Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (25 page)

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 histor- ical context.

Back in the late 1990s, she explains, Atlanta women had galva- nized 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 home- less 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 docu- menting cases of child prostitution. Apart from thirty-one juve- nile 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 exis- tence,” 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 envi- ronment 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 find- ings under the headline “City’s shame remains; despite crack- downs, 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 adoles- cent 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 statis- tics, 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 strate- gies 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.”

In late 2009 the U.S. Department of Justice called on the Center for Court Innovation and John Jay professor Ric Curtis to expand their research to other cities nationwide, backing the project with

a $1.275 million federal grant. Now Curtis and Jennifer Bryan, the center’s principal research associate, direct six research teams across the United States, employing the same in-the-trenches approach that worked in New York City: respondent-driven sampling, or RDS.

The method was developed in the 1990s by sociologist Doug Heckathorn, now on the faculty at Cornell University, who was seeking a way to count hidden populations. It has since been used in fifteen countries to put a number on a variety of subcultures, from drug addicts to jazz musicians. Curtis and his research assis- tant, Meredith Dank, were the first to use RDS to count child prostitutes.

For the John Jay study, Curtis and Dank screened kids for two criteria: age (eightgeen and under) and involvement in prosti- tution. All subjects who completed the study’s full, confidential interview were paid twenty dollars. They were also given a stack of coded coupons to distribute to other potential subjects, and for each successful referral they were paid ten dollars. And so on.

RDS relies on a snowball effect that ultimately extends through numerous social networks, broadening the reach of the study. “The benefit of this is that you’re getting the hidden popu- lation: kids who don’t necessarily show up for [social] services and who may or may not get arrested,” says Bryan. “It’s based on the ‘six degrees of separation’ theory.”

To calculate their population estimate, the John Jay team first culled the interview subjects who didn’t fit the study’s criteria but had been included for the potential referrals they could generate. The next step was to tally the number of times the remaining 249 subjects had been arrested for prostitution and compare that to the total number of juvenile prostitution arrests in state law-enforce- ment records. Using a mathematical algorithm often employed

in biological and social-science studies, Ric Curtis and his crew were able to estimate that 3,946 youths were hooking in New York.

David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, calls the New York study significant, in that it “makes the big [national] numbers that people put out—like a million kids, or five hundred thousand kids—unlikely.”

Finkelhor’s single caveat: while RDS is efficient in circulating through a broad range of social networks, certain scenarios might elude detection—specifically, foreign children who might be held captive and forbidden to socialize.

Still, says Finkelhor, “I think [the study] highlights important components of the problem that don’t get as much attention: that there are males involved, and that there are a considerable number of kids who are operating without pimps.”

The John Jay study’s authors say they were surprised from the start at the number of boys who came forward. In response Dank pursued new avenues of inquiry—visiting courthouses to inter- view girls who’d been arrested, and canvassing at night with a group whose specialty was street outreach to pimped girls. She and Curtis also pressed their male subjects for leads.

“It turns out that the boys were the more effective recruiter of pimped girls than anybody else,” Curtis says. “It’s interesting, because this myth that the pimps have such tight control over the girls, that no one can talk to them, is destroyed by the fact that these boys can talk to them and recruit them and bring them to us. Obviously the pimps couldn’t have that much of a stranglehold on them.”

The same, of course, might be true of the elusive foreign-born contingent Finkelhor mentions.

Curtis and Dank believe there is indeed a foreign sub-popu- lation RDS could not reach. But with no data to draw on, it’s impossible to gauge whether it’s statistically significant or yet another overblown stereotype.