Getting Screwed (13 page)

“Trafficking conveys this notion that most of these kids are being taken around from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, if not imported into this country, and that is not true,” says David Finkelhor, a professor of sociology and director of the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. “Our research suggests that most of these kids are operating in their home cities and towns.” Other research reveals the same pattern. A 2008 study of 226 youth who began selling sex as minors on the streets of New York City found that 92 percent of them were born in the United States and 56 percent were New York City natives.
⁹

Finkelhor, a slender, genial man in his midsixties with two Harvard degrees (one in social relations, the other in sociology), has been studying the problem of child victimization for over thirty-six years. He began examining the issue of child sexual abuse for his dissertation and received his first National Institute of Mental Health grant to study familial sexual abuse in 1978, the same year he was awarded his Ph.D. in sociology. These days, Finkelhor finds himself both irked and astonished at the level of misleading information spread about underage prostitution.

In recent years, for example, antitrafficking activists have repeatedly claimed that between 100,000 and 300,000 children are trafficked in the United States every year. And once again, the mainstream media have picked up the cry without bothering to check the veracity of these
figures. The
New York Times, USA Today,
CNN
, and the
Boston Globe
have all breathlessly reported that between 100,000 and 300,000 American-born children are sold for sex each year.

Respected researchers such as Albanese and Finkelhor have debunked those figures in their own studies. Even the authors of the original 1999 study that gave rise to those inflated numbers acknowledged that “100,000 to 300,000” came from an estimate of the total number of children “at risk” of physical or sexual exploitation because of problems at home and the conditions in which they live. To reach that “at risk” estimate, the authors even included all transgender kids, female gang members, and children who live near the Mexican or Canadian borders and have their own transportation.
¹⁰

So what are the actual numbers on child prostitution? A study by Finkelfor and colleagues at the University of New Hampshire found that police nationwide arrested or detained 1,450 juveniles for prostitution in 2005.
¹¹
That number closely corresponds to an earlier study, which analyzed data from the
FBI
's Uniform Crime Report, and found that 1,400 juveniles were arrested nationally for prostitution and commercialized vice in 2003.
¹²
Of course, as Finkelhor notes, that is not the right number either. “That's just juvenile prostitutes known to law enforcement,” he says. “People who have statistics on it are blowing smoke. Nobody really knows how many cases [of juvenile prostitution] there are.”

Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped activists from continuing to spew false information. In a December 2013 interview, Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of
CATW
(the Coalition against Trafficking in Women), informed me that between 250,000 and 500,000 children in the United States are sold into prostitution every year.

A New Name for Pimps

Besides spreading false statistics, antitrafficking proponents have deliberately changed the language for a problem that has existed for decades. Pimps, mostly men who target vulnerable runaways from dysfunctional homes and promise them affection and security, are now called sex traf
fickers, according to Finkelhor and those who work directly with sexually exploited youth.

“The traffickers used to be called abusive pimps,” says Andrea Powell, the executive director of
FAIR
Girls, the nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., that provides services to sexually trafficked girls. Powell says that more than 90 percent of the girls her organization serves are American citizens and the majority are girls who were in the foster care system or have run away from violent or abusive situations at home. “Boyfriend is beating the mom or the girls themselves have been sexually molested by a family member,” she says. “The traffickers know who to target. We're talking about American girls who are being exploited in their own communities.”

Powell says the new nomenclature is more effective in arousing public concern. “When you say ‘pimp,' it doesn't have the magnitude of saying ‘sex trafficking,' ” she points out. When I mention that the term “trafficking” connotes movement across borders and might confuse people, Powell shrugs. “It's your job as a journalist to explain it,” she says.

This new narrative, however, cuts deeper than mere semantics. While it may be effective in raising money for advocacy groups such as
CATW
and
FAIR
Girls, it obscures the real reasons youngsters are out on the street selling sex. And that, in turn, impedes efforts to truly help these youth. While there is no question that some teenage runaways who have left home because of abusive situations are being entrapped and exploited by ruthless pimps, there are also many kids, both boys and girls, who are selling sex as a way to survive on their own, Finkelhor says.

For example, the John Jay College study of teenage sex workers in New York City found that most of these youth were not recruited by or under the control of pimps. While pimps or so-called boyfriends were clearly a route into the market for some girls (14 percent of this sample), only one boy and no transgender youth reported being recruited or controlled by pimps. Of the 226 youths in the John Jay College survey, only 10 percent said they currently had pimps, the researchers found. By contrast, about 45 percent were recruited into the “business” through friends. The John Jay College researchers said that they had made a special effort
to recruit pimped girls and concluded that while “it seems likely that [pimped youth] were more difficult to recruit than youth that did not have pimps, there is little reason to believe that the proportion of pimped girls was much higher than reported here.”
¹³

A 2014 study of sex workers in Atlantic City found much the same thing: pimps played a small role in the initiation and operation of street-based prostitution in that resort city. Most of the street workers surveyed did not know a pimp at the time of their interview, and those who said they had a pimp typically described the relationship as “more mutual and easier to leave than the stereotypes suggest,” the researchers found. They concluded that “the conventional narrative of deception, force, or the captive slave — recruited and tied to a pimp through love, debt, addiction, authority, or coercion” did not apply to the majority of streetwalkers they studied.
¹⁴

While pimps are not major actors in the commercial sex market in New York or Atlantic City, they clearly control those teenagers who work for them, according to the John Jay College study. Most of the girls who worked for pimps had negative things to say about them. Some of them described being beaten and emotionally abused, and many said they didn't like not being allowed to spend the money they earned on themselves. A seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican girl told the researchers that her pimp takes whatever money he wants and “doesn't protect me.”
¹⁵
An eighteen-year-old black woman from Queens, who said that she had started selling sex when she was fifteen, witnessed horrific abuse against the other girls who worked under her pimp:

We all shared a room. Two of the girls in our house . . . one does coke and the other one is a heroin-crack user. Like, a lotta her dates she goes on, she gets beat because . . . she's like ten, twenty dollars for this, so that she could get that next high. He beat on the 15 year old . . . he hit her like she was a man. She's short and small — so it's like when he hit her, it dropped her the first time. But he didn't stop hittin' her, he just constantly was beatin' her. She was like, “Daddy, I don't wanna go . . . on the stroll, I don't wanna be on the stroll. I wanna be in a club — with the rest of the girls — I can't be out there because I keep getting' arrested. Police keep
stoppin' me.” He was like, “You gonna go wherever the fuck I tell you to go.” And he hit her. My first reaction was to stop him. But I knew if I interfered with that, it was just gonna make the situation worse for me . . . I'm like, “I gotta get outta here.” So I left with what I had on my back.
¹⁶

Others, however, spoke somewhat fondly of their pimps and portrayed them as protectors or father figures. An eighteen-year-old woman of Haitian ancestry who had grown up in the Bronx said that her forty-one-year-old Jamaican pimp contacted clients for her. “Sometimes, when I don't wanna do some kinda things, he understands and just gimme the money,” she told the John Jay College researchers. “So, it's like a father to me, just in a different kind of way.”
¹⁷

Regardless of whether underage sex workers are pimped or selling sex on their own, no one I've interviewed for this book considers underage prostitution acceptable. “This is a very serious problem and it's something that does merit some mobilization,” Finkelhor says. “But we need more science and knowledge for that mobilization.” For example, studies show that successful strategies for helping children who run away from dysfunctional families and end up selling sex for survival involve treatment for trauma from childhood abuse, job training, safe housing, and specialized educational services.

“Putting a focus on the prostitution end of things makes people think that the solution is getting them out of prostitution,” Finkelhor says. “My sense is this is not the way these kids see themselves or their problems either. If you're defining a problem differently from the target population you're trying to help, that's often a recipe for failure.”

The study by the John Jay College researchers found, for example, a higher number of underage boys than underage girls selling sex on the streets of New York City.
¹⁸
While that doesn't mean there are more boys than girls working in the city's sex trade — more underage females may be performing this work indoors as opposed to walking the streets — the study does indicate a large population of underage prostitutes (gay and straight boys) that is often overlooked by the conventional antitrafficking
narrative. “There are a considerable number of gay boys involved who are dealing with the fact that they haven't been helped to transition into managing a gay identity and have had to run away,” Finkelhor says. “The clear prevention approach to this particular subgroup is to have supportive people in every community who can help gay youth get adjusted to that particular world. But that aspect of the problem has been completely ignored.”

The same complexity, researchers say, holds true for adult prostitutes. According to Albanese, there are several populations involved in prostitution in the United States: first, people who are doing sex work by choice and running what might be considered small business enterprises; second, sex workers addicted to drug and alcohol who are desperate for money to feed their addictions and are often under the sway of pimps; third, migrants who have been smuggled into the country voluntarily and sell sex in order to make a better living than they could otherwise; and fourth, those who are truly being forced into the sex trade against their will. A 2005 study of indoor sex workers in New York City, conducted by the Urban Justice Center, found that only 8 percent of the study's respondents were trafficked into the country for prostitution. The majority (67 percent) of the indoor workers (who worked independently or for brothels, escort agencies, or private clubs) said they got involved with sex work because they were unable to find other work that provided a living wage.
¹⁹
While some adult sex workers are definitely being exploited by pimps, for others, the men in their lives whom law enforcement would label as pimps are actually lovers, bodyguards, or drivers who share in their earnings. These men, many sex workers insist, don't control them; they work together, so-called partners in crime. “I think the general debate never separates out these different groups,” Albanese says.

The irony is that even studies by antitrafficking groups indicate that more people are trafficked into untenable labor situations in the agricultural, domestic service, hotel, and construction sectors than in the sex industry. Surveys by the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (
CAST
) showed that of the trafficked victims that
CAST
helped in the Los Angeles area in 2013, 40 percent were victims of sex trafficking
and 60 percent were victims of trafficking in other industries, such as agriculture, domestic service, hotels, and construction. In 2012, the trafficked victims
CAST
surveyed included 32 percent in sex trafficking and 68 percent in other sectors.
²⁰
But media attention remains fixated on sex trafficking because, as Albanese says, “it sells a lot more newspapers. It's not that big news to find a lot of people being exploited on a farm somewhere.”

As a result, federal and state authorities routinely put more money and resources into fighting sex trafficking than into combating the more ubiquitous types of labor trafficking. And they continue to pursue what many researchers and even some law enforcement officials consider a misconceived approach. Ken Lanning, a retired
FBI
officer who specializes in crimes against children, says there may indeed be too much focus on the law enforcement aspect of trafficking and not enough attention paid to eradicating the causes of underage prostitution.

“Part of the solution has to be dealing with the root causes — parents who may be physically or sexually abusing their children and abusing drugs and alcohol,” Lanning says. “But all of that is complex, difficult, and expensive to address. Americans like problems we can solve. So even though kidnapping by strangers is the least common problem, it's the one we talk about the most because it's the simplest to understand.”