While recent campaigns aim to bring awareness of child sex trafficking, recent research has suggested that the public’s understanding of sex trafficking is misinformed. A research report, Youth Involvement in the Sex Trade: A National Study by John Jay College and the Center for Court Innovation, contested the myth that youth engaging in the sex trade(s) were all victims of sex trafficking. This two-year long research project showed only 10% of approximately 300 interviewed minors in the NYC sex trade used “market facilitators” (e.g., pimps), and 70% stated they had sought services specifically for youths at least once and could not adhere to the regimented guidelines of the service agencies (one-half of the 1,000 minors interviewed nationally did not access services). A whopping 95% of NYC youth stated they exchanged sex for money purely for financial support.
If we apply these empirical findings through a social justice lens, it clearly shows that youth are using prostitution as survival mechanisms due to the fact there are minimal resources made available to them other than state/city sanctioned programs that leave little recourse for them to determine their future outcomes. When we spend millions of dollars annually on awareness campaigns looking for pimps that aren’t there, additional millions annually on youth programs for shelter and services not utilized, and have contributed millions in taxpayer revenue to fund program-specific street outreach/trafficking, we must ask ourselves why the estimated 3,946 NYC homeless youth engaging in prostitution did not seek these services out.
The answer is simple: if minors are caught prostituting, most are arrested, pipelined back into a system that has more than likely failed them repeatedly, or sent back to environments that are dangerous and abusive. A similar study in Atlanta found no shelters for youth at all despite the heavily funded claim that the city was an immense hub for child sex trafficking.
A legitimate question posed to the anti-trafficking awareness campaigners would be: why do these campaigns dismiss the needs of the majority of youth in the sex trade that are not being coerced by third parties? Anti-trafficking awareness campaigns employ scare tactics that present all children as sex trafficked. They detract from building a movement that addresses sustainable and workable solutions to fix the vulnerabilities of societal realities that affect youth such as homelessness, systemic abuse by the child welfare system, and the fact that minors have little or no legal options to actively participate in their self-determinations.
Marketing mass hysteria: anti-trafficking awareness campaigns go rogue
Mooncustafer 