In 2008 the New York State Legislature passed the Safe Harbor for Exploited Children Act, a critical law in the fight against child sex trafficking. The law has numerous provisions, but the primary function of the law is to prevent commercially sexually exploited children from being charged with prostitution. The legal basis is that a ...

On Monday, June 23 2014, FBI Director James Comey announced the results of Operation Cross Country, the FBI’s annual nation-wide investigation of child sex trafficking. The eighth installment of the sting covered 106 cities and resulted in the rescue of 168 sexually exploited children and the arrest of 281 pimps (1). The operation was a ...

What do you picture when you hear “human trafficking victim?” For the majority of us, we see a young girl, probably weak and fragile, maybe from a foreign country. We often forget that young boys are often victims of the same tragedy. A recent study from ECPAT-USA looked at the boys who become victims of ...

Julia Davidson explains in her book Prostitution, Power, and Freedom, that prostitution is an institution that “founders upon the existence of economic and political conditions that compel people to act in ways they otherwise would not choose to act”. This statement explains the current status of prostitution as an institution built on unfreedom. For Davidson ...

This paper uses peer-reviewed social science literature to estimate the number of minors victimized by human trafficking in the United States and, out of that amount, how many are runaways, homeless, and throwaway youth. Download the paper here.