Guest Written by Cornell Student, Paris Wu
“A myth is simplistic: it cannot express the complexities of an issue, entertain controversy, or encompass ‘gray areas…’ It presents morals, heroism, and emotionality as readily as facts [and is] easily influenced by cultural prejudices and political agendas.” (Frederick John, 2005)
The federal government defines and prohibits Child Sex Trafficking as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a minor (person under 18 years of age) for the purpose of any sex act in exchange for anything of value. It should be noted that child sex trafficking does not have to involve movement across borders, and that all minors who trade sex for anything of value are defined as victims of human trafficking without needing proof of force, fraud, or coercion. To enforce the federal statute (18 U.S.C. § 1589), New York State enacted NYS Anti-Trafficking Law in 2007, and further strengthened them with the 2008 New York Safe Harbour for Exploited Children Act as well as the 2010 Vacating Convictions for Trafficked Persons Law.
Popular understanding of child sex trafficking in the United States revolves around its most extreme but least common form: “a minor being abducted off the street and transported violently across national borders to be sold at auction.” In films, child sex trafficking is typically framed as a problem “over there,” caused by criminal perpetrators from foreign and developing nations. However, as Theresa Flores, survivor of and campaigner against sex trafficking, points out in her guest lecture given recently at Cornell University, domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) is in fact a prevalent issue in the United States, including New York, possibly fostered by its highway system, truck stops, international borders, waterways, and other structural characteristics. The New York State Interagency Task Force on Human Trafficking’s 2022 Annual Report confirms a small percentage of actual occurrences of human trafficking: 249 victims of human trafficking, with 171 individuals for sex trafficking, and 65 individuals as minors. In 2017, a total of 2,996 youth across New York City were identified by the NYC Administration for Children’s Services as trafficked or at-risk for labor and sex trafficking. In 2014, Eric Oliver’s arrest and sentencing revealed a sex trafficking ring with victims as young as 15 years old operating in Syracuse, Watertown, and Ithaca.
Indeed, contrary to the dominant notion that overestimates individual criminals as the sole cause of child sex trafficking, complex social and political structures play a bigger role in contributing to sexual exploitation of children. For example, the foster care system that disconnects youths from families and state support pressures them into running away, resulting in commercial sex for survival. Even within foster care, children are more vulnerable to sexual exploitation as residential facilities can operate as prostitution recruitment stations. A federal prosecution in December 2018 exposed a sex trafficking ring that victimized 15 minors in the child welfare system, of which 9 girls were residents of Hawthorne Cedar Knolls residential treatment center in Westchester County, New York. In a New York commercial sexual exploitation of children study published in 2014, only 10% of 249 minors had a pimp at the time of research. DMST frequently involves marginalized youth—gender/sexuality nonconforming minors, unaccompanied migrants, teenagers of color, or housing-insecure young people—who trade sex under social and economic pressures such as poverty and homelessness. In cases where minors are recruited into prostitution by pimps, the pimps did not resemble the image of a foreign stranger as reflected in films and popular discourse. Instead, they are more likely to be “an informal or legal guardian, or a friend or intimate companion of a parent… this type of pimping accounted for some of the youngest ages of initiation into sex work, and was the most coercive type of relationship.”
It is enticing to believe that child sex trafficking “looks like” symbolic forms of a foreign looking pimp, or a large van crossing state borders. However, this popular understanding of child sex trafficking not only continues to misinform us about what constitutes child sex trafficking by compressing it into an oversimplified narrative, it also distracts us from noticing and helping those who do not fit it. Child sex trafficking is “a slow violence,” as opposed to the instantaneous moment of a kid snatched from the streets for unlawful sex. It is a series of processes and systematic structures at play. Even when pimps are involved, an average of six months are used to establish a relationship with the minor through forces of “love, debt, addiction, physical might, and authority.” As more social care professionals and multidisciplinary teams who try to prevent child sex trafficking and help its victims realize this, more avoid perpetuating this popular misconception by adapting the more holistic term “commercial sexual exploitation of children” (CSEC). It is crucial to remember that unlike the universalized image perpetuated by popular discourse, films, and even state media, child sex trafficking also (and more likely) plays out in more nuanced, and perhaps even more boring ways. To paraphrase Theresa Flores, a minor performing a sex act for a Happy Meal is also child sex trafficking.
References
Baker, Carrie N. “An Intersectional Analysis of Sex Trafficking Films.” Meridians 12, no. 1 (2014): 208–26. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.12.1.208.
Bogel-Burroughs, Nicholas. “Sex in the Shadows: An inside look at prostitution in Ithaca.” The Ithaca Voice (September 11, 2015) https://ithacavoice.org/2015/09/sex-in-the-shadows-an-inside-look-at-prostitution-in-ithaca/.
“Criminal Division | Citizen’s Guide to U.S. Federal Law on Child Sex Trafficking.” www.justice.gov. May 26, 2015. Updated August 11, 2023. https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-child-sex-trafficking.
Flores, Theresa. Guest lecture. Cornell University, New York. April 29, 2025.
Hochul, Kathy, Barbara C. Guinn, and Rossana Rosado. New York State Interagency Task Force on Human Trafficking 2022 Annual Report (2022): 1-25. https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/pio/humantrafficking/2022%20ITF%20Annual%20Report-FINAL.pdf.
Marcus, Anthony, Amber Horning, Ric Curtis, Jo Sanson, and Efram Thompson. “Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps: A Closer Look at Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 653 (2014): 225–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24541783.
NYC Administration for Children’s Services. For Immediate Release (January 11, 2019): 1-4. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/PressReleases/2019/TraffickingToolkitsRelease.pdf.
Roberts, Dorothy. “Criminalizing Black Children.” In Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. New York: Basic Books (2022).
Schwarz, Corinne, and Trevor Grizzell. “Trafficking Spectacle: Affect and State Power in Operation Cross Country X.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 41, no. 2 (2020): 57–81. https://doi.org/10.5250/fronjwomestud.41.2.0057.