Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture

by Неизвестный

  ▶ In other words, the typical kid who is commercially exploited for sex in New York City is not a tween girl, has not been sold into sexual slavery and is not held captive by a pimp.

  ▶ Nearly all the boys and girls involved in the city’s sex trade are going it alone.

  Ric Curtis and Meredith Dank were amazed by what their research had revealed. But they were completely unprepared for the way law-enforcement officials and child-advocacy groups reacted to John Jay’s groundbreaking study.

  “I remember going to a meeting in Manhattan where they had a lot of prosecutors there whose job was to prosecute pimps,” Curtis recalls. “They were sort of complaining about the fact that their offices were very well staffed but their workload was—not very daunting, let’s say. They had a couple cases, and at every meeting you go to they’d pull out the cherry-picked case of this pimp they had busted, and they’d tell the same story at every meeting. They too were bothered by the fact that they couldn’t find any pimps, any girls.

  “So I come along and say, ‘I found three hundred kids’—they’re all perky—but then I say, ‘I’m sorry, but only ten percent had pimps.’

  “It was like a fart in church. Because basically I was saying their office was a waste of time and money.”

  Jay Albanese, a criminologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who headed up the Justice Department’s research arm for four years, says the findings of the John Jay study are among the most interesting he has seen.

  “Whether you are a kid or an adult, the issue becomes: To what extent is this voluntary?” Albanese says. “Because you make more money in this than being a secretary? Or because you really have no choices—like, you’re running from abuse or caught up in drugs? The question becomes: If Curtis is correct, what do we do with that ninety percent? Do we ignore it? How hard do we look at how they got into that circumstance? You could make the case that for the ninety percent for whom they couldn’t find any pimping going on—well, how does it happen?

  “It’s a very valid question,” Albanese continues. “A policy question: To what extent should the public and the public’s money be devoted to these issues, whether it’s child prostitution or child pimping?”

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the only agency that keeps track of how many children the legal system rescues from pimps nationwide. The count, which began in June 2003, now exceeds 1,600 as of April of this year, according to the FBI’s Innocence Lost website (fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/vc_majorth-efts/cac/innocencelost)—an average of about 200 each year.

  Through interviews and analysis of public records, Village Voice Media has found that the federal government spends about $20 million a year on public awareness, victims’ services, and police work related to domestic human trafficking, with a considerable focus on combating the pimping of children. An additional $50 million-plus is spent annually on youth homeless shelters, and since 1996 taxpayers have contributed a total of $186 million to fund a separate program that provides street outreach to kids who may be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation.

  That’s at least $80 million doled out annually for law enforcement and social services that combine to rescue approximately two hundred child prostitutes every year. These agencies might improve upon their $400,000-per-rescued-child average if they joined in the effort to develop a clearer picture of the population they aim to aid. But there’s no incentive for them to do so when they stand to rake in even more public money simply by staying the course.

  At the behest of advocates who work with pimped girls, along with a scattering of U.S. celebrities who help to publicize the cause, the bipartisan Senate tag team of Oregon’s Ron Wyden, a Democrat, and John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican, is pushing for federal legislation that would earmark another $12 million to $15 million a year to fund six shelters reserved exclusively for underage victims of sex trafficking. (In an editorial published this past July, Village Voice Media expressed its support for the initiative, now folded into the pending Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.)

  Though the language of the bill is gender-neutral, some advocates point to the disproportionate influence wielded by groups who direct their efforts exclusively at pimped girls. They worry that anti-sex-trafficking funding might increasingly ignore boys and transgender youths, not to mention kids of any gender who aren’t enslaved by a pimp but sell sex of their own volition. Jennifer Dreher, who heads the anti-trafficking program at Safe Horizon, a New York nonprofit whose Streetwork project has targeted juvenile prostitutes and homeless youths since 1984, says if federal lawmakers took the time to read the John Jay report, they would better grasp the complexity of the issue.

  “We have been seeing and talking about this population for so long, but that kind of tug-at-your-heartstrings narrative was the only one focused on,” Dreher says, referring to the stereotype of the pimped little girl.

  Certainly those girls are out there, Dreher says, and they’re in need of help and compassion. But they’re only a small segment of the underage population commercially exploited for sex. If you want to eradicate the scourge, argues Dreher, “Then you have to recognize the ninety percent of other types of people that this John Jay College study found.”

  Ric Curtis couldn’t agree more. “All of the advocates are focused on girls,” he fumes. “I’m totally outraged by that—I can’t tell you how angry I am about that. The most-victimized kids that I met with were the boys, especially the straight boys. I felt so bad for those who have no chance with the advocates.” More than three years after publishing his study, the researcher still smarts from the cold shoulder that greeted his work.

  “[Initially] there were a lot of people enthusiastic in Washington that we found such a large number,” he recounts. “Then they look more closely at my findings. And they see, well, it wasn’t three hundred kids under the yoke of some pimp; in fact, it was half boys, and only ten percent of all of the kids were being pimped. And [then] it was a very different reception.”

  Dank, who now researches human trafficking and commercial sex at the nonpartisan Urban Institute in Washington, DC, is equally baffled at the study’s lack of traction outside the halls of the Justice Department.

  “We’re not denying that [pimped girls] exist,” she emphasizes. “But if you were to take all the newspaper, magazine and journal articles that have been written on this, you’d come away saying, ‘Oh, my god! Every child-prostitution incident involves a pimp situation!’ It’s this huge thing. Where really, at the end of the day, yes, that is an issue, but we’re at the point where we need to look beyond this one subgroup of the population and look at commercial sexual exploitation of children as a whole.”

  About a year after the John Jay study commenced, the Justice Department set its sights on Atlanta, awarding a $452,000 grant to Mary Finn, a professor of criminal justice at Georgia State University. Finn’s 2007 study had two goals: first, to calculate the population of the metro area’s underage sex workers. And second, to evaluate the work of an assemblage of government agencies and nonprofits that had joined forces to combat child prostitution.

  The coalition Finn was to assess had formed several years prior with $1 million in Justice Department funding. Heading it up: the Juvenile Justice Fund, a child-advocacy agency allied with the Atlanta Women’s Foundation and the Harold and Kayrita Anderson Family Foundation. The trio of nonprofits had commissioned a child-prostitution survey whose alarming findings were destined to be regurgitated nationwide by an unquestioning media—and whose methodology, in turn, would be exposed as entirely bogus and discounted by a veritable who’s who of child-prostitution researchers.

  To kick off the project, Finn arranged a meeting with representatives of the collaboration and invited Curtis along to help break the ice. It seemed like a good idea: Curtis had accrued a wealth of experience thanks to his one-year head start, and the researchers would ultimately share their findings in a final report. But what was intended as an exercise in diploma
cy quickly devolved into a debacle.

  The get-together began to unravel when Finn explained that the Justice Department’s guidelines required her team to gather its data without regard to gender or motive—in other words, that they would be calculating the prevalence of commercial sex among both boys and girls, and that both trafficking and so-called survival sex were fair game.

  At that point, Finn recounts, a Juvenile Justice Fund board member angrily objected, insisting that no child would engage in prostitution by choice. Throughout the debate that ensued, not a single representative from the Atlanta advocates’ contingent uttered a syllable of support for Finn’s approach. Curtis stepped in, noting that Finn’s methodology made sense in light of his preliminary findings.

  The group wasn’t having any of it.

  “The members of the collaborative felt the data couldn’t be accurate—that maybe that’s the case in New York, but it’s certainly not how it is here in Atlanta,” Finn recalls. “That’s when I sensed that they had far more invested—that there was a reason to be so standoffish, to resist so aggressively or assertively, that I wasn’t privy to. What was clear to me was the silence of everyone else: there was some issue of control and power.”

  To this day, Finn says, she’s not sure what was behind the hostile reception. But she does provide some compelling historical context.

  Back in the late 1990s, she explains, Atlanta women had galvanized to prevent child prostitution. One juvenile-court judge in particular provided a catalyst when she instituted a screening process in her courtroom that was aimed at identifying kids who were engaging in prostitution.

  The only children who were questioned about sex work were girls. Boys were never screened.

  “The problem was very narrowly defined from the outset,” says Finn. “I’m a feminist scholar,” she goes on. “I understand the importance of these advocates—who are predominantly women, predominantly concerned about the plight of girls—wanting to retain that focus on that issue. But as a researcher, knowing that this is labeled as ‘child exploitation,’ and knowing that there are numbers in other cities showing boys are being victimized, I had to argue that this was maybe a small but significant population we had to look at.”

  Finn soon found herself facing a dilemma on the research front as well.

  When Curtis and Dank put out the call for underage sex workers in New York, they were confident they’d be able to find space in an emergency shelter if they encountered an interview subject who appeared to be in immediate peril. Atlanta, on the other hand, was equipped with no emergency shelters for homeless youths. In the absence of any such backstop, Finn concluded, it would be unethical to go hunting for kids to interview.

  So she went with Plan B: interviewing law-enforcement agents and social workers, examining arrest records, and mining a countywide database of child-sexual-abuse cases.

  Despite the less-than-satisfactory secondary-source approach, Finn figured she’d have plenty of data to mine. After all, she’d seen breathless media reports of trafficking in Atlanta. “The overall market for sex with kids is booming in many parts of the U.S. In Atlanta—a thriving hotel and convention center with a sophisticated airport and ground transportation network—pimps and other lowlifes have tapped into that market bigtime,” blared a 2006 New York Times story.

  “I walked in thinking: This is going to be a huge priority for any agency that is dealing with at-risk youth. I mean, goodness, this must be at the top of their agenda for training, protocol—all of it.”

  On the contrary, Finn found that most organizations, whether nonprofit or government-run, were not systematically documenting cases of child prostitution. Apart from thirty-one juvenile arrests police had made over a four-year period, there were virtually no numbers for her to compile.

  “It was almost like nobody wants to document their existence,” Finn says. “Whether it’s because they don’t want to label the youth, or they don’t want other agencies to know they’re aware of them because then the call comes—‘Well, what are you doing about it?’—I just don’t know. It was very odd. The environment we were seeing in the media just looked so different from the environment we walked into.”

  In September 2008, just as Finn was preparing a summary of her scant findings, the Juvenile Justice Fund announced an ongoing statewide study based on “scientific probability methods,” whose results to date pointed to “a significant number of adolescent girls being commercially sexually exploited in Georgia, likely ranging from 200 to 300 girls, on the streets, over the internet, through escort services, and in major hotels every month from August 2007 to May 2008.”

  Published in 2010, the final report was nearly as ambiguous, though there were more—and even bigger—numbers. According to the Justice Fund’s “scientific research study,” underwritten with money from the Anderson Family Foundation, each month in Georgia, 7,200 men pay underage girls for 8,700 sex acts, “with an average of 300 acts a day.” The report’s authors updated their 2008 stat, increasing their underage-hooker count to four hundred.

  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution trumpeted the report’s findings under the headline “City’s shame remains; despite crackdowns, Atlanta is still a hub in selling children for sex.”

  The Journal-Constitution did not, however, inform its readers that the “scientific study” was undertaken not by researchers adhering to rigid academic standards, but by the Schapiro Group, an Atlanta public-relations firm hired by the Justice Fund.

  Despite the claims to the contrary, there was nothing remotely “scientific” about the research. In order to gauge the number of men who pay for sex with underage girls, the PR firm observed activity at major hotels and on streets thought to be frequented by sex workers. Staffers also called escort services, posing as customers, to inquire into the possibility of hookups with adolescent girls. And they created online ads featuring photos of young-looking females and inviting prospective customers to call a phone number—a line answered by PR firm “operators” posing as pimps and madams. (For more about the Schapiro Group’s dubious methods, see “Weird Science,” written by Nick Pinto and published in the March 24 issue of Village Voice Media’s newsweeklies, citypages.com/2011-03-23/women-s-funding-network-sex-trafficking-study-is-junk-science.)

  Mary Finn is troubled by the murky provenance of the statistics, but more so by the time and effort wasted on sensationalizing a problem instead of addressing it.

  “This shouldn’t be a race to the top,” she contends. “We should be mobilized for a single victimization. Why do we need three hundred, or five hundred, or one thousand to mobilize as a community?

  “I guess that’s what is most disheartening about the [dubious] numerical information that’s coming out: we may not be putting resources where we need to put them, because we don’t have a clear grasp of what the underlying problem is.”

  Anyone curious about the underlying problem in New York City can find numerous clues within the 122-page report documenting the several hundred in-person interviews at the core of the John Jay College study.

  There are, for instance, the state-run group homes for orphans and kids whose families have kicked them out:

  “…[H]e was like, you know, the little leeches that linger around,” said a girl who told of being picked up by a pimp outside the group home where she resided at age fifteen. “And I was sittin’ on my steps and I was cryin’ because they’re givin’ you allowance—twenty-sumpin’ dollars a week—and then you’re not allowed to do certain types a jobs because you have a curfew. And if you miss curfew, they shippin’ you somewhere else. So it was like, I was just at my rope’s end. And the things that he was sayin’ to me, it sounded good.”

  And the potential pitfalls of the foster-care system:

  “My mother died and I was placed in foster homes,” said a girl who started hooking at age fifteen. “My foster father would touch me, and I ran away. I ended up coming to New York, and I was on the streets; nobody wanted to help me.
And I ran into this girl, and she was like thirty-eight when she passed away last year, but she taught me everything I know. She taught me how to do what I have to do—but not be stupid about it—to play it right, and be smart.”

  Not to mention youth homeless shelters:

  “I’ve been raped at Covenant House three times,” one young man stated. “It was by guys in the men’s ward.” (The three other youths interviewed for the study who spoke specifically about the New York–based nonprofit, whose mission is to care for kids in crisis, made no mention of sexual assault; they described the shelter as a place where kids shared knowledge about how to sell sex and/or characterized it as a popular place for pimps looking to recruit.)

  One recurring theme is economic desperation:

  “The fact that people think that I’m doing it because I want to—I mean, I get replies all the time on email, and they tell me, ‘You know, why don’t you just get a job?’” reported a boy with three years’ experience selling sex. “Well no shit, Sherlock! Honestly! I don’t know, I would like someone to be able to offer me something.”

  Law-enforcement personnel, the kids say, are not always helpful:

  “One cop said, ‘You’re lucky I’m off duty, but you’re gonna suck my dick or I’ma take you in,’” a transgender youth stated. “This has happened to me about eight times.”

  “Police raped me a couple a times in Queens,” said a female who had worked as a prostitute for four years. “The last time that happened was a coupla months ago. But you don’t tell anybody; you just deal wit’ it.”

  Though many kids said they developed buddy-system strategies to stay safe and fed on the street, nearly all wanted a way out:

  “I really wanna stop now, but I can’t ’cause I have no source of income since I’m too young,” said a girl who’d begun hooking at age twelve. “So it’s like that I have to do it, it’s not like I wanna do it. As I say, I’m only seventeen, I got a two-year-old daughter, so that means I got pregnant real young. Didn’t have no type of Medicaid…. Can’t get a job, have no legal guardian, I don’t have nobody to help me but [friends], so you know, we all in this together.”