John & Nisha Whitehead - The Rutherford Institute

"Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day."—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

It takes a special kind of evil to prostitute and traffick a child for sex, and yet this evil walks among us every minute of every day.

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is bought and sold for sex.

Hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex, as many as 20 times per day.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States alone.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.

It is estimated that at least 100,000 to 500,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

Child rape has become Big Business in America.

This is not a problem found only in big cities.

It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”