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Background
The prostitution of juveniles within the United States has proven a difficult
problem to confront, whether by social welfare agencies, law enforcement
organizations, or private social reform groups. This is due to the social
and legal complexity
of the problem and is compounded by a scarcity of reliable information on its
nature and extent (Estes and Weiner, 2002; Fassett and Walsh, 1994; Flores, 1996;
Klain, 1999; National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 1992; The Hofstede
Committee Report, 1999; Whitcomb, De Vos, and Smith, 1998).
The prostitution of juveniles occurs in a variety of contexts. Both international
rings and interstate crime operations traffic young girls to distant places
with promises of employment and money (Flowers, 2001). Parents advertise and
prostitute their children over the Internet (The Hofstede Committee Report,
1999). Runaway and homeless youth on city streets are recruited by pimps or
engage in “survival sex.” Drug pushers force addicted teenagers to
prostitute themselves as a condition for receiving drugs or a place to stay
(Klain, 1999). As part of initiations, gangs may require members to engage
in sex for money or other services (The Hofstede Committee Report, 1999). But
also, acting on their own initiative or in the company of friends, young people
may engage in casual or even frequent prostitution for money or for adventure
(Rasmusson, 1999).
Juvenile prostitutes may be preadolescent children or older teenagers nearly
indistinguishable from their adult counterparts. They may work individually
or in groups, independently or under the control of pimps, parents, or other
operators. The literature has tended to focus on girls, but male juvenile prostitutes
have drawn increasing attention (Flowers, 2001). Knowledge about the backgrounds
of juvenile prostitutes and the association of juvenile prostitution with child
maltreatment, sexual abuse, and running away is better established than information
on how these youth are dealt with by the justice and child welfare systems.
Part of the complexity of this problem relates to the social and legal status
of the juveniles involved. Juvenile prostitutes can be viewed primarily as
victims in the control of unscrupulous adults and commercial vice, but they
can also be viewed as willing participants in an illegal trade and objectionable
activity. Welfare and reform organizations tend to approach these juveniles
as victims of specific exploiters and/or more general social conditions. The
police, on the other hand, are more likely to view them as criminal offenders
(Fassett and Walsh, 1994). In fact, the legal system can treat them as both
offenders and victims.
The National Incident-Based Reporting System
The U.S. Department of Justice is replacing its long-established
Uniform Crime Report (UCR) system with a more comprehensive National
Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). While UCR monitors only
a limited number of index crimes and gathers few details on each
crime event (except in the case of homicide), NIBRS collects
a wide range of information on victims, offenders, and circumstances
for a greater variety of offenses. Offenses tracked in NIBRS
include violent crimes (e.g., homicide, assault, rape, robbery),
property crimes (e.g., theft, arson, vandalism, fraud, and embezzlement),
and crimes against society (e.g., drug offenses, gambling, prostitution).
Moreover, NIBRS collects information on multiple victims, multiple
offenders, and multiple crimes that may be part of the same episode.
Under the new system, as with the old, local law enforcement
personnel compile information on crimes coming to their attention,
and this information is aggregated in turn at the state and national
levels. For a crime to be counted in the system, it simply needs
to be reported and investigated. The incident does not need to
be cleared or an arrest made, although unfounded reports are
deleted from the record.
NIBRS holds great promise, but it is still far from a national
system. Its implementation by the FBI began in 1988, and participation
by states and local agencies is voluntary and incremental. By
1995, jurisdictions in 9 states had agencies contributing data;
by 1997, the number was 12; and by the end of 2000, jurisdictions
in 19 states submitted reports, providing coverage for 14 percent
of the nation’s population and 11 percent of its crime.
Only three states (Idaho, Iowa, South Carolina) have participation
from all local jurisdictions, and only three cities with a population
greater than 500,000 (Austin, TX, and Memphis and Nashville,
TN) are reporting. The crime experiences of large urban areas
are thus particularly underrepresented. The system, therefore,
is not yet nationally representative nor do its data represent
national trends or national statistics. Nevertheless, the system
is assembling large amounts of crime information and providing
a richness of detail about juvenile offending and victimization
that was previously unavailable. The patterns and associations
these data reveal are real and represent the experiences of a
large number of youth. For 2000, the 19 participating states*
reported more than 2,819,000 crime incidents, with at least 267,164
involving an identified juvenile offender. Nevertheless, these
patterns may change as more jurisdictions join the system.
More information about NIBRS data collection can be found at
these Web sites:
(1) www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm,
(2) www.search.org/nibrs/default.asp,
and
(3) www.jrsa.org/ibrrc/.
* Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky,
Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South
Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia. |
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Using NIBRS Data To Examine the Prostitution
of Juveniles
The information presented in this Bulletin on juvenile involvement
in prostitution is based on data collected by the National Incident-Based
Reporting System (NIBRS) for 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000 (see
discussion of the National Incident-Based Reporting
System). NIBRS is presently the only available source of
geographically diverse and uniformly collected crime data that
provides detailed descriptions of prostitution incidents, including
the identity of individual prostitution offenders in terms of
age and other personal characteristics. The prostitution incidents
recorded by NIBRS represent only those that come to the attention
of police.
The basic unit of data organization in NIBRS is the crime incident.
An incident is defined as “one or more offenses committed
by the same offender, or group of offenders acting in concert,
at the same time and place.” Thus, a single incident can
be characterized by multiple offenses, multiple offenders, and,
for those types of offenses for which NIBRS collects victim information,
multiple victims.
The present analysis examines prostitution 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.
NIBRS records personal data on identified prostitution offenders,
but treats prostitution offenses as “crimes against society” (rather
than crimes against persons or property crimes) and provides
no option for identifying or collecting data on individual victims
of prostitution. It is important to note that the offenders identified
for prostitution offenses in NIBRS are only those persons engaged
in prostitution, not its patrons. Offenses such as “patronizing
a prostitute” or “patronizing a house of prostitution” are
categorized in NIBRS as “Type B, All Other Offenses,” and
offender information is only recorded if an arrest was made.
Unfortunately, prostitution patrons cannot be distinguished from
other, nonprostitution offenders who are also recorded in this
NIBRS category (which includes those charged with a wide range
of crimes, such as unlawful assembly, bigamy, contempt of court,
criminal libel, harassment, invasion of privacy, jury tampering,
littering, obstructing justice, perjury, reckless endangerment,
sedition, smuggling, tax law violations, and illegal wiretapping).
In spite of these and other limitations set by data collection
protocols, NIBRS allows two types of juvenile involvement with
prostitution offenses to be identified. First, it reveals the
presence of juvenile offenders in prostitution incidents. Because
a NIBRS incident can include a “group of offenders acting
in concert,” multiple offenders identified in an incident
are considered to be associated with all offenses occurring in
the incident. When there are multiple offenses and multiple offenders,
this leaves some uncertainty as to the exact role each offender
played in each recorded offense. However, in most prostitution
incidents with juvenile offenders (84 percent), either only a
prostitution offense alone occurred or only a single offender
was identified, thus removing any ambiguity as to the link between
the offender and the offense. Thus, it is clear that most juvenile
offenders identified in prostitution incidents in NIBRS were
themselves engaged in prostitution.
Second, although juveniles are not recorded in NIBRS as victims
of prostitution per se, they are sometimes identified as victims
of other offenses (crimes against persons) that occurred in the
same incident as a prostitution offense. Thus, juvenile victimizations
associated with prostitution activity can be recognized. However,
because the juvenile victim is linked to another specific offense
in the incident and because NIBRS does not allow the recording
of “child exploitation” as a type of criminal activity
associated with prostitution offenses themselves (which it does
for pornography and other selected crimes), the nature of the
link between a juvenile victim and the prostitution offense remains
ambiguous and must be inferred from other characteristics of
the incident.
This Bulletin explores both patterns of juvenile prostitution
involvement recorded in NIBRS: involvement as an offender and
involvement as a victim. For purposes of analysis, prostitution
incidents involving juvenile offenders and prostitution incidents
involving juvenile victims are treated as distinct sets of events,
even though a small number of incidents (5 percent of all prostitution
incidents involving juveniles) qualify in both categories. When
an incident could qualify as a juvenile offender incident and
a juvenile victim incident, it was counted in both categories
for purposes of comparison.
In exploring prostitution incidents involving juvenile offenders,
NIBRS data are used to construct statistical descriptions of
the incidents and the offenders involved in them. Characteristics
that can be described include offender age, gender, and race;
numbers of offenders involved; age and gender mixes of offenders;
times of day of incidents; and type of locations and places where
incidents occur. Comparison of these characteristics with those
of other types of crime incidents recorded in NIBRS (such as
juvenile offender incidents that did not include prostitution
and prostitution incidents that involved only adult offenders)
can highlight what is distinctive and noteworthy about the prostitution
of juveniles.
In addition, this analysis describes the characteristics of
those juveniles categorized as victims in prostitution incidents,
as well as the dynamics of their victimization. Of particular
interest are the personal characteristics of juvenile victims
found in prostitution incidents (e.g., age, gender, race) and
how their patterns compare to those of juvenile prostitution
offenders. Also of interest are the specific offenses committed
against these victims, the nature of the offenders who committed
them, the relationship that existed between a victim and an offender,
and the conditions (such as time and place) in which the incident
occurred. Once again, comparisons with other types of incidents
and victims recorded in NIBRS can highlight distinctive and noteworthy
characteristics of these incidents and the juvenile victims involved.
Such comparisons can also provide ideas about how the juvenile
victims found in these incidents are linked to the prostitution
offense itself.
Although the number of incidents reported thus far within NIBRS
is not large, NIBRS data is useful nonetheless to analyze for
several reasons. First, NIBRS provides information about a topic
on which very little systematic statistical and research data
have been previously available. Second, it aggregates the experiences
of a fairly large number of communities and police jurisdictions,
avoiding biases that may be introduced by studies or analyses
in single communities. Third, it provides an anticipatory look
at data from a source that will be increasingly important as
it becomes national in scope in the coming years.
Still, patterns from the analysis of NIBRS data in this Bulletin
should be regarded with caution. They are based on a small number
of cases from an unrepresentative sample of jurisdictions. In
particular, the sample contains few large urban areas and border
cities where such activity may flourish. Moreover, little is
known about how police practices may bias what the statistics
reveal (Fassett and Walsh, 1994). In addition, much juvenile
prostitution is undoubtedly overlooked or fails to come to the
attention of law enforcement. All this points to the need for
more and better data and research on the prostitution of juveniles.
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Uncertainty within law enforcement agencies on how to respond to the prostitution
of juveniles and how to treat juvenile prostitutes has in turn contributed
to a scarcity of reliable, consistent information about the problem. The variable
status of a juvenile prostitute (victim or offender?) may discourage officers,
especially if they are inexperienced in working with child welfare and juvenile
justice systems, from recording a prostitution offense at all, or may lead
them to charge the juvenile instead with another offense altogether (Fassett
and Walsh, 1994; Klain, 1999). In the absence of resources to keep them off
the streets, some police believe charging juveniles with a crime may be the
only way to place them in a secure location.
One of the tools that may prove helpful in guiding law enforcement initiatives
about the problem of juvenile prostitution is the FBI’s NIBRS. This growing
system, designed to replace the present Uniform Crime Report (UCR) system,
allows, for the first time, the tracking of prostitution incidents involving
juveniles across a large number of law enforcement jurisdictions. Although
NIBRS data are far from nationally representative, they provide broad-based,
uniform reports of juvenile prostitution activities that overcome many of the
data limitations that have plagued past analyses of this problem.2 Consequently,
the cases recorded in NIBRS merit careful examination to see what they might
reveal about the problem as it is presently known to police, and how they might
be used to help clarify the nature of the problem.
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| Prostitution of Juveniles:
Patterns From NIBRS |
OJJDP
Bulletin • June 2004 |
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