What do you know about sex trafficking?

Do you want to save underage "sex workers?" Simple, right? Go after the pimps? Yeah, go after the pimps, but when researchers

interviewed a total of 372 sex workers (262 of whom were minors and 70 who had previously worked as minors), only 14 percent of female underage sex workers in New York City (and 6 percent of the males) had a pimp. Some testified that they had recruited their friends and boyfriends to help them with their business. And “all sex workers in both Atlantic City and New York City described experiencing increasing, rather than decreasing, agency and control over their work over time.”

Pimps, too, failed to fit the stereotypical mold. “We were told pimps were not approachable because they were too dangerous and didn’t want to talk,” Marcus told me. “But all they wanted to do was talk, talk, talk—that’s what they do for a living.” Many pimps referred the researchers to their sex workers if they approached them in the right way, no cuts on the face required. (In addition to interviewing pimps in Atlantic City, the researchers spoke with 85 male pimps working in New York.) One pimp told them that going after underage girls constituted “pimp suicide,” not because it makes pimps vulnerable to harsh anti-trafficking laws, but because “teenage prostitutes don’t earn enough money,” Marcus says. In Atlantic City, they found, “those who first entered when over 18 years of age reported being approached by a pimp at nearly twice the rate of those whose entry occurred when they were minors.” And while some pimps boasted about exerting control over “their” sex workers, the women working with them told a different story. One sex worker named Diamond says that she had led her pimp to believe that he had initiated her into sex work, though she had been working for some time. She did it in order to hold up her pimp’s “narrative of hypermasculine enticement and feminine vulnerability,” as the researchers put it.

The pimp-focused approach will fail to reach the vast majority of underage sex workers who want to leave but have no adult forcing them to stay. “We haven’t really nailed down what works to get these kids back in the mainstream,” she says. “Many of them are quite disaffected. They’ve been thrown away by their families. The street has become a life they can negotiate relatively well. They’re not banging on our doors.”

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