24 hour Snapshot of Commercial Sexual Exploitation Headlines in America

Written By Brooke Ruffin

At Street Grace, we routinely track important events related to commercial sexual exploitation of all kinds, including sex trafficking of children and adults, prostitution, and the illicit production of pornography and child sexual abuse materials. We believe it would be helpful to provide you with a glimpse of what we see.   

Below we present a list of a small sample of headlines from a 24hr period (December 16-17, 2025). You may click on any headline to access one of the source documents about the particular event. What you will see, even through this very narrow window, are cases involving hundreds of victims, many of them children or vulnerable, abused adults, in America on any given day.

You will also see results of excellent police work by dedicated law enforcement professions, including prosecutors, detectives, police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and victim services.

If you do these searches every day, you will also see that police are overmatched – the volume, of sex buyers, traffickers, facilitators, and victims who need support far outstrip the public resources needed to successfully combat this massive crime industry. 

This 24 hour window was chosen because it stands out as particularly good or bad. A list of atrocities like this represents an ordinary day in the life of someone tracking sexual exploitation in America. 

Please note that this illustration shows just the smallest tip of the massive iceburg that is the sex trade. Among the factors that drastically narrow the scope:

  • We have focused only on sexual abuse and pornography cases that have a commercial element, which is needed by law for sex cases to be defined as prostitution, sex trafficking, or CSAM. This list excludes the vast majority of cases of sex offenses or illegal pornography that do not include the exchange of money (or other things of monetary value) for sex or sexual performances.

  • Our searches target “news” items based on a few key words (e.g., prostitution, sex trafficking).  Expanding the keywords and going beyond news will if course provide more results.

  • For this illustration we have focused only on events occurring in the United States.  Sex trafficking, CSAM, and related crimes are universal problems, and our local events are just a small part of the crimes of the global sex trade. 

  • Most of the news is driven by arrests, it is well known that the vast majority of all such crimes go undetected and unreported, even fewer result in arrests or convictions, and only some of those cases become news reports.

We hope this simple exercise helps to convey the reason we feel such urgency about combating the sex trade on all fronts, and why it is so important to develop and apply new technology solutions to help level the field for local efforts to prevent these crimes.

We urge you to encourage others to repeat this exercise themselves if they are curious or skeptical about the magnitude and prevalence of the problem. 

In the face of the perpetual onslaught of commentary and facts from countless social media sources, podcasters, it can be daunting to gain ones footing about the facts describing the scope and magnitude of social problems about which we care, and want to address. Routinely collected, verified government facts and scientifically sound research reports on the crimes involved in commercial sexual exploitation are hard to come by and are often out of date by the time data are collected, processed, and published, particularly when the public infrastructure for doing so has been drastically downsized. 

Brooke Ruffin
Previous

Senate Unanimously Passes Federal Bill to Prosecute AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM)
Next

International Organization for Migration Launches “Anyone a Victim” Campaign: Street Grace is encouraged, but has concerns