U.S. juvenile sex trafficking arrests far lower than much-hyped survey suggests
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 by Hart Van Denburg in News
Sex trafficking is just plain evil, and it's illegal, but a 10-year-review of law enforcement data shows that the heinous crime appears far less prevalent in America than much-hyped data suggests.
Village Voice Media examined a decade's worth of arrests for juvenile prostitution in the nation's 37 largest cities and found 8,263 cases. That's about 827 a year, and 11 annually in Minnesota.
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That's a far cry from the unsubstantiated estimates of 100,000 to 300,000 kids sold as sex slaves every year that gets carelessly thrown around by everyone from Congress to the New York Times -- and now by to Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.
The new Voice investigation results can be found in Real Men Get Their Facts Straight. The headline is a play on Kutcher and Demi Moore's PSA campaign, "Real Men Don't Buy Girls."
It's the second in an ongoing series that began with a City Pages report a few months ago, Junk Science, that exposed the totally unscientific findings from the Women's Funding Network on which the inflated figures are based.