Implications
NIBRS data, although limited, suggest that the prostitution of juveniles is a varied and complex problem that affects both male and female juveniles and both older and younger teenagers. Some of the juveniles appear to be engaged in prostitution on their own, some in groups with other juveniles, and some in conjunction with adults. In a majority of cases, law enforcement appears to treat the juveniles involved in these incidents as offenders, but in some they appear to regard the juveniles entirely as victims.In NIBRS data, the prostitution of juveniles differs from adult prostitution in that it is less likely to be engaged in alone, and somewhat more likely to be engaged in indoors and in large urban areas. It is less likely to result in an arrest. Like adult prostitution, juvenile prostitution offenses are more likely to occur in the summer months and during the evening hours. Some of the differences from adult prostitution, like its indoor occurrence, may suggest the need for new law enforcement strategies for tracking and uncovering juvenile prostitution.
Strong gender segregation appears to occur in the prostitution of juveniles. According to NIBRS data, the prostitution of male juveniles appears different from that of female juveniles. Males tend to be somewhat older, more likely to operate outdoors, somewhat more likely to be arrested, and less likely to be treated by the police as “victims.” According to the literature, female juveniles are more likely to operate in conjunction with pimps, and the NIBRS data on adult offenders in incidents involving juveniles are consistent with this observation. However, a considerable number of prostitution incidents involving female juvenile offenders appear to have no identified adult or male offender. These incidents are more similar to incidents involving boys without adult offenders than they are to incidents involving girls with adult offenders.
It is primarily boys who have been described as working on their own or with same age peers (Flores, 1996; Klain, 1999), so the large number of incidents in the NIBRS data involving only female juveniles raises some questions. Girls may be working on their own without adult pimps more than they have in the past, or the pimps may be hard for the police to locate. The finding may also reflect something about police practices (i.e., how police typically find juvenile prostitutes—by street patrols, complaint investigation, targeted investigations, etc.). The data do suggest, however, that the phenomenon of female juvenile prostitutes working alone may have been overlooked in discussions of the juvenile prostitution problem. Law enforcement may need to make sure that outmoded stereotypes do not compromise effective work on this issue.
Another surprising finding from NIBRS data is the large percentage of juvenile prostitution offenders who are male (61 percent), even larger than the percentage of males in the adult prostitution offender population (53 percent). This contrasts with the literature on the prostitution of juveniles and with intervention efforts, which have for the most part concentrated on females (Fassett and Walsh, 1994; National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 1992; The Hofstede Committee Report, 1999). Trend information from the UCR shows a growing proportion of male prostitution during the 1990s (Snyder, 2001; Snyder, Sickmund, and Poe-Yamagata, 1996). This may reflect an increasing visibility of young male prostitutes, or an increasing law enforcement concern about this group. But the crime data may also possibly exaggerate this aspect of the problem for several reasons. The willingness of young men to operate outdoors may make them more conspicuous to the police. Police may be more likely to crack down on male prostitutes, or they may be more likely to treat females as victims, as offenders of other kinds of crimes, or in ways that do not show up in crime statistics (Fassett and Walsh, 1994). The absence of data in NIBRS from most major urban areas may, in addition, distort the gender distribution (e.g., if females are more common in cities). Moreover, some of the male juveniles who are listed as prostitution offenders may be playing other roles than actually prostituting themselves, such as pimping or procuring. Nonetheless, the NIBRS data do suggest that the role of male juveniles in prostitution, whether as pimps, procurers, or prostitutes, needs more attention from practitioners and researchers. However, before dramatic policy changes are made, more inquiry is needed from more jurisdictions to confirm these results.The other important issue raised by the NIBRS data concerns the nature of law enforcement treatment of juvenile prostitutes. When discussed as a social problem, juvenile prostitutes are generally regarded as victims. But in police data on prostitution incidents, juveniles appear considerably more often as offenders than victims. Older teens and males, in particular, are considerably less likely to be categorized as victims. The NIBRS data may simply reflect the fact that police are not provided with categories adequate to code the true nature of the episodes. But it may also be that in the eyes of law enforcement, juvenile prostitutes are more often seen as offenders than victims. For effective intervention in this problem, it may be important for all of the agencies involved to arrive at a common analysis. This suggests the need for both additional research to clarify the nature of the problem, and forthright discussions in a common forum.
As this Bulletin demonstrates, NIBRS data offer new insights into the problem of juvenile prostitution. Furthermore, the value of these data can be amplified if police officers fully report every contact they have with a prostitution offense. For this to occur, both NIBRS training practice and individual agency protocols may need to emphasize the prostitution of juveniles as an important social problem in need of a solution. Data quality, and detail, can also be improved by changing some NIBRS coding practices. For example, “pimping” could be identified as a distinct prostitution offense, separate from “assisting or promoting,” and a Type Criminal Activity code (which presently exists in the system and includes “exploiting children”) could be permitted for prostitution offenses. Of course, NIBRS data will automatically become more representative of national patterns as participation by law enforcement agencies continues to expand, and this prospect will make them more valuable. As NIBRS data become national, they may be very useful for tracking historical and geographic trends in juvenile prostitution and for evaluating the impact of public policy.
However, the potential utility of NIBRS data does not reduce the need for considerable additional research on the problem of juvenile prostitution—both short-term and long-term studies. Such research should focus on the epidemiology of the problem, the variety of forms that it takes, the social and geographic contexts in which it occurs, and the life histories of juveniles both before and after their involvement in prostitution. In addition, considerable research attention needs to be paid to law enforcement practices, other interventions directed at the problem, and the consequences of these actions. This information is necessary to develop an effective public policy that addresses the prostitution of juveniles.
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