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Advocacy Outside “The Life”1:
A Guide to Using Legal Services to Build a Public Systems Safety Net
for Child Survivors of Commercial Sexual Exploitation
By Allison Green and Sarah Tomkins*
I. INTRODUCTION
Each year, an estimated 100,000 children are commercially sexually exploited within the
United States.2 Training for educators, law enforcement, and social service providers on this
topic has substantially expanded within the last decade,3 with a growing emphasis on the
domestic scope of the problem.4 Even over the course of writing this Article, the domestic
commercial sexual exploitation of children (“CSEC”) has become an increasingly hot topic
within the legal services field and the public eye.5 Despite such attention, there is currently no
authoritative resource that lays out best practices for attorneys who represent the interests of
commercially sexually exploited children in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems, either
* Ms. Green earned her bachelor’s and Juris Doctor degrees from Georgetown University. Ms. Tomkins earned her bachelor’s degree
from Princeton University and her Juris Doctor from the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law. The
authors of this Article have worked directly with system-involved youth who have been commercially sexually exploited, as a best
interest guardian ad litem (GAL) attorney and a special education attorney, respectively. Some of the evidence in this Article is
therefore anecdotal and based on the experience of the authors.
1 “The Life” is a colloquial term used to describe the experience of engaging in commercial sexual acts. See, e.g., Glossary of
Trafficking Terms, SHARED HOPE INT’L, http://sharedhope.org/learn/traffickingterms/ (last visited Jan. 28, 2014); The Life, URBAN
DICTIONARY, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the%20life (last visited Jan. 28, 2014); see also Voices in the Life,
NEV. SHAKESPEARE CO., http://voicesinthelife.com/ (providing information about a play that includes monologues about commercial
sexual exploitation); PROSTITUTION: LEAVING THE LIFE (Oprah Winfrey Network 2011), available at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/18/prostitution-leaving-the-_n_930545.html (documenting the lives of sex workers in Cook
County, Illinois).
2 Human Trafficking, POLARIS PROJECT, http://www.polarisproject.org/human-trafficking/overview (last visited Jan. 28, 2014).
3 See generally U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, THE NATIONAL STRATEGY FOR CHILD EXPLOITATION PREVENTION AND INTERDICTION: A
REPORT TO CONGRESS (2010), available at http://www.justice.gov/psc/docs/natstrategyreport.pdf (summarizing federal training
funding and goals); Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, U.S. DEP’T JUST. OFF. JUV. JUST. PROGRAMS,
http://www.ojjdp.gov/programs/csec_program.html#ttap (last visited Mar. 15, 2014) (reporting current recipients of federal technical
assistance and training funds).
4 See Richard J. Estes, Professor, Univ. of Pa., Sch. of Soc. Policy & Practice, PowerPoint Presentation: Myths Associated with CSEC
in North America, available at http://www.sp2.upenn.edu/restes/Powerpoint%20Presentations/Myths_091008.pdf (last visited Apr. 5,
2014) (“Increasingly, child sexual exploitation is gaining recognition as the most neglected form of child abuse in the U.S.”); see also
Gary Feuerberg, Americans Largely Ignorant of Domestic Sex Trafficking, EPOCH TIMES (Mar. 4, 2014),
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/541381-americans-largely-ignorant-of-domestic-child-sex-trafficking/ (noting that “[w]hen most
Americans hear the term ‘child trafficking,’ they think that it only happens somewhere else” and recognizing the need for increased
focus on issues of domestic human trafficking).
5 Recent literature has been published on the topic of commercially sexually exploited youth since Fall 2013. See generally Patricia
Leigh Brown, A Court’s All-Hands Approach Aids Girls Most at Risk, N.Y. TIMES (Jan. 28, 2014),
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/us/a-courts-all-hands-approach-aids-girls-most-at-risk.html?_r=0 (describing the “unusual
collaboration between the judicial and social service systems” resulting in “a half dozen or so Girls Courts around the country[,]”
bringing “an all-hands-on-deck approach to the lives of vulnerable girls” that have been recruited as child prostitutes or have been
identified as “at risk for involvement”); J. David McSwane, The Stolen Ones, HERALD TRIB. (Oct. 12, 2013),
http://thestolenones.heraldtribune.com/ (detailing the story of a seventeen-year-old girl in Florida who escaped her exploitation, only
to be sent to a juvenile jail by her mother, concerned with her daughter’s rehabilitation and “[l]acking resources and comprehensive
laws” to help her recover); Elizabeth LaMura, Sex Trafficking of Minors in the United States: State Legislative Response Models, 33
CHILD. LEGAL RTS. J., Fall 2013, at 301 (noting the call to action in the United States in the past decade to address the issue of human
trafficking); NACC Call for Abstracts, NAT’L ASS’N COUNSEL FOR CHILD. (Dec. 1, 2011),
http://www.naccchildlaw.org/events/event_details.asp?id=199284 (seeking submissions related to “Teen Prostitution” and “Sexual
Exploitation” to incorporate into the NACC’s 35th National Child Welfare, Juvenile, and Family Law Conference).
