Trafficking of Minors in the United States (2013) / Chapter Skim
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2 The Nature and Extent of Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Sex Trafficking of Minors in the United States
2 The Nature and Extent of Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Sex Trafficking of Minors in the United States
Pages 41-76
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The chapter describes the current state of research focused on estimating commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States. It includes examples of data collection efforts at the local, state, and federal levels and their relative strengths and limitations.
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How perfect are extant estimates of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States? Incidence and Prevalence One of the most widely cited estimates of the commercial sexual exploitation of children comes from the research of Estes and Weiner (2002)
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. While this work did not yield an estimate of the prevalence of minors who are victims or survivors of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking, it demonstrates that shelter and street youth may be at high risk for being subject to these crimes given their involvement in survival sex.
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Victim Identification Another approach used to estimate commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States is to quantify known victims by groups such as service providers, health care providers, school personnel, and law enforcement, among others. An example is estimates derived from 2 he authors note that their definition of juvenile (i.e., under age 18)
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First, the number of children recovered from prostitution includes only those victims of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking who come to the attention of law enforcement. Further, as with arrest records, one cannot know whether this estimate includes some minors who have been recovered multiple times.
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State-Level Data A number of states have conducted prevalence studies of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors within their borders (Gragg et al., 2007; Ohio Trafficking in Persons Study Commission Research and Analysis Sub-Committee, 2012; Quin et al., 2011)
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One cannot know from this work how many Internet-facilitated commercial sexual exploitation incidents did not come to the attention of law enforcement or the extent to which those that did come to attention resulted in an arrest. Issues in developing estimates of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States Efforts to measure commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States confront virtually every challenge associated with measuring crime.
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The following sections outline the measurement and sampling issues and other methodological challenges associated with measuring crime. These issues directly affect efforts to measure commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States.
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At present, victims may instead view themselves as criminal offenders and fail to cooperate with entities seeking to assist them. Similarly, without clear and widely accepted definitions of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors, individuals in a position to provide assistance to victims (e.g., law enforcement agents, health care providers, teachers, social workers, foster parents)
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In terms of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States, it is important to determine what one wishes to estimate (e.g., current victims, individuals at heightened risk of being commercially exploited and trafficked, victimizations, former victims, incidents, exploiters, abettors)
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Commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors appear to be a form of series victimization, which further complicates attempts to estimate these crimes in the United States.7 There is no agreement on how series victimizations should be counted. One possibility is to count such a victimization as a single (ongoing)
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While identifying the many possibilities is beyond the scope of this study, it is valuable to point out useful approaches for asking questions to elicit data with which to estimate commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States. Returning to the point made earlier that definitions guide measurement, a successful practice is to ask the respondent about elements of the definition of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors.8 An understanding of those elements can guide the types of questions used to measure the problems.
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Thus to generate a probability sample for estimating the number of minors involved in commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States, one would need a list of all minors in the United States. Using that list and one of numerous probability sampling approaches, a sample would be selected.
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Nonprobability sampling entails gathering a subset of the population of interest; however, there is no known probability associated with the selection of each element into the sample. There are many ways to draw a nonprobability sample.10 One can find a person with the characteristic of interest (e.g., a minor known to have been commercially sexually exploited or trafficked for sex)
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While these and similar approaches may represent improvements over traditional nonprobability sampling, they are not substitutes for probability sampling, and the generalizability of the findings of such research remains questionable. Still, these approaches may offer the best opportunity for generating estimates of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States.
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. Estimating commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors is complicated by the dark figure of crime.
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Existing Crime Measurement Programs This section describes the UCR program, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) , the Supplemental Homicide Reports, and the NCVS, and explains how these programs can and cannot assist in providing estimates of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States.
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incidents of prostitution, which shall include crimes committed by persons providing or attempting to provide commercial sex acts. In accordance with the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the UCR/SRS added two Part I crimes beginning on January 1, 2013: human trafficking/commercial sex acts and human trafficking/involuntary servitude.
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In addition to the changes in the UCR/SRS discussed above, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 requires the inclusion of human trafficking as a circumstance code in the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports. NIBRS Given the limitations of the UCR program and the success of the Supplemental Homicide Reports, calls were made for an enhanced data collection effort.
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. Like the UCR/SRS, the NIBRS is being changed in response to the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.
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Similarly, the Supplemental Homicide Reports historically could offer no information regarding the homicide of minors resulting from commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. The changes made to the Supplemental Homicide Reports in accordance with the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 do not allow the estimation of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors resulting in homicide.
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First, the NCVS does not collect data on the crimes of sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, survival sex, kidnapping, prostitution, pornography, or a myriad of others; it collects information on a relatively restricted list of street and property crimes (e.g., rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, simple assault, purse snatching, pocket picking, burglary, motor vehicle theft, property theft)
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This section includes brief descriptions of selected efforts that gather data relevant to commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking (e.g., child sexual abuse) or vulnerable populations (e.g., homeless youth)
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While the YRBS offers some advantages for understanding commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States, these limitations are significant. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health)
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While Add Health data are widely used and extremely valuable, the data are limited in their ability to support estimates of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States. The clearest limitation in this regard is that Add Health is a panel study, and in-sample respondents are currently 28 to 36 years of age.
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The Runaway and Homeless Youth Management Information System (RHYMIS) is an automated data collection tool that collects information from grantees in three federal programs that provide support to homeless and runaway youth in the United States: the Basic Center Program, the Transitional Living Program, and the Street Outreach Program (ACF, 2012)
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First, as noted above, RHYMIS does not offer a representative accounting of all homeless and runaway youth, which limits its utility for estimating commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States. To the extent that minors who are victims of these crimes do not obtain services that report to RHYMIS, those minors will not be represented in these data.
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Since these crimes are forms of child sexual abuse, however, the study findings regarding the association between child sexual abuse and increased risk for poor health and social outcomes in adulthood likely are applicable to these victims of exploitation. As discussed in Chapter 3 of this report, the adverse childhood experiences tracked by the ACE Study are believed to be risk factors for commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors; therefore, child and adolescent victims of these crimes are likely at increased risk for the poor health and social outcomes identified by the ACE Study and related research.
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Like all the data sources discussed here, NCANDS has advantages and disadvantages for purposes of measuring commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States. An important advantage is that the data are based on child abuse and neglect reports and capture experiences of all children and adolescents, regardless of whether they are in school, living in a housing unit, or homeless.
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. Although existing non-criminal justice measurement efforts do not currently collect data on commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking, a
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In addition, the RHYMIS collects data from a national sample of runaway, "thrown-away," and homeless youth, populations that are at risk for commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. Like the NIBRS and UCR/SRS, these measurement efforts could add specific questions and data elements related to commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking to enhance measurement and understanding of these problems.
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In sum, based on its review of the available evidence, the committee maintains that, despite the current imperfect estimates, commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States clearly are problems of great concern and worthy of attention. Therefore, this report and the committee's recommendations go beyond counting commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors in the United States to emphasize that, unless additional resources become available, existing resources should be focused on what can be done to assist the victims of these crimes.
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to enhance estimates of these crimes; similar changes could be made to existing non-criminal justice measurement efforts (e.g., YRBS and Add Health) to enhance estimates of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of minors that may not involve law enforcement (e.g., instances in which police are not notified or the crime is not recognized)
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2011. Characteristics of suspected human trafficking incidents, 2008-2010.
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2002. The commercial sexual exploitation of children in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
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2007. Missing the mark: Why the trafficking victims protection act fails to pro tect sex trafficking victims in the United States.
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