Difficulties in Measurement Sample Clauses

Difficulties in Measurement. Current knowledge about the commercial sexual exploitation of children is very limited and has been greatly hampered by an inability to accurately estimate the scope of the problem (Xxxxxx 2005, Tyldum and Brunovskis 2005). The existing studies that form the theoretical framework for this inquiry have done considerable work to illuminate the realities of CSEC only for very specific groups in particular locations, and we still lack more generalizable information. Research on the subject is difficult because it involves so-called hidden populations, or “group[s] of individuals for whom the size and boundaries are unknown, and for whom no sampling frame exists” (Tyldum and Brunovskis 2005, 18). Commercial sexual exploitation research operates at the intersection of two types of obfuscation – victims are actively hidden in order to keep them as captives, and the work they engage in is illegal and thus out of the public eye. To attempt to gauge its prevalence, therefore, is to quantify “a complex concept, not as readily suitable for counting in the same way we are able to count, say, corpses, or persons killed” (Aromaa 2007, 13). Some have quoted the figure of 100,000 victims in the United States (Xxxxxx 2010, Estes and Xxxxxx 2001, X. Xxxxx 2008), but this figures appears to have minimal empirical basis. Another estimate of three million current CSEC victims (Kara 2009) has been cited as a high (Dank 2011) and, if it is meant to pertain to the US population, would imply that approximately 1% of all residents of the United States – and approximately 4% of all US children – are prostituted children, figures that do not seem plausible. There have been various attempts to both measure and describe ideal measures of the number of underage victims of sexual exploitation, the size of the market in underage bodies, and the extent to which the commercial sexual exploitation of juveniles is a problem in the United States. Because policy decisions rest on the ability of advocates to quantify the size of the problem and, over time, the efficacy of the solution, these figures are much in demand. In the case of system avoidance, it is impossible to estimate the effects of this phenomenon on the prevalence of CSEC without accurate, local estimates for the nation as a whole. Existing attempts to quantify CSEC specifically have employed a variety of methodologies. But each has had serious weaknesses. Aggregations based on content analyses of newspaper crime accounts are tremen...