Criminal Justice Response to the Sex Trafficking of Minors

This study examined the criminal process for 355 sex traffickers involved in domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) from the years 2010 and 2014 to analyze how the criminal justice system handles these cases and how their conduct could affect the types of cases that are being investigated. Areas of interest included traffickers' demographic information, criminal history and associations, recruitment and control techniques, victimology, how law enforcement officials became aware of the cases, details of the arrests, prosecutions, and sentencing. The cases from 2010 and the cases from 2014 were then compared using all of these factors to determine any significant changes in the practices of law enforcement officials and the types of cases that were investigated from 2010 to 2014. These changes will showcase some of the progress the criminal justice system has made in handling DMST cases, and also showcase some of the areas in which progress should still be made.