Ah, I think we are finally finding where some of these ridiculous numbers are coming from. The six figure numbers are for children AT RISK of being exploited for commercial sex purposes, not the number of children who are actually being exploited for commercial sex purposes.
From that study:
I’m not saying, and neither is Aston Kutcher that every youth who works in the sex trade is being coerced, but every youth who is in the sex trade, should be there. No teen should be selling their body for money, and no adult should be buying. And if an adult buys sex from a child, that is WRONG.
These are kids who come from abuse, neglect, and heaven known what - and people who buy sex from them are exploiting these children and should be charged with a crime.
I’m bot saying either that the numbers of 100,000 to 300,000 are exact either (by the way the study covers the USA, Canada and Mexico), but the number of less than 9000 in the USA is impossibly low in comparison. Based on what I have seen in my life, the number of youth in the sex trade is far closer to the hundreds of thousands than less than 9,000.
Having worked with HIPS, what percent of working girls under age lie about their age? How many girls did you meet who looked way younger than what they said?
The reality I know is that cops are very apathetic to street teens, and even more so to youth prostitution. Most consider street kids of every ilk to be human trash. Many cops are creeps too, so for being serviced, they will let the kid be for the night.
Do you think police numbers are 100% realistic considering the way they view street kids and teen sex workers?
I just can’t see how the village voice article is supposed to be serious with all that info from my own experience.
Girls? Honestly not that many, if any. Most of the women streetwalkers were older and had children who were closer to being teenagers than they were. I’m assuming that most younger women can trade sex for something more valuable than what they could get working on the street. When I was younger I did encounter several teenage girls who were living with much older men who, while being scumbags, weren’t pimping the girls out.
While working with HIPS I did meet several male prostitutes who were teenage runaways. The cops tended to not give a shit about them, and they frequently got beat up or robbed. Those boys needed help, but they certainly weren’t sex slaves being violently coerced into prostituting.
Like many other depravities of human culture this can be directly linked to men’s twisted sexual appetite. No demand, no supply. Little girl being held against her will? That’s a turn on, you can charge extra for that. She’s probably extra tight too. That’s how men think. When science finds a cure to align men’s sexual desires and attitudes more in line with that of women’s an enormous amount of human suffering will be alleviated. Until then things will go on the same as they have before.
I knew quite a few boys as well, and the same stuff applies to boys as girl, except boys don’t admit how much it sucks as often.
Also in regard to at risk teens, what do you count as sexual exploitation? Not every girl or boy I knew worked regularly. Sometimes it was just if they had no squat to stay in, not enough money for a hotel, and it was too cold to sleep outdoors. What about a 14 year old who is sleeping with an adult for only the purpose of having a place to stay? What about giving the cop a blow job on the highway so the cop won’t send you home? How about the truck driver who wants one of the girls who hitchhiker in his car to sleep in his bed? Even if nothing but groping and saying no happened, and the girl didn’t sleep because of fear that if she was asleep she couldn’t fight him off. What about the older boyfriend who gives the girl more drugs than she can handle, and then shares her with some “friends” for cash for drugs?
I know I was exploited, yet I never was a prostitute. All of this is the exploitation of youth, and all of this is a crime.
And kidnapping does happen, I knew 2 girls who were kidnapped by the same pimp. The first even had 2 customers before she escaped, and one customer despite he telling him she was kidnapped, didn’t care. After she escaped the cops didn’t care either. It wasn’t until another girl who was more part time of a street kid and had parents who pushed for arrest was kidnapped by the same pimp that this pimp wad arrested for the rape and battery and selling of second girl. The first girl never got her day in court. Posted about this earlier in the thread, sorry for repeating myself.
You look fabulous in Tin Foil!
I agree with everything everyone here has posted except the most obvious complaint overlooked, prices. The prices are getting out of hand. Pretty soon we will just have to save up for it. I am starting to get withdrawals. Maybe some of you well meaning posters can spot me a bop? Kidnapping is against the law. Now go have a nice day.
[QUOTE=lexi]
I am making estimates off the number of people I knew, lived with and loved. some I still know.
[/QUOTE]
plural, anecdote, data, etc.
It might be helpful if you set forth explicitly how you’re deriving these estimates. Because as things stand, such estimates aren’t really worth much. Your estimates seem entirely based on emotion.
A huge driving force in all of this, something that needs to be addressed along with the illegal prostitution problem in our country is the issue of drug addiction. Pimp or independent, agency or forced/trafficked; the VAST majority of these women/girls have one thing in common: an addiction to one or more potentially deadly drugs. Many of the opportunistic pimps will use these addictions maliciously to control their hookers, giving them only enough to function and holding out on them at other times-fueling the desperation. Even the “independent” hookers don’t do what they do because they enjoy their work. I don’t care what ANYONE says, no one puts strange mens’ dicks in their mouths’ because they ENJOY it. There is always a desperation behind it; whether it be the desperation of a forced prostitution (probably not TOO common) or the desperation of the heroin addict whose entire LIFE revolves around the next 6hrs and getting that next dose. Until we address the tradegy that is the drug culture in this country, illegal prostitution will never be dented.
I think she(*) was quite clear. She extrapolated roughly from her personal experience in one city, multiplying a per-city number by number of U.S. cities. This is somewhat problematic (e.g. different urban areas will have different cultures), but should give a reasonable ballpark guess. Perhaps even low: since some kids escape the lifestyle, one needs to multiply by a turnover factor.
As an experiment for those who live in urban areas, estimate how many prostitutes (under-age or not) work in your city.
(* - sorry if I have Lexi’s gender wrong.)
Yes, everybody lets start guessing. That will get us some reliable numbers.
I think we can all agree that there are some people out there with hard lives. We’d all like to see their lives improve. But making up false statistics and misrepresenting facts isn’t the way to do it.
I don’t like violent pimps. I’d like to put violent pimps out of business. I think legalizing prostitution would help put a lot of violent pimps out of business. Would it get them all? No. But I think it would significantly help.
…and thats how you get the completely made up statistics that you used in your OP!!!
You do agree that, based on the investigations done by the Village Voice that the best way to describe the figures used in the Vanity Fair article is “made up”, don’t you?
Wow.
Double wow.
Since we’re already in BBQ Pit, let me say these are the kind of idiotic posts that often make discussion frustrating here at the Dope.
When I lived in the Bay Area one could drive through red-light districts on any evening and count at least 75 young obvious streetwalkers with one’s own eyes. No idea how many are under-age, but I said this in the post in question. Anyway, what is a big tragedy at age 17 is also a significant tragedy at age 19. To dismiss these own-eyes counts as “unreliable” or “completely made up” is stupid or insulting or both.
These own-eye counts exclude hookers with a customer, working indoors, in another neighborhood, or off that day. Extrapolations require care and may be error-prone; to pretend I don’t know that is, again, stupid and/or insulting.
It’s already been pointed out that the 100 - 300,000 under-age figure was a stupid overestimate, and I agree that repeating stupid estimates is counter-productive. The less-than-1000 estimate (or whatever it was) was a stupid under-estimate; it will be just as counter-productive to prattle it around.
Based on my own very limited experiences I am sure that stupid under-estimate is way off. Lexi obviously had some significant contact with this culture; to dismiss her estimates because they weren’t published in a journal is stupid and insulting.
Hope this helps.
Lets be honest here: you aren’t interested in discussion. If you were, you would have put this thread in GD, or MPSIMS, or in IMHO. You wanted to rant: you wanted to get all passive-agressive over posters that you didn’t want to pit directly, so you posted it here in the pit.
…sorry, I don’t believe you. Are you so irresponsible that you regularly drive down a street, spot 75 potentially underage streetwalkers, and you don’t call the police?
Is the Bay Area the United States? My understanding is that the United States has a population of over 307,006,550 people scattered over an area of 1900 million acres. Are you really telling me that you can extrapolate your extremely tiny small sample size in your very tiny geographic area to any degree to the entire of the United States?
Well I’m not the one making up numbers, you are. And I’m not the one who isn’t reporting obvious underage prostitution to the police. Here’s a clue: from what you have just said YOU are a huge part of the problem. Stop whining on a message board and pick up the phone and call the police.
Its not just counter-productive, the figures are made up. They are lies. You’ve been challenged to provide a cite for the numbers: they don’t exist. To call this simply “counter-productive” is simply spin on your behalf.
Well here’s the thing: I’m not sure who made the less-than-1000 estimate (cite?), but it would appear that if someone has made it, it is based on much better figures than what was in your OP. Arrest records are pretty solid evidence that something has happened, don’t you agree?
The other option is to rely on the figures that you and Lexi are making up out of thin air. You are guessing. I challenge anyone in the Bay Area to go for a drive and confirm your numbers.
Lets stop pretending that Lexi is an expert on the culture and the only person who is an authority in this thread. There are a number of people who have had involvement in some way in the sex industry, including myself, Stoid, and **SecretaryofEvil **, and we all dispute the numbers. And while not belittling Lexi’s experiences, we do not believe they can be extrapolated beyond what she has been through.
This is just a continuation of your lazy behaviour. Too lazy to link to previous threads. Too lazy to back up the statistics you have proffered. To lazy to name which police departments aren’t taking youth prostitution seriously. Too lazy to post a decent coherent OP. Lazy, lazy, lazy. You are even too lazy to call the police when you see 75 underage prostitutes in the Bay Area every night.
What kind of evidence do you need?
So, if a study of at risk kids from U on Pennsyvania is incorrect and laughably large although the numbers were stated to cover North America and also to cover both at risk and those in the life, to get to the number 100,000 to 300,000. And anecdotal evidence from someone who was part of the culture of street kids is not enough. Then what is?
The village voice is giving really low numbers - Here is a quote “Compare 827 annually with the 100,000 to 300,000 per year touted in the propaganda.”
They use only arrest numbers, and they say that is the number… And they call any evidence to the other side propaganda. This is NOT news, unless you count FOX news style defamation as news…
They are trying to say there is on 827 youth prostitutes! That is really laughably low, and one could easily contact a US group such as GEMS or MISSY and see those numbers for girls they help in a single city over a span of a couple years.
As for other people’s contact with the sex trade, the world of street youth is not the world of adult prostitution. The only time it intersects is when a girl who worked as a youth chooses to work as an adult. Surveys have found nearly ever working girl started between the ages of 11 and 16.
And as for septimus not calling the cops… My oh my! Do you think the cops are going to do anything? Do you think they don’t know? Do you think the cops can even do anything to gets these girls off the street?
Really - that is a totally low blow - and totally in a fantasy world.
How about reading some of these articles on Canada and then multiple the numbers by 10?
http://gvnet.com/childprostitution/Canada.htm
I’ll try to find more later, but I am betting Canada’s numbers times 10 are far closer to the high range than the low.
It’s still not clear to me what the actual evidence offered by the anecdote is. I see nothing more than a vague, conclusory number. Even anecdotal evidence requires some kind of explanation of how the figure was reached.