From villain to victim

Research Summary Safe harbor laws are designed to redirect young victims of commercial sexual exploitation away from justice system involvement by prohibiting their arrest and prosecution as criminals. A quasi‐experimental design was used to compare prostitution‐related crime and sex abuse maltreatment trends at the county level in states that have implemented safe harbor laws with a comparison group of counties in states that have not implemented safe harbor laws. Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) were used to measure prostitution‐related crime trends, while National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) data were used to measure sex abuse maltreatment trends. We used a multilevel Poisson regression model to analyze the change in prostitution‐related crime and sex abuse maltreatment trends in treatment and comparison counties over an 11‐year observation period (2005–15). Policy Implications Overall, the findings provide a striking perspective into the current U.S. landscape of dealing with the commercial sexual exploitation of juveniles. To that end, the decline in the number of overall and juvenile arrests across all prostitution‐related offenses suggests that safe harbor laws were effective in redirecting young victims away from system involvement. But the systematic provision of treatment services envisioned to go to these young victims has, to date, not become a reality. Nevertheless, these findings offer policymakers a foundation of evidence that can be used to engage intelligently and knowledgeably with regard to the current state of U.S. policy.