I’ve been following this stuff since I was a teenager. I’m 52 years old now going on 53, so that would be about… 35-36 years on and off. I don’t have a comprehensive knowledge of it.
It’s VERY COMPLICATED because there is a lot of overlap in different areas. Off the top of my head:
You have:
– Emancipated youth
– Runaway youth
– Homeless youth
– Migrant youth
– Sex trafficked youth
– Sex trafficked adults
– Sex workers (adults)
Then you have various agencies:
– The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) oversees the Runaway and Homeless Youth program,:
– The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness also reports on youth homelessness as part of the overall homelessness statistics in the country.
-The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) leads federal efforts to combat human trafficking and collects data on reported cases.
– The DOJ’s Office for Victims of Crime tracks the number of -victims served through federally-funded programs.
– The Department of Homeland Security also collects data on human trafficking investigations and arrests.
– Non-profit organizations like the Polaris Project operate hotlines and publish annual reports on human trafficking trends.
THEN you have state, county and local police agencies that do THEIR own thing too.
THEN you have politicians, movie makers, organizations that make profit, non-profit and for-profit foster care, religious organizations that move children around from family to family, missionary religions that ’employ’ volunteer children to ‘spread the word’ in exchange for food and clothing and shelter who are invisible children, etc.
and with all of that, there is often a lot OVERLAP in statistics. So much overlap.
And to make it harder, a lot of these agencies, whether government or non-profit or for profit, have to keep the statistics high in order to maintain funding or public buy-in so that the public won’t lose interest and their programs lose funding etc, complicating things.
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pt 2:
My first exposure to the topic was from Father Bruce Ritter, 1980s. He founded Covenant House in NYC in the 1970s, a network of homeless shelters for runaway youth.
His work was highly praised. President RONALD REAGAN even named Father Bruce Ritter BY NAME in his 1984 inauguration address.
I read his book “Sometimes God has a Kid’s Face”, which was a short book about his homeless shelters with stories of the great work his organization did published in 1988. I was about 16 years old and because I knew of him, I devoured it and was going to make that something I did in life; helping homeless youth.
But almost two years later in late 1989, the first allegations of Father Bruce Ritter sexually assaulting a teenage boy at the Covenant House came out. He wasn’t believed, at first. Until maybe a year later, another came out and then a third.
Whole thing broke me honestly. I was all ready to make that a life-choice; be a do-gooder helping kids not that much younger than me get on their feet.
But instead Covenant House, which *did* do some very good work, was ALSO a feeder for Father Ritter’s depravity – as well as a few youth ministers he passed the boys on to as well.
None of it was proven and I REALLY wanted to believe it was lies and fabrications because I wanted to believe in the mission there, but in the end, I accepted that the boys were being truthful.
Soon the made-for-TV movies about sexual abuse in churches came out and you JUST started seeing hints of the problem in the Boy Scouts.
Here’s one of the victims, age 60, of Father Ritter. Doesn’t matter how old you get, they never can fully outlive it as it shaped their whole lives in a bad way, being abused by someone trusted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKdF5bgpqcI
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