Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (24 page)

Life is life, and you gotta do what you gotta do. It’s like everybody can’t be a doctor, a teacher, or have rich parents take care of us. And it’s gonna teach us, like—when we get older, we’re gonna be stronger, ’cause we know life experience and stuff like that. And we’re goin’ to know what to do in certain situations because of what we’ve been through when we were younger. You gotta do what you gotta do to survive.

—female, age sixteen

The first night Ric Curtis and Meredith Dank went looking for child prostitutes in the Bronx back in the summer of 2006, they arrived at Hunts Point with the windows of Curtis’s decaying Oldsmobile, circa 1992, rolled down. Curtis, who chairs the anthropology department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, had done research on the neighborhood’s

junkies and was well acquainted with its reputation for pros- titution (immortalized in several HBO documentaries). If the borough had a centralized stroll for hookers, he figured Hunts Point would be it.

But after spending several hours sweating in the muggy August air, the professor and his PhD student decided to head home. They’d found a grand total of three hookers. Two were underage, and all three were skittish about climbing into a car with two strangers and a tape recorder.

Dispirited though they may have been, the researchers had no intention of throwing in the towel. They were determined to achieve their goal: to conduct a census of New York City’s child sex workers.

Even before they’d begun gearing up for the project two months prior, Curtis and Dank knew the magnitude of the chal- lenge they had on their hands. No research team before them had hit on a workable method of quantifying this elusive population. For decades most law-enforcement officials, social workers, and activist groups had cited a vast range—anywhere from tens of thousands to three million—when crafting a sound bite pegging the population of underage hookers nationwide. But the range had been calculated with little or no direct input from the chil- dren themselves.

Over time, the dubious numbers became gospel.

In similar fashion, monetary outlays based on the veracity of those numbers began to multiply.

The $500,000 the federal government had allotted for this joint study by John Jay and New York’s public-private Center for Court Innovation was chump change compared to the bounty amassed by a burgeoning assortment of nonprofit groups jockeying to liberate and rehabilitate the captive legions

of exploited and abused children.

Now Ric Curtis intended to go the direct route in deter- mining how many kids were out there hooking: he and Dank were going to locate them, make contact with them, and inter- view them one-on-one, one kid at a time. If they could round up and debrief two hundred youths, the research team would be able to employ a set of statistically solid metrics to accurately extrapolate the total population.

It took two years of sleuthing, surveying and data-crunching, but in 2008 Curtis and Dank gave the feds their money’s worth— and then some.

The results of the John Jay survey shattered the widely accepted stereotype of a child prostitute: a pre- or barely teenage girl whose every move was dictated by the wiliest of pimps.

After their first attempt flopped, the two researchers switched tacks. They printed a batch of coupons that could be redeemed for cash and which listed a toll-free number that kids could call anonymously to volunteer for the survey. With a local nonprofit agency that specialized in at-risk youth on board to distribute an initial set of the coupons, the researchers forwarded the 1-800 line to Dank’s cell phone and waited.

It took almost a week, but the line finally lit up. Soon after- ward Dank met her first two subjects—one male, the other female—at a cafe near Union Square. Both were too old to qualify for the study, and the man said he’d never engaged in sex for pay. But Dank decided to stay and interview them.

The woman said she had worked as a prostitute and that she was confident she could send underage kids Dank’s way. The man said he was twenty-three, just out of jail and homeless.

“Out of the two of them, I thought she would have been the

catalyst,” Dank says now. “But his was the magic coupon.”

Within a day her phone was “blowing up” with calls from kids who’d been referred by the homeless man. Almost as quickly word got around that two professors were holding late- afternoon “office hours” at Stuyvesant Park and would pay half the going rate for oral sex in exchange for a brief interview. Before long the researchers found themselves working long past dark, until they’d covered everyone in line or the rats got too feisty.

Nine months later Dank and Curtis had far surpassed their goal, completing interviews with 249 underage prostitutes. From that data, they were able to put a number on the total population of New York’s teen sex workers: 3,946.

Most astonishing to the researchers was the demographic profile teased out by the study. Published by the U.S. Depart- ment of Justice in September 2008, Curtis and Dank’s findings thoroughly obliterated the long-held core assumptions about underage prostitution:

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Nearly half of the kids—about 45 percent—were boys.

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Only 10 percent were involved with a “market facilitator” (e.g., a pimp).

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About 45 percent got into the “business” through friends.

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More than 90 percent were U.S.-born (56 percent were New York City natives).

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On average, they started hooking at age fifteen.

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Most serviced men—preferably white and wealthy.

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Most deals were struck on the street.

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Almost 70 percent of the kids said they’d sought

assistance at a youth-service agency at least once.

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Nearly all of the youths—95 percent—said they exchanged sex for money because it was the surest way to support themselves.

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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.

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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.”

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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 Inno- cence Lost website (f bi.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 consid- erable 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 enforce- ment 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 initia- tive, now folded into the pending Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.)

Though the language of the bill is gender-neutral, some advo- cates 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 Wash- ington 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 commer- cial 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 commer- cial 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 commis- sioned 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 repre- sentatives 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 diplomacy quickly devolved into a debacle.