Advocacy groups are desperately fighting the problem of underage girls trapped in the tawdry sex industry.
“This is a growing problem but it is hard to quantify. In the clubs, especially, it’s very difficult to see what’s going on,” said Rachel Lloyd, executive director of GEMS, a counseling and mentoring group which helps rehabilitate young girls who have worked in the sex industry.
Lloyd says that between January and July this year she met with 88 girls under the age of 18 who were involved with commercial sexual exploitation – a number she says is just the tip of the iceberg.
“For the majority, dancing in topless bars was their entry point,” she said.
Lloyd says that the use of minors in strip bars is simply going undetected.
“Fake IDs are not hard to get in your average topless bar in the boroughs. If they raided every club regularly, we would see more interventions with young people in these situations,” she said.
Other groups say the problem is made worse by a legal system which falls short when dealing with minors in the sex industries.
Margaret Loftus, a lawyer for The Correction Association, says that authorities need to treat the exploitation of underage girls as a child-protection issue instead of a law-enforcement issue.
Minors are frequently treated as criminals instead of victims, she says.
“Someone has sex with an underage girl – that is statutory rape. But if $20 changes hands, it suddenly becomes prostitution,” said Loftus.
“Everyone agrees that the use of underage girls is increasing as a problem on the street, so you would conclude it must be happening behind the scenes, too. But a lot of the times when the clubs get busted, they are not looking at it as a child-protective issue.”