Recently, a Massachusetts doctor was charged with paying for sex with a 14-year-old boy. Three Delaware men were convicted of sex trafficking after police identified two minors being advertised for prostitution. A Utah man was arrested on suspicion of human trafficking and unlawful sexual activity with a minor.
Stories like these are so common they don’t even make national news anymore. Somehow, we have gotten to a place where the sale of a child for sex hardly raises eyebrows.
But here’s another problem: Even these seemingly endless arrests fall far short of the number of child victims who are actually out there.
In 2017, there were 661 active sex trafficking cases nationally, according to the Federal Human Trafficking Report. Yet a 2016 study by the U.S. Department of Justice estimated the number of trafficked children to be between 4,500 and 21,000. Why are we not able to identify thousands of these children and prosecute their abusers? Part of the reason is that many of these kids are being prosecuted instead of helped. We are labeling them criminals when we should be calling them victims.
The crimes differ between boys and girls. In 2017, the U.S. Institute Against Human Trafficking opened a safe home for underage male victims of human trafficking, one of the first boys’ safe homes in the country. What we know from our work with these boys and many others is that a large number of male victims go undetected because they are arrested for theft and other crimes related to their trafficking. They are usually prosecuted and often sent to juvenile detention — or worse, back to their traffickers — without anyone having asked what put them in the situations that have led to their arrests.
[Read more: Kentucky woman indicted on sex trafficking charges]
In short, they are dismissed as criminals without anyone wondering whether they are actually victims.
The ones who make it to our safe home, often through the juvenile justice system, are the lucky ones.
In 2009, 26-year-old Samuel Marino carjacked a vehicle and died in a car crash during the ensuing police chase. Last fall, a note he had written as a child was found in a raid on the house of a sex trafficking ring leader. Before he had become a criminal, Marino was the victim of horrific sexual abuse and trauma.
What Marino did was wrong, but his story shows how we need to do a better job of identifying and getting help for victims before they reach the point of no return. And, for the victims who are identified, there has to be flexibility in the criminal justice system for their circumstances.
Most of the boys who are forced or coerced into the commercial sex industry are desperate. Many are runaways. Others are coming from an abusive home. They are offered food, shelter, or drugs in exchange for sex, and they comply because they are hungry, struggling with addiction, or feel they have nowhere else to go. When they do come into contact with law enforcement, it is because they have been caught shoplifting food or clothes, or in possession of drugs.
With girls, the crime is more often prostitution. Underage girls are being arrested and charged with prostitution across the country, and every single one of them is a victim. The reality is that there is no such thing as a child prostitute. Anyone under the age of 18 who is sold for sex is, legally, a victim of sex trafficking, not a criminal.
This is not just my opinion, this is federal law. Under the federal Trafficking and Victims Prevention Act, sex trafficking occurs when “a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age.”
Still, shockingly, laws prohibiting the criminalization of minors for prostitution currently only exist in 25 states and the District of Columbia. In some states, a child can actually be considered a victim of sex trafficking and yet still be charged with prostitution. In Las Vegas, for example, despite being designated by the FBI as a high-intensity area for child sex trafficking, minors are often arrested as prostitutes, handcuffed and put in jail.
Some police departments are trying to educate their officers on how to identify trafficking victims, especially children. Last year, the sheriff’s department in Pasco County, Fla., which has one of the country’s highest rates of human trafficking, began implementing a comprehensive training program and almost immediately saw an uptick in detected trafficking cases.
These changes need to be made across the country. Police officers, prosecutors, and judges who work with juveniles need trafficking-specific training, and teachers, medical professionals, and others need to be educated on how to spot victims and connect them with the appropriate resources for help.
Child victims of sex trafficking have endured immense trauma and psychological manipulation. Arresting and punishing them not only creates distrust in a justice system that should be helping them, but it exacerbates the trauma those children have already endured.
We need to make it clear to both victims and the public that these children are not responsible for what has happened to them. Our laws and our tax dollars should be directed toward providing services for sexually exploited children, not toward prosecuting them.
Kevin Malone is the president and co-founder of the U.S. Institute Against Human Trafficking, a nonprofit, faith-based organization committed to ending human trafficking in America. He is also the former executive vice president and general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
