Rethink Resources

So the report “The commercial sexual exploitation of children and youth in Illinois” from the research funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and conducted by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority has been released officially. You can find the whole research report here and the research brief here.

I consulted on the project. Much to say but I’m going to focus on a few thoughts and highlights here.

The research process was not easy from the start. The research planning started while I was still the director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project in Chicago. The researchers from ICJIA wanted YWEP’s participation but hadn’t thought of including youth at all in the interviews or process.

So I called them out on that fairly strongly and suggested that the only way to get substantial data on youth in the sex trade would be to actually talk with youth directly. The original plan from the researchers was to only talk with adults who work with youth.

This turned out to far more difficult than anticipated. Like often, the funding for this effort was very low. Even the amount allocated from the budget for the organization’s work was inevitably insubstantial and led to far more unpaid than compensated work.

Secondly, the framework for the study and questions were still determined by the federal framework and definition of “commercial sexual exploitation of children.” This led to a lot of struggle around the focus group questions - which youth and adult staff at YWEP helped shape and develop after realizing the first draft from the researchers would be almost complete nonsense to youth. YWEP, as a youth-defined, youth-led project, is used to youth centered questions and analysis. This was, most decidedly, an adult-framed research project.

Lastly, as the research report details:

One problem occurred during the recruitment of participants for the first focus group. Four local law enforcement officers entered an outreach worker’s home and questioned her regarding her work with the research project. It is unknown how the police became aware of the research, but the individual was upset after this encounter. ICJIA is not a law enforcement agency, but due to its associations with law enforcement, YWEP requested that neither the principal investigator for the research project nor any another representative from ICJIA be present at the focus groups. In the interest of the study and with some reluctance, ICJIA agreed not to be present. However, a professor and researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Laurie Schaffner, Ph.D, agreed to stand in and audio-record and take notes at the focus group sessions. This situation highlighted that issues may be encountered when recruiting this population for focus groups due to the sensitive nature of the topic.

In order to reach youth in different areas of the city, youth developed a poster (with the ICJIA logo to identify it as an official research project) then gave out the poster to many by hand and posted it in a number of neighborhoods. That police abuse their power and target youth of color is not really surprising. And that they used this as opportunity to frighten a youth outreach worker in her home and make baseless accusations, is a chilling reality of conducting research.

We had to make efforts to secure the safety of youth assisting in the outreach and those who would participate in the focus group. Sadly the researchers from ICJIA were unprepared for this kind of crisis or how to assist in resolving it.

But the focus groups were amazing and the report only touches on a few ideas from those discussions.

I’m much more impressed with the openness of the law enforcement. ICJIA is far more used to interviewing law enforcement for their reports so perhaps that was one of the reasons that section has more depth. This from one member of law enforcement:

It’s very disheartening when you feel that you can’t help them. You have them right there you know, basically in your hands. She gives us all the information we need and then at the end of the night it’s like ‘I have to take you here.’ And it’s like she doesn’t want to be there. Not to mention that’s our state witness. And I’m not saying the case is everything because the victim is suffering as well. Now we don’t get to keep our witnesses happy and we have to to prosecute these guys. And they don’t want to go to the hospital and frankly, I can’t blame them.

I think it’s important that the report outlined the contradictions of considering one act sexual abuse or assault (adults having sex with minors) and the same act as “juvenile prostitution,” a criminal offense that youth are arrested for, when money is involved. And of course the report had all the latest data on Illinois and Chicago arrest numbers of minors, which I believe are low compared to several other major metropolitan areas like NYC or San Francisco.

I offered my ideas to the researchers and I know they sincerely tried to understand the issue. The framework of the research deeply affected the outcomes and that was partly a function of OJJDP’s decisions and partly about the researchers’ approach.

It’s just very different to research, think and explore the experiences of youth in the sex trade from youth centered methods. This report reads more like it was prepared by someone visiting from a far away land. As an insider, I need something more.

Read it and see what you think.

Maybe one day we could have research via osmosis.