Notes

1. This Bulletin defines prostitution incidents as those incidents that contain at least one of two types of prostitution offenses identified by NIBRS. The offenses are defined as (1) prostitution (“to unlawfully engage in sexual relations for profit”) and (2) assisting or promoting prostitution (“to solicit customers or transport persons for prostitution purposes; to own, manage, or operate a dwelling or other establishment for the purpose of providing a place where prostitution is performed; or to otherwise assist or promote prostitution”). Either or both can occur in a single NIBRS incident. While this Bulletin treats any incident that contains either of these offenses as a prostitution incident, at times during data analysis it will be useful to distinguish between those where only “prostitution” occurred and those where “assisting prostitution” was recorded. It is important to note that the offenders identified for prostitution offenses in NIBRS are only those engaged in prostitution, not its patrons. (See “Using NIBRS Data To Examine the Prostitution of Juveniles” for more information.

2. Most discussions of the prostitution of juveniles rely heavily on anecdotal case studies, often gathered from individual police officers or derived from interviews with limited populations of juvenile prostitutes, such as shelter residents or correctional facility inmates. Statistics on the prostitution of juveniles have often been based on guesswork (Ennew et al., 1996; Estes and Weiner, 2002; Rasmusson, 1999).

3. In 416 incidents, offender age was not specified in NIBRS data.

4. Similar stability is evident in the numbers of juveniles arrested for prostitution as reported in UCR in recent years (Sickmund, Snyder, and Poe-Yamagata, 1997; Snyder, 2001; Snyder, Sickmund, and Poe- Yamagata, 1996).

5. Only 3 percent of NIBRS’s juvenile offenses came from large city locales. This suggests that if large cities were appropriately represented in NIBRS, which they are not, the percent of juvenile offender prostitution from those areas would be considerably larger.

6. In NIBRS, a forcible sex offense is defined as “any sexual act directed at another person, forcibly and/or against that person’s will; or not forcibly or against the person’s will where the victim is incapable of giving consent.” The specific forcible sex offenses are rape, sodomy, sexual assault with an object, and fondling. A nonforcible sex offense is defined as “unlawful, nonforcible sexual intercourse.” The specific nonforcible sex offenses are incest and statutory rape.

Prostitution of Juveniles: Patterns From NIBRS	OJJDP Bulletin • June 2004