Photo credit: Thomas Leuthard, Flickr
The connection between prostitution and a history of childhood sexual abuse is staggering.
Some studies have found that 70 percent of female prostitutes were sexually abused as children; others peg the figure at closer to 85 percent. The bottom line is that prostitution, especially among teenagers, is rarely if ever an act of free will; it's born out of a lifestyle that destitute young people are forced into.
Prostitution, commercial sex acts, and survival sex are deeply bound up with one another, but they are all also strongly associated with running away from home at an early age. In other words, trying to resolve teenage prostitution and sexual victimization starts with understanding why teenagers run away from home in the first place.
The reasons are grim: The National Runaway Safeline reports that 80 percent of female runaways were physically or sexually abused at home before fleeing to the streets. In addition, the study done by Covenant House found that among youth victims of sex trafficking, 36 percent of the traffickers were family members, the largest of all the trafficking groups. Sometimes sex trafficking is the final stop on a road littered with necessary acts of degradation; other times, it's where everything begins.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/exchanging-sex-for-survival/371822/
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