Youth Involvement in the Sex Trade: A National Study
Date
2016
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Publisher
Center for Court Innovation
Abstract
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. 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.
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Keywords
juveniles, sex trade, domestic minor sex trafficking, response, research
Citation
Swaner, R., Labriola, M., Rempel, M., Walker, A., & Spadafore, J. (2016). Youth Involvement in the Sex Trade: A National Study. New York: Center for Court Innovation.