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Recent high-profile cases against financier Jeffrey Epstein and R&B singer R. Kelly forced the nation to confront the sordid reality of child sex trafficking. Many have asked: How rampant are sexual predators?
The answer is that good data is hard to come by. Though estimates vary wildly, there's one consistent measurement.
Prosecutions for sex trafficking of children are on track to be 27 percent lower than last year, according to an analysis of the latest Justice Department figures by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
The federal government reported 108 new child sex-trafficking cases in the first eight months of fiscal 2019, which began in October. At the current pace, such prosecutions will fall well short of the 221 filed in 2018 and even further — a 32 percent drop — from the 239 in 2014. The number of defendants included in each prosecution did not factor into the TRAC report.
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