Here's a quote from an article in the Village Voice:
I remember going to a meeting in Manhattan where they had a lot of prosecutors there whose job was to prosecute pimps. ... They were sort of complaining about the fact that their offices were very well staffed but their workload was—not very daunting, let’s say. They had a couple cases, and at every meeting you go to, they’d pull out the cherry-picked case of this pimp they had busted, and they’d tell the same story at every meeting. They too were bothered by the fact that they couldn’t find any pimps, any girls. So I come along and say, ‘I found 300 kids’—they’re all perky—but then I say, ‘I’m sorry, but only 10 percent had pimps.’ It was like a fart in church. Because basically I was saying their office was a waste of time and money.
This is based upon some work that the researchers in question had done for the US Department of Justice to try to estimate the prevalence of child prostitution in New York City. Their estimate? That about 45% of child prostitutes were male, only about 10% had pimps, and they started prostitution at a later age than commonly percieved. (You might not hear a lot about it, but boys have been estimated to account for up to 90% of child prostitutes in some countries).
It should be noted, as the researchers themselves note in the Village Voice article, that their study was based on an interview approach - one which might miss a segment of foreign, trafficked child prostitutes. Just how big a segment this is remains unknown. As an earlier article I'd posted notes, commonly cited estimates in this area aren't very credible when examined.
To address a problem effectively, it seems important to actually understand the circumstances on the ground. All too often there's not a whole lot of interest in actually doing that though, as this article notes, such would allow for better strategies to tackle the issue.
