The Dirty Little Secret of Sex Trafficking

Since I have been a member of ATS, periodically I find a new thread of outrage over sex trafficking in America. Generally, the story told is of young girls (under 16 years of age) desperately trapped as a sex slave to some monstrous pimp or madam who ruthlessly uses them to build horrid empires. Reports of this form of modern-day slavery is understandably upsetting and should outrage the most indifferent among us. The FBI's report on human sex trafficking begins:

Human sex trafficking is the most common form of modern-day slavery. Estimates place the number of its domestic and international victims in the millions, mostly females and children enslaved in the commercial sex industry for little or no money.

Activists, such as Kevin Bales, President of Free the Slaves, have written books titled The Slave Next Door to draw attention to - and to alarm - this problem.

Even if only a handful of young children are being used as sex slaves this is indeed an alarming circumstance, but as you saw from the FBI website page, it is estimated (by the FBI) to be in the millions, not just a handful, but how did the FBI determine there were millions of young children (mostly girls) trapped in a hell of sex slavery? What methodology did they use to obtain these figures?

As it turns out, few government and outside organizations have used any real scientific method to determine the alarming numbers they have reported. However, in 2008 Ric Curtis and Meredith Dank from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, after obtaining $500,000 to do a study to determine the actual numbers of child sex slaves, gave the federal government their report, demolishing several stereotypes and falsehoods about this circumstance.

No research team before them had hit on a workable method of quantifying this elusive population. For decades, most law enforcement officials, social workers and activist groups had cited a vast range — anywhere from tens of thousands to three million — when crafting a sound bite pegging the population of underage hookers nationwide. But the range had been calculated with little or no direct input from the children themselves.

Over time, the dubious numbers became gospel. In similar fashion, monetary outlays based on the veracity of those numbers began to multiply.

The $500,000 the federal government had allotted for this joint study by John Jay and New York's public-private Center for Court Innovation was chump change compared to the bounty amassed by a burgeoning assortment of nonprofit groups jockeying to liberate and rehabilitate the captive legions of exploited and abused children.

www.westword.com...

What followed was - while not nearly as alarming as the notion of young girls trapped in sex slave trafficking rings - alarming enough as those who have benefited (and arguably as much as any pimp or madam has) on this alarming crime, the government agencies tasked with arresting and prosecuting the sex traffickers, and the non-profits who have promised to help the victims of sex slave trafficking, began to circle their wagons and if not openly challenge the John Jay Report, resist its findings, and why not?

"I remember going to a meeting in Manhattan where they had a lot of prosecutors whose job was to prosecute pimps," Curtis recalls. "They were sort of complaining about the fact that their offices were very well staffed but their workload was...not very daunting, let's say. They had a couple cases, and at every meeting you go to, they'd pull out the cherry-picked case of this pimp they had busted, and they'd tell the same story at every meeting.

They, too, were bothered by the fact that they couldn't find any pimps, any girls. "So I come along and say, 'I found 300 kids' — they're all perky — but then I say, 'I'm sorry, but only 10 percent had pimps.'

"It was like a fart in church. Because basically I was saying their office was a waste of time and money."

www.westword.com...

One of the long perpetuated reports - joyfully lapped up by media and regurgitated to upset and outrage us all - that had been dispelled by the John Jay Report was that only 10% of these child prostitutes were involved with what Curtis and Dank call "market facilitators", which I suppose is scientific terminology for pimps and madams. This meant that 90% of these child prostitutes were doing business on their own.

"Whether you are a kid or an adult, the issue becomes: To what extent is this voluntary?" Albanese says. "Because you make more money in this than being a secretary? Or because you really have no choices — like, you're running from abuse or caught up in drugs? The question becomes: If Curtis is correct, what do we do with that 90 percent? Do we ignore it? How hard do we look at how they got into that circumstance? You could make the case that for the 90 percent for whom they couldn't find any pimping going on — well, how does it happen?

"It's a very valid question," he continues. "A policy question: To what extent should the public and the public's money be devoted to these issues, whether it's child prostitution or child pimping?"

www.westword.com...

The FBI's Innocence Lost website informs us that around 200 children are rescued from sex trafficking scenarios each year. While this fact certainly underscores the reality of the problem, what is not underscored, and even avoided is the fact that between government law enforcement agencies and social services agencies tasked with handling this problem, $80 million of tax dollars is spent each year to rescue an average of 200 children. That is roughly $400,000 per child per year.

Is that too much, or not enough? Certainly children trapped in sex slave trafficking should be rescued, but how well does anyone truly understand this problem, and if we do not truly understand this problem, how can we possibly expect to fix the damned problem?

It is also worth noting that much of the federal funding, and even private funding is allocated to help young teenage girls believed to be trapped in these sex trafficking cycles, but as the John Jay Report makes clear, 45% of the child prostitutes are teenage boys who are largely ignored by the system that itself seems to intent on ignoring any facts that might reduce the size of their own bureaucracy claiming to handle the problem.

The dirty little secret of sex trafficking is that if we allow government funding to discriminate against the 90% of child prostitutes who do not fit in the paradigm of alarming "modern-day slavery" scenarios just so they can enlarge their own bureaucracies, and by extension their own wallets, then how are they any different than the largely missing "market facilitators" they claim exist?

When a problem gets overwhelmingly complex, parsimony becomes prudent. ATS, what is to be done?

A must see ..this is real conspiracy

What, you mean to tell me the gubment exaggerated their numbers on a statistic? I'm Shocked, just shocked!


How's that line go again: There's lies, damned lies and statistics.

"42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot." -- Steven Wright

"Statistics means never having to say you're certain."

“A statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice, and he will say that on the average he feels fine.”

"Statistics are no substitute for judgment." -- Henry Clay

"Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance." -- Morris Kline

"You can not feed the hungry on statistics." -- Heinrich Heine

"In earlier times, they had no statistics, and so they had to fall back on lies". -- Stephen Leacock

Online Math Learning


What I find shocking about all this is the fact that the gubment actually spend money to find out the real numbers and study the problem. Even more shocking is the fact that they didn't try to bury it or come out with another study to show how wrong this study is. We all know how reliable those gubment studies are, after all...

Good thread, what has been ignored, and most people deny, is that teenage sex and drug usage have been in a serious decline since the 1990ties.

Crime has been on the decline for almost 20 years now, and for the most part, the media ignores the facts, and continue to make it look like our streets are crime ridden.

Here is an interesting report, apparently black teens have the lowest levels of drug usage these days.

www.businessweek.com...

The survey of 72,561 teens found that American Indian youth had the highest level of drug or alcohol use, with 48 percent reporting they had used the substances in the past year. That was followed by 39 percent of whites, 37 percent of Hispanics, 36 percent mixed-race teens, 32 percent of blacks and 24 percent of Asians, according to the research published today in Archives of General Psychiatry.

I would say that back in the 70ties when I grew up, most likely 80-90 percent of teenagers, if not over 90% had used drugs or alcohol over the last year. Going out and getting wasted was the favorite past time.

Even though crime overall is way down, they keep increasing the budgets for the police and the courts, when they should be massively cutting those budgets to reflect the changes in crime rates.

Most child prostitution seem to occur in the inner cities, and probably most of it is young boys selling themselves to men. Ever read "The Basketball Diaries" by Jon Carroll? It is one funny eye opener, one of the best books I have ever read. The movie was pure drivel, nothing but standard propaganda. I remember in LA, when you go driving around Hollywood, the boy street walkers were everywhere, impossible to ignore, while females were not nearly as evident.

reply to post by Jean Paul Zodeaux


Havent got time to read whole thread at mo, but I know what you mean about horrid empires, whats more most of these big horrid empires are protected by the very people who make and enforce the laws of "our" lands.