Punk’d

Excellent piece in the Village Voice (some ads nsfw) about the Ashton Kutcher-Demi Moore campaign on child prostitution:

“It’s between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today,” Ashton Kutcher told CNN‘s Piers Morgan on April 18. That, says Kutcher, is how many kids are lost to prostitution in America every single year.

…”Last month, the New York Times breathlessly confided, “An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 American-born children are sold for sex each year.”…

• USA Today: “Each year, 100,000 to 300,000 American kids, some as young as 12…”

• CNN: “There’s between 100,000 to 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States…”…

• C-SPAN: “Children in our country enslaved sexually…from 100,000 to 300,000…”

But a detailed review of police files across the nation tells another story.

Village Voice Media spent two months researching law enforcement data.

We examined arrests for juvenile prostitution in the nation’s 37 largest cities during a 10-year period.

To the extent that underage prostitution exists, it primarily exists in those large cities.

Law enforcement records show that there were only 8,263 arrests across America for child prostitution during the most recent decade.

That’s 827 arrests per year.

The article has much more detail on how an already bogus figure of 100,000-300,000 children “at risk” of prostitution expanded and then went viral.