Shining the Light on a Hidden Tragedy

Charities take on a problem few care to acknowledge — commercial sex involving youngsters

A small slice of the nonprofit world is organizing to combat a problem few people know about or discuss: Tens of thousands of children in the United States

are getting paid to have sex, serve as strippers, pose for pornographic materials, and participate in many other sexual activities.

A study published in September, paid for largely by the U.S. Department of Justice, found that some 325,000 Americans younger than 18 perform sexual acts in exchange not just for cash, but also for clothing, shelter, and other items each year. Many of the charity leaders working to help such children believe the numbers may be even higher, and that they are growing in part because of the ease with which teenagers can be reached through the Internet.

While many food banks, health clinics, and centers for runaway and troubled children open their doors to young people who have been involved in commercial sex, very few charities offer specialized programs to help child prostitutes and others leave the sex trade.

Ostracized by Others

Such young people often have very specialized needs, requiring intensive therapy and other care to overcome sexual and physical abuse, as well as low self-esteem, says Daniel Blausey, counseling supervisor at the Door, a New York charity that offers free help to 150 to 300 youths a day, most of whom live in foster care or on their own. General group-therapy sessions tend not to work, says Mr. Blausey, because young people who have been paid for sex often get ridiculed by other kids and ostracized.

Faced with a demand that is far greater than the services they can provide, more than two dozen of the nonprofit groups that focus on helping people hurt by commercial sex have teamed up to form the U.S. Campaign Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children.

“We’ve been trying to make the harm visible because for a long time in this country, prostitution has been seen as a victimless crime, when in actuality the harm is almost irreparable,” says Laura J. Lederer, a member of the coalition and director of the Protection Project, a Washington group that does research on people who are transported across state and national lines to be used in commercial sex against their will.

The coalition’s members provide direct services to children, promote laws to protect them, and educate the public about kids’ involvement in commercial sex. Their campaign plans to work on a number of fronts, including:

• Raising public awareness, on a national scale, about what they call “commercial sexual exploitation of children,” through informational brochures and possibly a poster campaign aimed at young people.
• Developing education programs for kids, police officers, juvenile-justice officials, social workers, and others to teach children how to protect themselves from being lured into commercial sex and to sensitize adults who work with young people about the realities of prostitution.
• Expanding services for children who have been involved in the sex trade, including specialized housing programs, a national crisis line, and an enhanced system for referring people to counseling and other services. The coalition is seeking federal funds to support new services.
• Finding ways to prevent men — the vast majority of perpetrators — from procuring young people for commercial sex, including programs that educate adolescent boys and men about the devastating impact of prostitution on children’s lives.

Charity leaders in the coalition met for the first time in March in San Francisco. The groups involved are hoping to persuade President Bush to appoint a committee to develop a national plan to combat the hiring of minors for sex-related activities.

In the works is a youth conference next year, probably in Washington, that will highlight the experiences of people who have recently left the sex trade. Members of the campaign are also planning to travel to Japan in December to issue a report on child commercial-sex activities in the United States at the Second World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children.

As Many Boys as Girls

The coalition’s report will be based, in part, on the recent findings of the Justice Department study.

In that study, the largest percentage of children who are paid for sexual activities have run away from home, been abandoned, or are otherwise homeless. Many are addicted to drugs and have been subjected to violence or rape at the hands of pimps, customers, or traffickers who take children across state lines, according to the report’s authors, Richard J. Estes, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, and Neil A. Weiner, a senior research investigator at the university’s Center for the Study of Youth Policy.

The report says that a smaller portion of kids, largely unbeknownst to their parents, engage in prostitution and pornography while living at home. The paying customers in such cases are often fellow students, the study found.

The authors examined the United States, Canada, and Mexico to find out whether the North American Free Trade Agreement had affected commercial sexual exploitation of children. Of the three, the United States has the largest number of children, per capita, who are involved in the sex industry, they found.

Mr. Estes says that when it comes to getting help, boys are worse off than girls. “In the U.S., child sexual exploitation affects as many boys as girls, but boys are less well served by human-service and law-enforcement systems because of the widespread belief that boys are better able than are girls to fend for themselves,” he says.

The authors uncovered very few government services for children engaged in commercial sex. “The human-service agencies and juvenile authorities, by and large, are in denial about this,” says Mr. Estes. The report found that nonprofit groups provide the bulk of specialized services to child prostitutes and others involved in sex work.

The report, “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico,” is available online at http://caster.ssw.upenn.edu/~restes/CSEC.htm.