Underage Sex Trafficking: What the Real Numbers Show

• this is a seriously "who cares topic" ~ I'm so sick of reading or watching media content on the morality issues such as age of consent , or the right for two concenting people to excchange sex for money .......  these are not childern they are teens almost 100% of the time and its pretty obvious to any current high schooler that there are always a handful of girls willing to do this ~ its easy money for little effort , and ya its stupid but to each their own ... if you wanna be a ho bag and jerk old guys off for in their car for cash on Friday night .... go for it  But stop filling the whole media with the same old redundant dribble about the decay or moral values  ~ from my understanding this has been going on since TIME began! ~ and it will continue to go on until time ends, its obviously something human about us and mother nature ain't gonna be told what to do ~ prostitution will always and for ever be a part of every society ....... just leave it alone and who cares ... focus on "Real issues" please ... IE constant wars we wage all over the world .... our sh1t economy, I just finished a MBA and work in a god dam bank for 12 bucks an hour ... i cant afford anything and i'm in debt up the ass from school ~ so forgive me if i'm not giving skanky teenagers wanna blow your husband in the car for 1000 bucks an hour.  perhaps I should get into escort service .... 7 years of crazy schooling and 25k per year for a degrading dull bank job is a fuking scam of all scams .... put that in the media.

• Um, what we're being asked to accept by you in the "abolitionist" types is that out of several hundreds of thousands of underage trafficking victims, fewer than 1000 ever come to the attention of police. So either this is the most hidden crime imaginable, or more likely, these estimated numbers are off by an order of magnitude. And this would be hardly the first time that overinflated numbers were attached to a hot-button issue of this kind. Oh, and please spare us the "there are experts in the field who KNOW the real numbers". If that were the case, you could provide hard numbers and sources – not just estimates that you "know" are true.

• Just because the numbers of arrests for child prostitution don't appear to be as high as you might expect, that does not mean that there aren't more children who are sexually exploited across the country. In fact, that low number speaks to an even greater issue, which is that these poor children are STILL at risk because not enough is being done to rescue them. Have you ever looked at say, rape statistics? It is an accepted fact that there are more rapes across this country than the numbers show because of the fact that many times victims do not come forward. Do not belittle the issue of child sexual exploitation by minimizing the number after a paltry two months of research when there are people who have been working to combat the issue for years and who KNOW that there are hundreds of thousands of children at risk and currently being sexually exploited. Instead of taking all your information from the Village Voice (which, unless I am much mistaken, isn't exactly the pinnacle of perfection or an expert on the issue) try doing some of your own research and look into what goes on. Also, the 100,000-300,000 is just the estimate of USA children who are exploited, it doesn't take into consideration the children who are trafficked into the country each year.

• Ashton Kutcher is the worst celebrity spokesperson of all time.  

• The numbers come from Dr. Richard Estes, of the University of Pennsylvania, and his very reputable study.  The study does NOT say that 100-300,000 kids are victims of sex trafficking (according to the federal law, they are NOT child prostitutes); the study says between 100-300K kids are at risk of commercial sexual exploitation.  You can read the study yourself.

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