Children of the Night: Child Prostitution Is America‚s Dirty Little Secret

Carissa Phelps was only 12 years old when she ran away from the Fresno County group home where her mother had left her. Hungry and alone, the runaway was befriended by a man three times her age. And the price of a hot dog and Pepsi was all it cost the man to get her to a seedy motel.



Carissa soon found herself drawn into the world of child prostitution. It begins with men who first befriend lost girls like Carissa, then force them to have sex with other adult men and take whatever money they earn. Twenty years later, Carissa has managed to escape the desperate „survival sex‰ lifestyle that has become a dead-end road for many young people.



Others, however, are not so fortunate. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, child prostitution has become a problem of epidemic proportions, with estimates ranging between 300,000 and 800,000 (five million or more are prostituted globally). Those figures are likely even higher when one considers how many street kids˜runaways, thrown-aways and cast-offs from the foster care system˜remain unaccounted for in America. Left to fend for themselves, these young girls and boys quickly become prey for small-time pimps and organized sex-trafficking rings.



Amazingly, many children are introduced to prostitution by family members or acquaintances such as parents, older siblings or boyfriends. The internet, especially websites such as Craigslist, Facebook and MySpace, has made it even easier to prey on children without being easily detected by law enforcement.



Child prostitution is America‚s „dirty little secret,‰ one that cuts across racial and socio-economic divides. As Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin observed, „It‚s one of those issues that doesn‚t get discussed and therefore there‚s an assumption that perhaps either it doesn‚t exist at all or the young women and girls who are prostitutes are there by their own free will.‰ Yet there is little to suggest that these children ever willingly choose such a lifestyle. Even the term „child prostitute‰ is something of a misnomer, suggesting that it is the child˜and not the adult handler˜who has opted to sell him or herself for sex.



Children who are sold for sex (the majority are female) typically range in age from 11 to 17, with some as young as 9 years old. Once they have been lured or ...