Federally Prosecuted Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) Cases, United States, 1998-2005 (ICPSR 26722)

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Study Purpose View help for Study Purpose

The purpose of this research was to conduct a national analysis of federal prosecutions of CSEC-related cases from 1998 through 2005, in order to answer the following four research questions:

Study Design View help for Study Design

The secondary data analysis of Federal Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) case-defendants that the researchers conducted relied on detailed federal criminal case processing data obtained from the Federal Justice Statistics Resource Center (FJSRC), a project sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and operated by the Urban Institute. The researchers utilized the FJSRC database to examine the prevalence and characteristics of CSEC offenses and offenders across all stages of the federal criminal justice system, including: criminal suspects investigated by U.S. attorneys, persons arrested by federal law enforcement, defendants prosecuted and adjudicated in U.S. district court, and offenders sentenced and imprisoned. To measure and assess trends in the federal prosecution of CSEC offenders, the research approach defined a key analytic cohort, defendants in cases filed in U.S. district court each fiscal year, from 1998 to 2005-and used the FJSRC data linking system and its special "link index file" to link the cohort to data from both prior and subsequent stages of case processing.

To identify CSEC defendants in the FJSRC database that comprised the cohort, the researchers relied on the criminal statutes of the U.S. Criminal Code (mainly those from Chapter 110 of Title 18) that pertains to CSEC crimes. The list of the specific statutes included were informed by several interviews that were conducted with federal prosecutors who routinely worked on and prosecuted CSEC cases for the U.S. Department of Justice. The statutes were also informed by feedback obtained from Polaris Project, whose staff were in the field working together with victims and prosecutors of CSEC cases on a daily basis. The researchers organized descriptive statistics in a set of detailed tables that covered all stages of case processing (including arrest, investigation, prosecution, adjudication, and sentencing), as well as defendant demographics such as race, gender, age, citizenship, and marital status.

Since CSEC covers several different types or "groupings" of offenses that vary considerably on many aspects, including offense seriousness, associated penalties, and offender characteristics, the researchers developed a typology of CSEC offenses that were used to organize and display information in the descriptive tables. This typology, with groupings of federal statutes associated with each type, consists of the following three CSEC offenses:

In addition to the descriptive analyses described below, the researchers also conducted a variety of multivariate predictive analyses. First, the researchers conducted a time series analysis to assess the impact of federal initiatives (e.g., passage of the TVPA) on CSEC prosecutions. Then the researchers constructed multivariate predictive models to analyze the key case outcomes of case disposition (conviction or not) and sentence length imposed, for those who were convicted. The researchers used logistic regression modeling, with case disposition as the dependent variable, to examine the characteristics related to conviction (guilty pleas, as well as trial outcomes), and also used Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to build multivariate models predicting sentence length.

Interviews were conducted with an Assistant U.S. Attorney from the District of Columbia, two prosecutors from the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) within the Department of Justice (DOJ), and a prosecutor from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division - all of whom had experience prosecuting CSEC offenders at the Federal level. The FJSRC link index file is a publicly available file of unique sequential number identifiers that permits the linking of records from different agency data files across various stages of processing. For example, users can link arrest data with case disposition and sentencing data. This feature allows for the tracking of an analytic cohort of offenders to prior and/or subsequent stages, thus permitting the ability to build a more comprehensive dossier of case history and characteristics for each defendant-case in the cohort.

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Federally prosecuted commercial sexual exploitation of children and youth (CSEC) cases.

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Description of Variables View help for Description of Variables

The variables included in the data collection include information from the Federal Justice Statistics Resource Center (FJSRC), such as: unique sequential number identifiers (for files, cases, etc.), arresting agency, offense at arrest, month and year of arrest, as well as the arrestee's county of birth, age, gender, race, citizenship status, marital status, and other demographics. Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) typology variables were also included, covering category of offences and charges. Geographic information included circuits and districts where cases were filed.

Presence of Common Scales View help for Presence of Common Scales

The Final Offense Level, as calculated by the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines (offense seriousness level scale)

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2019-10-29

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