Often called a melting pot, New York is well-known for its diversity in culture and race, and this same diversity is reflected in the prostitution sector. This goes for the customers, prostitutes and pimps. Mia Spangenberg said in her report on prostituted youth that over 80% of young prostituted females were African American, 15% were Latino, and 2% were white.
Spangenberg went on to state that the majority of sexually exploited youth are runaways or castaways from dysfunctional homes where they suffered physical, psychological and sexual abuse. These runaways come from immigrant families, whose traditional practices clash with their child's American culture.
There are as many as 400,000 prostituted children in the United States, and often 45,000 to 50,000 are smuggled in to work in prostitution. In New York City, Susan Breault of the Paul and Lisa Program, estimates that there are roughly 5000 youth and children in prostitution. As the numbers in prostituted children increase, the ages of child prostitutes decrease.
New York Police Detectives Kevin Mannion and Jim Held found that young boys and girls start selling sex at 11 or 12, and by the time they are 14 or 15 years old, they are already pros in the business.
Child prostitution is the commercial exploitation of children. The End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes-USA (ECPAT-USA), a nonprofit children rights organization, says the underlying causes of child prostitution are diverse and include war, natural disasters, economic injustice and discrimination. It is a multi-million-dollar business that has been well-organized into an industry with clients, traders, distribution routes and outlets, originating partly as a response to the demand from tourists.
Pedophiles, pimps and perverts have been and are now traveling abroad to developing nations where children are isolated and vulnerable because of broken homes and are kidnapped or lured by traffickers with promises of employment and instead are working the streets of New York.
Tourism provides easy access to vulnerable children, and according to ECPAT, many U.S. travel agencies set up tours for thousands every year. Added to the world becoming smaller because of advancements in travel, the advances in technology today are creating challenges to solving the problem also.
"The world has shrunk," said Carol Smolenski, executive director of ECPAT- USA. At ECPAT headquarters in Brooklyn Heights, Ms. Smolenski said that globalization plays a vital role in the trafficking of children that enables child prostitution, because families have missed the flow of money that comes with foreign direct investment. Foreign Direct Investment is an economic policy promoted by the United Nations' committees and international finance organizations that encourages private sectors to invest and create markets in order to provide jobs and money for the nation. Children who "missed out" on the flow of money get desperate, and desperate children are the targets of pimps.
When asked if the public needs to do more, Ms. Smolenski said that even though things have changed in the past few years, a push for more legislation on the topic needs to be done, especially in New York.
"If a girl wants to leave her pimp tonight she has nowhere to go," Smolenski continued. "There are no shelters in New York City for the sexually exploited, and the sexually exploited are prosecuted even though they are being forced to prostitute. There is no way out for the masses."
Demetrius Lemus, 37, of New York City, was caught in the fall last year for operating a prostitution ring operating from 1999 through 2005 in various cities, including New York City, by the FBI under a program called "Innocence Lost," which is a cooperative effort by the FBI, the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to prevent and prosecute cases involving child prostitution. In 2006, the initiative has resulted in 228 open investigations, 543 arrests, 86 complaints, 121 indictments and 94 convictions in both the federal and state systems.
This initiative is a response from the government in the wake of the growing number of children being trafficked and prostituted.
