Juvenile Victims in Prostitution Incidents
As noted earlier, not all juveniles in prostitution incidents were identified as offenders. Juvenile victims also were reported in some prostitution episodes, but, as described earlier, the victims in these episodes are not categorized as victims of prostitution per se, but rather as victims of other offenses, such as sex crimes (see figure 3). This means that a juvenile victim’s actual role in a prostitution incident is not always clear, nor is the victim’s link to the prostitution offense. For example, an adult prostitution offender may commit a sex crime against a child, but not necessarily as part of the prostitution activity. It is clear, however, that prostitution incidents involving juvenile victims had their own distinctive patterns and were different in many ways from prostitution incidents involving juvenile offenders.Figure 3: Offenses Committed Against Juvenile Victims in Prostitution Incidents
Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1997–2000.
First, the juvenile victims in prostitution incidents were predominantly female (72 percent) compared with the juvenile offenders who were disproportionately male (61 percent) (table 4). The victims were also younger, most (77 percent) 15 years old or younger, compared with the juvenile offenders, 69 percent of whom were 16 or 17 years old. One factor contributing to these age differences may be age-of-consent laws, which, in some states, do not allow juveniles to be considered the victims of statutory sex crimes after the age of 15 (Klain, 1999).
Prostitution incidents involving juvenile victims were also different according to the locales where they occurred. The predominant location (48 percent) was a home or residence and only 17 percent occurred outside. By contrast, incidents involving juvenile offenders occurred predominantly outside (68 percent) and much less frequently in homes and residences (14 percent). Prostitution incidents involving juvenile victims tended to occur much less frequently during the evening than those involving juvenile offenders (29 percent and 61 percent, respectively). And prostitution incidents involving juvenile victims were not nearly as often associated with large city environments as incidents involving juvenile offenders.
Prostitution incidents involving juvenile victims were also more likely than those involving juvenile offenders to involve adult offenders. Fully 90 percent of juvenile victim incidents involved an adult offender (table 5), compared with only 52 percent of juvenile offender incidents (104 of 200 incidents, see figure 2). In both types of incidents, the adult offenders were almost exclusively male. Specifically, 94 percent of mixed-age incidents involving a juvenile victim also involved a male adult offender (table 5), while 90 percent of mixed-age incidents involving juvenile offenders also involved at least one male adult offender (94 of 104 incidents, see figure 2).
In spite of the frequent presence of adult male offenders in prostitution incidents involving juvenile victims, arrest rates were relatively low. Arrests were made in 35 percent of prostitution incidents involving juvenile victims (table 4), compared with 74 percent of prostitution incidents with juvenile offenders and 90 percent of those with only adult offenders (table 1). The higher percentage of arrests in juvenile offender cases probably reflects, at least in part, that police encounter these offenses more often outdoors with the activities in progress and offenders present. The juvenile victim cases, which occur less frequently in an outdoor location, involve more episodes that come to police attention through victim or third-party reports, so that the offender is not present, making an arrest difficult if not impossible.
Most juvenile victims knew their offenders (64 percent were victimized by acquaintances and 11 percent by family members) (table 5). And most of the victimizations suffered by juveniles at the hands of these offenders were violent crimes (87 percent), with a majority being forcible sex assaults (64 percent of all victimizations) (figure 3). Nonforcible sex offenses were also committed, so altogether forcible and nonforcible sex crimes were present in nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of the juvenile victimizations.6 Still, nearly a quarter of the victimizations (23 percent) consisted of nonsexual violence. (If the child was being prostituted in these cases, the actual sex crime against a child may not have yet occurred.) Little victim injury was reported in these victimizations (12 percent of cases) (table 5). The typical victim in these incidents was a lone 14- year-old female who was the victim of a sex offense by an adult male acquaintance or family member that occurred during the daytime in a residence or hotel/motel.
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