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Trafficking of Children Within the United States

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Human Trafficking Is a Public Health Issue

Abstract

Trafficking of children for sex and labor happens in the USA (US) to US citizen and permanent resident children, as well as to foreign-born children. It is a complex and hidden phenomenon that occurs in rural areas, urban areas, and suburban areas. Especially in the case of children, human trafficking is often difficult to detect. By federal law, any child under 18 years old “induced to perform” a commercial sex act is a trafficked person. Child pornography, or child abuse imagery, is a growing form of commercial sexual exploitation of children that is becoming more violent. There are no good national estimates of the number of children trafficked for sex or labor. Certain factors put some children more at risk for human trafficking than others, but it can happen to any child. This chapter provides an overview of which children are particularly at risk of trafficking; the ways in which youth are trafficked; some methods that have been employed to combat child trafficking; and shares a list of indicators of child trafficking developed by the US Department of Education.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For this chapter we are defining “child” based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, as a person under 18 years old.

  2. 2.

    There have been attempts to use national arrest statistics, estimates drawn from subgroups such as street youth, and other ways of devising an estimate. Most of these are described and critiqued in the 2013 study by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine “Confronting Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Sex Trafficking of Minors in the United States.”

  3. 3.

    ECPAT is an international NGO originally known as End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism. In 1996, the organization changed the name but kept the acronym. The new name is End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes.

  4. 4.

    Google alerts for “child pornography” result in multiple news and web articles daily.

  5. 5.

    The National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine’s report analyzes risk factors for US children in great depth.

  6. 6.

    The “trauma bond” is a strong emotional attachment between an abused person and their abuser, formed as a result of the cycle of violence.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ECPAT-USA, 30 Third Ave. Suite 800A, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, USA

    Carol Smolenski

  2. HEAL Trafficking, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Sarah Ingerman

Authors
  1. Carol Smolenski
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  2. Sarah Ingerman
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Correspondence to Carol Smolenski .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Emergency Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA

    Makini Chisolm-Straker

  2. Department of Emergency Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Hanni Stoklosa

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Smolenski, C., Ingerman, S. (2017). Trafficking of Children Within the United States. In: Chisolm-Straker, M., Stoklosa, H. (eds) Human Trafficking Is a Public Health Issue. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47824-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47824-1_6

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