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Unseen: The Boy Victims Of The Sex Trade, Part I
Thousands of Boys Face ‘The Same Victimization’ As Girls, But Go Largely Overlooked
Unseen: The Boy Victims Of The Sex Trade, Part I
“I really thought I was the bad person selling myself. I didn't realize that I was a victim.”
“The major reason why kids aren't getting services is because they're not identified. That is compounded with challenges within our system to even recognize boys as victims of sexual crimes.”
Eliza Reock, a child sex trafficking program specialist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
There is growing evidence that in New England and across the U.S. there are likely thousands of male victims of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking, far more than previously understood.
Jose Alfaro says he was perfect prey for a sex trafficker because of the color of his skin.
Researchers say more than half of gay and bisexual teens use the site to find sexual partners.
The latest chapter turns to the abuse and trafficking trans females face In Massachusetts and across the country.
A recent case in Connecticut shows how difficult it is for prosecutors to hold alleged abusers accountable.
One small shelter that opened in Texas signals a growing awareness of this often unseen population, and serves as a beacon for those who need help.
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By Jenifer B. McKim and Phillip Martin ,
GBH News Center For Investigative Reporting
April 5, 2021
Chris Bates was 16 years old when he started selling nude photos of himself on the internet to adult men who pressured him for more and more images.
The demands snowballed into riskier requests, and within months the gay Connecticut teen was trading sex for dinners out, designer sneakers and other luxuries.
Bates says he was lured by the attention and what appeared to be easy money. He secretly hoped his financially struggling single mother, or anybody, would notice what was happening and protect him.
No one did — and within two years, the tall, lanky youth was living alone in a dilapidated apartment, prostituting himself to get by. His home — and an array of hotel rooms in Connecticut and Massachusetts — became a “revolving door” of sex buyers.
“I really thought I was the bad person selling myself,’’ said Bates, now 26 and living in Worcester. “I didn't realize that I was a victim.”
Bates’ story is unusual only in that it is so rarely told: Boys and young men lured into the sex trade and victimized in ways the public generally assumes applies mostly to women and girls. But there is growing evidence that in New England and across the United States there are likely thousands of male victims of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking, far more than previously understood.
In Massachusetts alone, more than 411 boys have been referred to the state Department of Children and Families since 2018 for concerns they were victims of commercial sexual exploitation — about 15 percent of the total number of referrals, according to state data. An additional 109 youth were identified as trans or non-binary, state data shows.
The state just started collecting this data in 2016, and it is widely considered to be an undercount. Definitive data is still lacking but recent studies show boys and young men are being exploited at much higher rates. A 2016 national study found more than a third of young people involved in the U.S. sex trade were boys and young men. That same year, a federal study found a third of male youths experiencing homelessnes said they traded sex for something of value — putting their numbers in the thousands on any given night nationwide.
Yet too often male victims of sexual exploitation go unseen and unhelped, specialists say, their stories stifled by personal shame, stigma and a world that has trouble seeing boys and young men as victims at all, especially gay and trans youth and boys of color.
In Massachusetts, there is one program focused solely on helping sexually exploited male youth and trans females, and its revenue last year was less than half of its sister program for female youth run out of the same nonprofit, Roxbury Youthworks, Inc.
Prosecuting exploiters and traffickers of boys and young men is even more challenging. The Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General has filed 62 sex trafficking cases since 2012, but only one includes a male victim, state officials say.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey says her office strives to hold exploiters accountable, whatever the gender of their victims, in what she calls one of the “fastest growing criminal industries in the world.” She says many victims are unwilling to speak out, silenced by fear, trauma and often substance abuse issues. She says she is working to better identify male and trans female victims. “We have to absolutely talk about the fact that it is not just girls, it is boys as well,’’ she said. “They suffer from the same trauma, the same victimization, the same exploitation.”
Yet conversations about sex trafficking still often focus on victims as girls or young women, controlled by a pimp in what is increasingly understood as modern day slavery. It’s a dark world, where many females go unidentified and lack enough services to help. But male victims get far less attention from the public, law enforcement and social services, say advocates who are striving to highlight their stories.
“We are led to believe that men are perpetrators and women are victims and not the flip side,’’ said Steven Procopio, a Boston-based social worker, who has been striving for more than a decade to raise awareness about the problem.
Many local advocates say they know there are more boys out there, even if they don’t show up in the data. Their stories run the gamut from teens controlled by traffickers including pimps and gang members, to an insidious form of commercial sexual exploitation known as “survival sex,” involving youth exchanging sex for food, shelter or other goods. Under federal law any youth under the age of 18 involved in the sex trade is considered a trafficking victim.
Males who are gay, trans, Black and brown are particularly affected, youth advocates say, because they are more vulnerable to exploitation and because people tasked with protecting them often don’t see they need help.
A small but vocal brotherhood of survivors is beginning to speak out.
“From the age of 15 to basically 24 years old, I felt crazy, like something was wrong with me and I didn't know why,’’ said Jose Alfaro, a sex trafficking survivor, who now is 29 and works as a hair stylist on Boston’s trendy Newbury Street.
Alfaro testified in 2018 against his trafficker in a federal courtroom in Texas describing how he was forced to perform sexual massages that became violent. In 2019, he won a rare $1.43 million civil verdict against his abuser — and wants people to know how male victims are overlooked in the sex trade.
“They are afraid that people are going to think that they’re gay. They’re going to think that if they are gay, that maybe they wanted it,’’ he said. “A lot of male victims decide not to come forward because of the stigma behind it.”
Compounding the problem, specialists say, is a slew of misinformation about sex trafficking that is surging on social media. Much of this is in the form of politically-motivated conspiracy theories advanced by proponents of QAnon under the seemingly virtuous heading “Save The Children.” Adherents of the right-wing extremist philosophy purport to be engaged in breaking up a global pedophile ring associated with liberal politicians.
Alfaro says these fabrications add to the suffering of real male victims like him. He says he was drawn into the sex trade as a teen after being kicked out of his home because he was gay. People already have a distorted picture of the boys and men who are exploited or trafficked, he said. Conspiracy theories only make it harder to tell the true story. “[QAnon] has ruined a lot of the hard work that people have done to put that education out there for people to read and to understand and to help end this problem,” he said.
Chris Bates is just now finding his voice. He says telling his story is empowering, as if by explaining the painful parts he too understands more about what happened and why.
He grew up in subsidized housing in rural Connecticut where he was the only openly gay youth he knew. His mother was stressed by mental health and financial challenges, working long hours. He found solace on Facebook where he quickly gained thousands of followers.
Bates says he first posted pictures of himself on the beach or a pool, which led to requests from adult men for nude photos, and, later, for meetups.
“At first it seemed kind of exciting,’’ he said. “I really wasn’t getting enough attention at home.”
Bates’ mother, Mariel Njuguna, acknowledges now that she wasn’t around enough. She worked long hours as a medical assistant and struggled with symptoms of a bipolar disorder. When Bates later told her what he’d been through, she says, she blamed herself. “At first I didn’t understand,’’ she said. Now she just wants to support him. “All you can give him is love.”
Bates’ entryway through his computer is increasingly common.
Online sexual exploitation is surging because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has kept young people stuck at home and attached to their computers, phones and tablets.
Last year, there were nearly 38,000 reports of suspected “online enticement for sexual acts” — nearly double the number of reports from the year before, according to the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which runs a cybertip line.
And boys are far more likely than girls to share sexually explicit content of themselves when directly communicating with predators, according to a 2015 study by the national center.
Eliza Reock, a child sex trafficking program specialist at the center, says the number of reported cases of trafficked boys has grown from almost nothing 15 years ago to seven percent of the total in 2020 — a sign she sees as hopeful that people are finally beginning to pay attention.
“The major reason why kids aren't getting services is because they're not identified,’’ she said. “That is compounded with challenges within our system to even recognize boys as victims of sexual crimes.”
Bates said selling nudes photos desensitized him to his own exploitation. A few weeks before he turned 18, he ran away and was placed in a temporary foster care home. After his birthday, he was forced to go out on his own, he says, and reconnected with his father who had been largely absent during his childhood.
His father set him up in an apartment, but Bates said he had no other means of support. He was living alone, without a car, eating at a nearby soup kitchen miles from his family home. That’s when he turned to prostitution full time. “The only thing I was doing was selling my body,” he said.
He learned how to post ads on Craigslist, Rent.men and other websites. He met two older men willing to drive him to hotels for hookups — people he now sees as traffickers, taking more than half of his earnings purportedly to cover transportation costs.
One particular day emphasized for him what he says he should have known all along: His drivers didn’t have his best interests in mind. He left a hotel room crying after a sexual assault and told his companion that he wanted to change his life. Instead of sympathy, he says, his driver told him bluntly he had no way out — he was a prostitute.
“That’s when I realized he was not a friend,’’ Bates said. “This is someone that is using me.”
Elisabeth Jackson, executive director of the Boston-based Bridge Over Troubled Waters that works with homeless youth, says too often boys don’t even understand they are being victimized.
“The young men see it as, ‘This is how I have to survive. I need to get something to eat. And I'm getting money,’’’ she said. “ You're dealing with somebody who's been completely brainwashed and believing that this is the life they have to live in, even though deep down, down there it doesn't feel right.”
Bates says many people ignored his suffering: doctors who overmedicated him, teachers and family members. Police officers once arrested him as a teen with an older man and didn’t think to ask him if he was OK. And then there are the men who purchased sex from him, some of whom were teachers, cops and other professionals.
Sex buyers fund a massive U.S. market estimated at $5.7 billion a year, according to a 2019 survey by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Demand Abolition. Twenty percen t of men who purchase sex weekly or monthly — classified as “high-frequency buyers” — said their last purchase was from a male provider, according to the survey.
“There was a lot of businessmen. There was a lot of married men, with rings on their fingers,’’ Bates said. “They would talk about their children, how they had family and how this needs to be secret.”
On a cool, cloudless April day last year, Jason Velasquez headed to Leominster center to catch a suspected pedophile.
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