PrimeWire

It angers me how little discussion there is about the victims in cases like this. Vice touches on it a bit in this, but in general the focus is almost always on the offenders. You can see the lack of public education on it in how most people think of sex trafficking and who the majority seem to think the victims of such are. It’s demonstrated perfectly when people call the offenders in this case pedophiles, and that plays into many misconceptions about child sexual abuse. I’m not going on a lengthy attempt to try to educate people here, but if you are interested, there is an excellent article on the subject in the Scientific American. Google Pedophiles, Hebephiles and Ephebophiles, Oh My: Erotic Age Orientation.

Most child sexual abuse is committed by hebephiles, those sexually attracted to children between the ages of 11-14, and ephebophiles, those sexually attracted to children between the ages of 15-19. Ephebophilia is the largest driver of child sex trafficking. If I had to speculate as to why we don’t talk about it is that the attraction is far more common than anyone wants to admit.

These misconceptions about child sex trafficking are what angers and frustrates me the most. The public conversation is almost exclusively focused on the rarest form of child sexual abuse, true pedophilia, and more important conversations are ignored. While there isn’t a lot of data out there about how post-pubescent, underage children become involved in sex trafficking, what there is suggests that most of them are troubled kids from unstable homes. Many were sexually abused as children, and many are runaways. While some involved are raped and forced into trafficking, many are coerced and manipulated through drug addictions, a place to stay, and a need for money to survive.

When we don’t have these discussions about whom the victims are, how they came to be such, we also don’t talk about how we can prevent this from happening to other children. We are failing, as a society, when we allow ourselves to be misinformed and misled by the more sensationalized focus on conversations about child sex trafficking that involves true pedophilia, the least common form of sex trafficking.