Sex Traffickers of Minors

Sex trafficking of minors is a rapidly growing issue. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 criminalizes trafficking in persons and defines human trafficking as “sex trafficking in which commercial sex acts are induced by force, fraud, coercion, or in which the person induced is younger than the age of 18”. This is a very complex crime and includes everything from recruitment, harboring, transporting, and the selling of minor victims for the purpose of sexual acts and gratification. Sex trafficking of minors can happen anywhere in the Unites States from rural areas to busy cities and according to research done by Parker & Skrmetti (2013) the majority of victims are U.S. citizens. This honors thesis explores various elements and pertinent information about sex traffickers of minors. The purpose of this paper is to describe the literature on sex traffickers who solely traffick juveniles and compare it to a study done in 2017 by Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) Vice & Sex Trafficking Investigations Unit and the Arizona State University Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research (STIR). This study focuses on sex trafficking cases across the whole 2014 year in Las Vegas, Nevada. The literature review in this thesis focuses on victim typology, an overview of traffickers and the techniques traffickers use. The overview includes trafficker demographics, manipulations used, the use of violence, and previous criminal histories. The techniques traffickers use covered in the literature review are: love, money, drugs, abduction, authority figures/gangs, and violence. All of this information was compiled and then compared to the study done by LVMPD & ASU STIR. Within the Las Vegas study, this thesis compared the trafficker demographics, trafficker techniques, and victim typology. There were a lot of similarities between the literature review and the Las Vegas study and minimal differences. To conclude, there were three suggestions found to combat the issue of sex trafficking of minors. The first is to provide education to at risk youth on the dangers of sex traffickers and the techniques they use. The second is to better train first responders such as law enforcement, firefighters, social workers, and EMT’s on identifying victims of sex trafficking and using a victim centered approach. The last suggestion is to enforce harsher penalties and punishments for sex traffickers of minors, making it a high risk/low reward crime.