Carissa Phelps was only 12 years old when she ran away from the Fresno County group home where her mother had left her. Hungry and alone, the runaway was befriended by a man three times her age. And the price of a hot dog and Pepsi was all it cost the man to get her to a seedy motel.
Carissa soon found herself drawn into the world of child prostitution. It begins with men who first befriend lost girls like Carissa, then force them to have sex with other adult men and take whatever money they earn. Twenty years later, Carissa has managed to escape the desperate “survival sex” lifestyle that has become a dead-end road for many young people.
Others, however, are not so fortunate. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, child prostitution has become a problem of epidemic proportions, with estimates ranging between 300,000 and 800,000 (five million or more are prostituted globally). Those figures are likely even higher when one considers how many street kids—runaways, thrown-aways and cast-offs from the foster care system—remain unaccounted for in America. Left to fend for themselves, these young girls and boys quickly become prey for small-time pimps and organized sex-trafficking rings.
Amazingly, many children are introduced to prostitution by family members or acquaintances such as parents, older siblings or boyfriends. The internet, especially websites such as Craigslist, Facebook and MySpace, has made it even easier to prey on children without being easily detected by law enforcement.
Child prostitution is America’s “dirty little secret,” one that cuts across racial and socio-economic divides. As Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin observed, “It’s one of those issues that doesn’t get discussed and therefore there’s an assumption that perhaps either it doesn’t exist at all or the young women and girls who are prostitutes are there by their own free will.” Yet there is little to suggest that these children ever willingly choose such a lifestyle. Even the term “child prostitute” is something of a misnomer, suggesting that it is the child—and not the adult handler—who has opted to sell him or herself for sex.
Children who are sold for sex (the majority are female) typically range in age from 11 to 17, with some as young as 9 years old. Once they have been lured or forced into prostituting themselves, these children are subjected to a full range of injuries, diseases, pregnancies, mental issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression and drug addiction, not to mention criminal and delinquency charges if they are caught. For those who are “rescued” out of the system, the stigma of having once been part of the sex trade is hard to overcome.
Yet while most people are barely aware of the sex trafficking industry, it infects suburbs, cities and towns across the nation. “This is not a problem that only happens in New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco,” stated Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “This happens in smaller communities. The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”
Unfortunately, Americans have become good at turning away from things that make us uncomfortable or stray too far from our picture-perfect images of ourselves. Yet the harsh reality is that this epidemic is largely one of our own making. Simply put, we have failed to prioritize or protect our young people, leaving them to fend for themselves. Continue >>
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