Prostitution Incidents Known to Police

As noted, in NIBRS juveniles can be associated with prostitution crimes as both offenders and victims. How these two categories differ is not entirely clear because NIBRS does not provide coding guidelines to police on this matter. Ambiguity exists because when a juvenile has sex with an adult in exchange for money, the juvenile may have committed a prostitution offense and may also be victim of a statutory or other sex crime. Presumably, when juveniles are pimped by adults they will tend to be seen as victims, and when they take a more active role in soliciting sexual activities, they will tend to be seen as offenders. But some of the categorization may reflect arbitrary features such as the demeanor of the juveniles, the sympathy that individual police officers may have for them, or the policies of the jurisdiction in which the incident occurred. To help understand how law enforcement responds to the prostitution of juveniles, this Bulletin examines the juveniles categorized as both offenders and victims in prostitution incidents.

Of the 13,814 prostitution incidents in NIBRS that involved identified offenders of any age, 200 (1.4 percent) involved juvenile offenders.³ The numbers showed little change over the 4-year NIBRS data period examined in this study (1997–2000). Although this could suggest that prostitution activity and/or the police practices that bring those activities to light remained stable during those years,⁴ the limitations of NIBRS data make it unwise to draw any conclusions about trends without having a variety of additional sources of information.

In addition to the juvenile offender cases, juvenile victims were listed in 52 prostitution incidents during the 4-year study period. As with incidents involving juvenile offenders, the year-to-year numbers of incidents involving juvenile victims remained relatively stable.

Altogether, NIBRS data for 1997–2000 identify 241 prostitution incidents with either juvenile offenders, juvenile victims, or both (5 percent of incidents). Within these incidents are found 229 individual juvenile offenders and 61 individual juvenile victims. These cases span 13 states and 76 law enforcement jurisdictions. Although this is not a large number of incidents for typical crime statistical analysis, so few multijurisdictional analyses exist of police encounters with the prostitution of juveniles that this limited sample is worthy of analysis. In addition, the NIBRS system allows a contrast between the prostitution of juveniles and adult prostitution

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