14 DAY TRIAL // Statistics show that about 650,000 US teens sold their bodies and sexual services in order to obtain money or drugs. The survey that showed theses data was published on the 9th of August in the Journal of Sexually Transmitted Infections and found that almost 3, 5% of teenagers in America had sexual intercourse with people who could offer them drugs or money. The most amazing finding was that most of these teenagers were males (2/3 of the 650,000), not girls as commonly expected.
Of the teenagers who had sex for money or drugs, most were of African American ethnicity, came from unstable families or had parents with no higher education. Also, a great deal of the 650,000 teenagers has used drugs at a certain point in their lives.
It is true that many of the teens exchanged sex for getting drugs they were addicted to or seen this as a way of earning money in order to survive. But in the study there were also teens who had sexual relationships not because they needed drugs or money, but because of emotional disorders such as depression or feeling blue and lonely states. A large number of the teenagers who "sold their bodies" were found to be runaways from their homes and families.
Most of the teenagers who prostituted did not remember using protection and were found to suffer from various sexually transmitted infections. One in 10 of the boys in the study admitted they have forced someone else to have sex with them, while one in six of the girls admitted they have been forced to have sexual intercourse.
"The present findings indicate that considerable numbers of youths in the general population have exchanged sex. The prevalence of exchanging sex reported here may be a conservative estimate," comment the authors of the survey.