Underage Sex Workers in USA - numbers investigated

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

The [I]Village Voice [/I]has applied its investigative journalism resources to defending its adult classified website (which cannot be named on Cerb) against the forces that applied the pressure that ultimately shut down Craigslist's erotic classifieds last year.

The lengthy article is well worth reading in its entirety:
[url]http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-06-29/news/real-men-get-their-facts-straight-sex-trafficking-ashton-kutcher-demi-moore/[/url]

Selected passages from the article:

[B]Real Men Get Their Facts Straight[/B]

(by Martin Cizmar and Ellis Conklin and Kristen Hinman Wednesday, Jun 29 2011)

Congress hauled in Craigslist on September 15, 2010. There, feminists, religious zealots, the well-intentioned, law enforcement, and social-service bureaucrats pilloried the online classified business for peddling "[B]100,000 to 300,000[/B]" underage prostitutes annually.

Those same numbers had already inspired terrified politicians, who let loose hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade to prohibitionists bent on ending the world's oldest profession ...

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security hearing on "Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking" culminated with the humbled attorneys from Craigslist announcing that they would close down their adult classified business....

Having run off Craigslist, reformers, the devout, and the government-funded have turned their guns upon Village Voice Media.

It is true that Village Voice Media has a stake in this discussion.

But the facts speak for themselves....

The underage-prostitution panic has been fueled by a scientific study that was anything but scientific.

The thinly veiled fraud behind the shocking "100,000 to 300,000 child prostitutes" estimate has never been questioned.

The figure has echoed across America, from the halls of Congress to your morning newspaper, from blogs both liberal and conservative. Google it and you'll get 80 pages of results....

the New York Times .... USA Today ... CNN ... Wikipedia ... U.N. goodwill ambassador Julia Ormond ... Orphan Justice Center ... C-SPAN: "Children in our country enslaved sexually...from 100,000 to 300,000..."

But a detailed review of police files across the nation tells another story.

Village Voice Media spent two months researching law enforcement data.

We examined arrests for juvenile prostitution in the nation's 37 largest cities during a 10-year period.

To the extent that underage prostitution exists, it primarily exists in those large cities.

[B]Law enforcement records show that there were only 8,263 arrests across America for child prostitution during the most recent decade.

That's 827 arrests per year[/B] ...

Compare 827 annually with the 100,000 to 300,000 per year touted in the propaganda.

The nation's 37 largest cities do not give you every single underage arrest for hooking. Juveniles can go astray in rural Kansas.

But common sense prevails in the police data. As you move away from such major urban areas as Los Angeles, underage prostitution plunges.

When the local police data was shared with a leading figure in the struggle against underage prostitution, the research struck her as ringing true.

"The Seattle Police Department totally have a handle on the situation and understand the problem," says Melinda Giovengo, executive director of YouthCare, which runs a live-in shelter for underage prostitutes in Seattle. "That seems to be a very accurate count and is reflective of what the data shows."

It is true that police departments do not arrest every juvenile engaged in sex work. But, surely, they don't ignore the problem.

So, if there are slightly more than 800 underage arrests a year, where did an estimate as horrible as several hundred thousand come from?

There are, quite simply, no precise numbers on child prostitution.

[B]The "100,000 to 300,000" figure ... came from two University of Pennsylvania professors, Richard J. Estes and Neil Alan Weiner.... the figure actually represents the number of children Estes and Weiner considered "at risk" for sexual exploitation, not the number of children actually involved.[/B]

Furthermore, the authors of The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, released in 2001, admitted that their statistics are not authoritative.

"The numbers presented in these exhibits do not, therefore, reflect the actual number of cases in the United States but, rather, what we estimate to be the number of children 'at risk' of commercial sexual exploitation," they wrote, underlining their words for emphasis.

Who, then, is at risk?

Not surprisingly, the professors find that any "outsider" is at risk.

All runaways are listed as being at risk.

Yet the federal government's own research acknowledges that "most runaway/thrown-away youth were gone less than one week (77 percent)"â??hardly enough time to take up prostitutionâ??"and only 7 percent were away more than one month," according to the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children 2002, commissioned by the Department of Justice.

According to Estes and Weiner, transgender kids and female gang members are also at risk.

So are kids who live near the Mexican or Canadian borders and have their own transportation. In the eyes of the professors, border residents are part of those 100,000 to 300,000 children at risk of becoming whores....

Such broad brushstrokes by professors have not endeared the study to such serious social scientists as David Finkelhor, professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire and director of Crimes Against Children Research Center. Finkelhor's work is cited in the University of Pennsylvania study, and he helped review the reportâ??not that he could've changed the direction of it.

"As far as I'm concerned, [the University of Pennsylvania study] has no scientific credibility to it," he says. "That figure was in a report that was never really subjected to any kind of peer review. It wasn't published in any scientific journal."

Rigorous peer review, as is required for most scientific publishing, could have really helped the study, he says.

[B]"Initially, [Estes and Weiner] claimed that [100,000 to 300,000] was the number of children [engaged in prostitution]. It took quite a bit of pressure to get them to add the qualifier [at risk],"[/B] he says.

Professor Steve Doig, Knight Chair of Journalism at Arizona State University, said the "study cannot be relied upon as authoritative."

As for the supposed number of children being exploited as prostitutes, Doig says, "I do not see the evidence necessary to confirm that there are hundreds of thousands of them."

Doig, who specializes in the analysis of quantitative methodology, was contracted by Village Voice Media to examine the science behind the Estes and Weiner study.

"Many of the numbers and assumptions in these charts are based on earlier, smaller-scale studies done by other researchers, studies which have their own methodological limitations. I won't call it 'garbage in, garbage out.' But combining various approximations and guesstimates done under a variety of conditions doesn't magically produce a solid number. The resulting number is no better than the fuzziest part of the equation."

When asked directly, Estes gives an estimate that is much less dramatic.

How many kids are involved in sex slaveryâ??forcibly taken into the trade and abused?

"That number would be small," Estes acknowledges. "Kids who are kidnapped and sold into slaveryâ??that number would be very small."

When we talk about very small, what sort of number are we talking about?

"We're talking about a few hundred people."

Finkelhor says there's no way to know for sure how many child prostitutes there are in America.

"All we have in the way of really hard evidence is what the police arrests are," he says. "They're way low. They're certainly not an underestimate, but it seems to me that it's incumbent on anyone who is writing about the problem to at least include that number on one end of the continuum, because that's probably the most justifiable number you have." ....

Jay Albanese, a criminologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, spent four years heading up the Department of Justice's research division.

"There's tons of estimates on human trafficking," says Albanese. "They're all crap... It's all guesswork, speculation... The numbers are inherently unbelievable.

"[The latest report] shows 2,500 investigations were begun by the 42 human-trafficking task forces. But only 30 or 40 percent of those have been confirmed as trafficking cases, and only 300 or so are actual arrests. The point is, given the 42 investigative trafficking task forcesâ??and these people have undergone trainingâ??the actual number of cases always seems to be just a fraction of these very high estimates." ...

Despite the tidal wave of cash going to nonprofits purporting to raise awareness and task forces hoping to prosecute (with little track record of success), someone's been left out: the victims....

[B]Although Congress has spent hundreds of millions in tax-generated money to fight human trafficking, it has yet to spend a penny to shelter and counsel those boys and girls in America who are, in fact, underage prostitutes.[/B]

In March of this year, 10 years after Estes and Weiner claimed that 100,000 to 300,000 children were at risk of becoming sex workers, U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (a Democrat from Oregon) and John Cornyn (a Republican from Texas) introduced legislation to fund six shelters with $15 million in grants. The shelters would provide beds, counseling, clothing, case work, and legal services. If enacted, this legislation would be the first of its kind.

The bill has yet to clear the Senate or the House ....

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[FONT=Calibri]Statistics donâ??t lie, but liars use statistics.[/FONT]