Understanding and Addressing Sex Trafficking of Children and Youth

Sex trafficking of children and youth as a form of child abuse is receiving increasing attention from practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.

In the February 2019 special issue of Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, Anne Fromknecht, Senior Research Associate at JBA, coauthored an article titled A Traumagenic Social Ecological Framework for Understanding and Intervening With Sex Trafficked Children and Youth. The article presents a framework for examining how factors at four levels—societal, community, interpersonal, and individual—contribute to youths’ vulnerability to sex trafficking. It also provides recommendations for prevention.

Fromknecht’s work was supported by the Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, as part of the Technical Assistance on Evaluation for Children’s Bureau Discretionary Grant Programs project. Evaluators from the Grants to Address Trafficking Within the Child Welfare Population discretionary grant cluster were coauthors of the article: N.M. Finigan-Carr, University of Maryland; M.H. Johnson, University of South Florida; M.D. Pullmann, University of Washington School of Medicine; and C.J. Stewart, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.