Youth Involvement in the Sex Trade: a National Study
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The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S. Department of Justice and prepared the following final report: Document Title: Youth Involvement in the Sex Trade: A National Study Author(s): Rachel Swaner, Melissa Labriola, Michael Rempel, Allyson Walker, Joseph Spadafore Document No.: 249952 Date Received: June 2016 Award Number: 2009-MC-CX-0001 This report has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice. To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this federally funded grant report available electronically. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Youth Involvement in the Sex Trade A National Study By Rachel Swaner, Melissa Labriola, Michael Rempel, Allyson Walker, and Joseph Spadafore 520 Eighth Avenue, 18th Floor New York, New York 10018 646.386.3100 fax 212.397.0985 www.courtinnovation.org This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Youth Involvement in the Sex Trade: A National Study By Rachel Swaner, Melissa Labriola, Michael Rempel, Allyson Walker, and Joseph Spadafore © March 2016 Center for Court Innovation 520 Eighth Avenue, 18th Floor New York, New York 10018 646.386.3100 fax 212.397.0985 www.courtinnovation.org This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Acknowledgements This study was supported by Award No. 2009-MC-CX-0001 from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of the Department of Justice. We are grateful to Ric Curtis for developing the youth interview instrument and respondent- driven sampling protocols, and for his assistance in site selection. We are also grateful to Jennifer Bryan for her work early on in the project. We could not have completed this project without the support, hard work, and dedication of the site coordinators: Ric Curtis and Anthony Marcus (Atlantic City, NJ); Joshua Gamson and Nikki Jones (Bay Area, CA); David Maurrasse and Cynthia Jones (Miami, FL); Marcus Martin and Heather Champeau (Dallas, TX); Laurie Schaffner (Chicago, IL); and Andrew Spivak, Brooke Wagner, and Jennifer Whitmer (Las Vegas, NV). Apart from this multi-site report, the site coordinators completed reports for each of the six study sites providing rich ethnographic details on their themes and findings (see http://www.courtinnovation.org/youthstudy). We are also deeply grateful to the research assistants at each site, who conducted the youth interviews with care and professionalism. We thank staff at the following organizations for granting interviews to our research team so that we could learn about the work they do. Specifically, thanks to Community Treatment Solutions, Atlantic County Youth Shelter, and the Division of Youth and Family Services in Atlantic City; the Center for Young Women’s Development, Standing Against Global Exploitation (SAGE), and Lyric in San Francisco; MISSSEY and JPG Consultants in Oakland; Children of the Night in Los Angeles; Kristi House, the Department of Children and Family Services, Women’s Fund of Miami-Dade County, Stand Up for Kids, and the Miami Police Department in Miami; Salvation Army STOP IT, Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, Night Ministry, and the Chicago Police Department in Chicago. We also thank representatives from Statistical Analysis Centers and other state agencies for providing aggregate and case-level data. The methodology used and results reported using data obtained from state data sources are solely the responsibility of the research team. Acknowledgements i This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. At the Center for Court Innovation, we wish to thank Liliana Donchik for countless hours of data entry and Liberty Aldrich and Greg Berman for their comments on an earlier version of the report. We also thank our grant managers over the course of this research project: Barbara Kelley, Karen Bachar, and Chris Holloway. For correspondence, please contact Rachel Swaner at [email protected]. Acknowledgements ii This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Executive Summary v Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Chapter 2. Research Design and Methodology 14 Chapter 3. Findings from the Youth Interviews 34 Chapter 4. Findings from Official Data and National Population Estimate 58 Chapter 5. Perspectives of Social Service Providers and Law Enforcement 73 Chapter 6. Conclusions 84 References 92 Appendices 98 Appendix A. Youth Interviews Consent Form 98 Appendix B. Youth Interview Instrument 101 Table of Contents iii This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Appendix C. Social Service Providers Interview Guide 126 Appendix D. Youth Interviews: Bulleted List of Select Significant Differences by Subgroups 133 Appendix E. Youth Interviews: All Responses by Site 136 Table of Contents iv This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Executive Summary Over the past decade, federal, state, and local policymakers across the United States have devoted increasing attention to the plight of youth who are involved in the sex trade. Despite growing national attention, the ability of policymakers to design effective programs and strategies has been hindered by a paucity of valid research on the size, needs, characteristics, and criminal justice experiences of these youth (e.g., see Institute of Medicine 2013). Funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the U.S. Department of Justice, the current multi-method, multi-site study aims to increase scientific knowledge. Building on prior research using comparable methods in New York City and implemented by some of the same researchers (Curtis et al. 2008; Muslim, Labriola, and Rempel 2008; and see, also, Dank et al. 2015), this study includes interviews with youth and official records data collection in six sites: Atlantic City, NJ; the Bay Area, CA; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Miami, FL; and Las Vegas, NV. To date, the study has produced six reports providing comprehensive ethnographic findings concerning the lives of youth in the sex trade in each of the research sites (Jones and Gamson 2016; Marcus, Riggs, Rivera, and Curtis 2016; Martin et al. 2016; Maurrasse and Jones 2016; Schaffner et al. 2016; and Wagner, Whitmer, and Spivak 2016). The current report provides a quantitative, multi-site analysis of findings from nearly 1,000 youth interviews across all six sites; a population estimate; findings from official criminal justice data sources; and findings from interviews with service providers. All reports are available at http://www.courtinnovation.org/youthstudy. Overview of the Study Methodology This study was animated by the goal of gaining a representative portrait of the lives and needs of youth who are involved in exchanging sex for money, food, housing, drugs, or other goods. The study was overseen by the Center for Court Innovation in collaboration with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Researchers from John Jay developed the youth interview instrument and led the fieldwork in the Atlantic City site, and researchers from the Center for Court Innovation contracted with experienced ethnographers to lead the fieldwork in the five other sites and conducted the multi-site analysis presented in this report. Executive Summary v This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. The six research sites were selected to represent a geographically diverse set of locations that, at the outset of the project, were deemed likely to possess a relatively sizable population of youth in the sex trade. Final site selection was informed by official prostitution arrest statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; call volume from a national human trafficking hotline maintained by the Polaris Project; and key informant interviews regarding perceived national “hub sites” for the sex trafficking of underage individuals. The feasibility of implementing the study methodology was also considered in final site selection. The four principal elements of the study methodology are summarized below.