The report that ISIS is forcing girls as young as 12 to become sex slaves is part of a larger issue. In the world today, an estimated 2 million underage girls work in the sex trade. A new study details the situation in Mexico, where researchers found that one in four sex workers in Tijuana and Juarez say they were forced into the sex trade as minors β under age 18 β and one in eight say they were 15 or younger.
The findings of the researchers are as bleak as you'd expect, perhaps even more so. But they did offer a glimmer of hope when they referred me to Alma Tucker, who runs a safe house for underage victims of sex trafficking in Tijuana. To gather information about the number of minors in northern Mexico's sex trade, a team of researchers traveled to Tijuana and Juarez.
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They visited nightclubs, massage parlors, street corners and public parks β locations where sex work is known to occur β to find female sex workers. Between March and January , the team enlisted more than 1, participants. The survey, says Jay Silverman , a public health specialist at The University of California, San Diego, who led the study, reveals that young girls forced into the sex trade face greater risks than older women.
They're repeatedly sold as virgins for a much higher price, too. All of these things add up to a much higher vulnerability for violence and HIV.
At the same time, these girls are very much invisible; what they're doing is hidden because it's illegal. Silverman adds that a third of girls who reported being forced into the business before the age of 16 were not allowed to use condoms or discouraged from using them during their first 30 days of work. This study helps dispel "the myth that all or the overwhelming majority of people in prostitution enter as fully consenting adults," comments Andrea Matolcsi, who works with sex trafficking issues at Equality Now , a global organization that fights for the rights of women and girls.
