For Dr. Richard Estes, professor in the School of Social Work, it was infuriating enough to see the child prostitutes being offered on street corners in places like Indonesia. Then he began to investigate the problem back home.
“I knew we had a problem in the U.S.,” says Estes, sitting in his office in the Caster building. “But I never imagined the magnitude of the problem.”
He has a pretty good idea now, having just completed a massive two-year study titled “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.” In it, Estes and Dr. Neil Weiner—a senior research associate in Penn’s Center for the Study of Youth Policy—chronicled how tens of thousands of children and youths in the three North American nations are ensnared in juvenile pornography, prostitution, and sex-trafficking each year. It is, Estes says, the “least recognized epidemic” and the “most hidden form of child abuse” in North America today, one that affects “250,000 or so” children.
“This is not a new problem in the U.S., and it has not been responded to,” he says. “Part of it is disgust; part of it is an unwillingness to believe the problem exists. It’s easier to believe that it only happens in poor, undeveloped countries.”
The study examined the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) in 28 North American cities, including 17 in the U.S. In it, Estes and Weiner identified 17 groups of children most likely to be sexually exploited.
“The largest of these groups are runaway, ‘thrownaway,’ and other homeless American children who use ‘survival sex’ to acquire food, shelter, clothing, and other things needed to survive on America’s streets,” says Estes. “These children are solicited for sex repeatedly by men, many of whom are married and have children of their own.” In the process, those children are subjected to violence, drug abuse, rape, and even murder.
While poorer families appear to be at a somewhat higher risk of commercial sexual exploitation, Estes was surprised to find how many of the children came from white, middle-class homes.
“Almost every myth that I had about this problem got shattered in the process of doing the research,” he adds. “Like most people, I thought it was primarily an inner-city problem; I thought the complexion of the kids probably would be kids of color. I really thought of it as a small issue affecting children who were minorities in the inner city. Because that’s mostly what the media portrayed. To the extent that they show it at all, they usually show African-American girls on the street corner, engaged in solicitation.
“We found it was just the opposite. We found children from all social strata—the faces were mostly white faces. Something like 65 or 70 percent of the children we encountered were white, and the majority originated from at least working-class homes.”
He was disturbed at how many children “were living in their parents’ home, doing sex not just for money but to get designer clothes and jewelry,” he says. “We call it ‘designer sex.’ We were not prepared for that at all.”
Nor was he prepared for the number of boys involved, he admits. “For every girl I encountered, there was a boy.”
A good 40 percent of the girls and 30 percent of boys “were themselves victims of sexual abuse before running away from their homes,” he says. “They flee the place of danger, and go to the streets thinking they can build a new life for themselves—and wind up being victimized by the very crimes they fled from.”
Among the other findings:
- More than 6.5 million children with regular Internet access are exposed to unwanted sexual materials each year, and more than 1.7 million of them “report considerable distress over exposure to these materials.”
- At least 95 percent of all the commercial sex engaged in by boys is provided to adult males, many of them married, with children of their own.
- At least 25 percent of girls who have joined gangs perform sexual services for other gang members or the general public.
- Fifty-five percent of “street girls” engage in formal prostitution, about 75 percent of which is pimp-controlled.
- About 20 percent of the children in the study were being trafficked nationally by organized criminal units, while about 10 percent were being trafficked internationally. A single internationally trafficked child can earn a trafficker as much as $30,000 or more in trafficking fees.
- Many children who enter the country illegally are forced into servitude by their traffickers.
Estes notes that the “trafficking patterns” of child sex use “highly structured, highly organized” sex circuits in the Midwest, the East Coast, and the West Coast. All are run by “adults profiting from kids.” On the other hand, he says, many of those adults were taken advantage of as children by adults. “Many of the men who were working as pimps worked as hustlers when they were boys,” he explains, noting that boys invariably used the hustler label as opposed to prostitute.
The logistics of the study were daunting, since it involved three nations, three universities (Penn, the University of Montreal, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology in Mexico City), and a host of governmental and non-governmental organizations, as well as interviews with some 800 adults and 200 children. It was also physically risky at times.
“You’re dealing with criminals,” Estes points out. “I’m collecting information that ultimately will do a lot of harm to their networks.” While he considers himself “pretty street-smart,” he admits he got “roughed up” a number of times by pimps.
On the whole, he says, “very little attention is paid to child prostitution, especially at the federal level. They see it as a local problem. But the fact that they’re crossing state lines makes it a federal crime as well.”
He thinks the study will do “quite a lot” to improve the situation, and he points out that congressional hearings on the subject are now being organized. To that end, he and Weiner made 11 recommendations, which included:
- Establishing a National Child Sexual Exploitation Intelligence Center.
- Expanding multi-jurisdictional task forces on child sexual exploitation into all major federal and state jurisdictions.
- Expanding Internet Crimes Against Child units.
- Enlarging the national pool of child-sexual-exploitation experts and specialists.
- Promoting effective public-private partnerships for combating child sexual exploitation.
- Conducting more specialized studies on both the perpetrators of child sexual exploitation and their victims.
- Giving a federal agency or agencies responsibility for protecting children from sexual exploitation; empowering children to report incidents to the appropriate authorities; and providing local and state agencies with the necessary resources.
- Targeting adult sexual exploiters of children for punishment, not the children.
- Enforcing existing national and state laws on child sexual exploitation.
- Increasing the penalties associated with sexual crimes against children.
- Supporting local communities in their efforts to strengthen local and state laws.
Despite being a pretty “hardened guy,” Estes admits that some individual cases kept him awake at night. “One child could not have been more than 10, and she had already been on the street for a year, and had anywhere from three to five customers a night,” he recalls quietly. “Can you imagine? She was already dead, in her eyes. You’re talking to kids 10, 11, 12 years of age, and you realize that they’re already gone.”