Research Paper On Child Sex Trafficking

The month of April was designated National Child Abuse Prevention Month in 1983, refocusing the country’s efforts on its child abuse epidemic . However, since then, there has been little focus on the prevalent, yet hidden, subsector of child abuse: child sex trafficking. In 2017 alone, the National Human Trafficking Hotline received 2,495 reports of child sex trafficking . Therefore, during National Child Abuse Prevention Month, and every month, we must work toward the prevention of child sex trafficking as we do with any other case of child maltreatment. We must fight for the children whose exploitation was not prevented in the first place.

One of these children is Sarah*, who is now 18 years old.

The first time I met Sarah, she wore white

In my mind, sex trafficking seemed synonymous with the storyline of Taken before I met Sarah. After meeting Sarah, I realized the movie was nothing like the reality of sex trafficking.

In fact, Sarah, like most victims of sex trafficking, doesn’t have a parent to rescue her like Liam Neeson did in Taken. Instead, her parents abused her as a child, just as occurs with 86 percent of sex trafficking victims .

Traffickers also didn’t abduct Sarah, as Neeson’s daughter was in Taken. She was desperate for basic needs, like food and housing, after she became homeless at twelve years old, and a man exploited this vulnerability by selling her for sex.

And, lastly, Sarah was trapped in the domestic sex trade, not in a foreign country. She grew up in Austin, Texas and was sexually exploited by American men throughout the state for most of her teenage

“Only 306 cases of child sex trafficking were reported to the National Trafficking Hotline in 2017,” she said. “When an estimated 79,000 victims are in Texas, there is a clear need for education to prevent and identify sex trafficking amongst our children.”

However, to date, no evidence-based research exists to back up sex trafficking prevention programs. Instead, three general sexual violence prevention programs, Expect Respect, Safe Dates, and Shifting Boundaries, have gained the most attention in terms of their effectiveness .

Each of these programs involves support groups to improve relationships, psycho-education to prevent perpetration and victimization, and consistent evaluation to determine the effectiveness of the programs.

Although My Life My Choice, Love146, and Ending the Game are all similar programs specific to sex trafficking prevention, no research has been conducted to determine the quality of the programs. While the development of these programs is helpful for sex trafficking prevention, we need more.

Not only do we need to apply the techniques used in the evidence-based sexual violence prevention programs to create effective sex trafficking prevention programs, but we also need to use victim stories, like Sarah’s, to make sure we have our facts straight when developing prevention