Tuesday September 11, 2001

WASHINGTON - Children who engage in prostitution and the making of pornography are likely to be white, middle-class and familiar with the person who got them involved, according to a study released yesterday.

These young people often were abused at home and fled to the streets, where they exchanged sex for money, food and shelter, said the report. It was issued by the University of Pennsylvania and the National Association of Social Workers.

About 326,000 children in the United States are victims of commercial sexual exploitation, the report estimated.

``It's an epidemic that has been off the radar screen and mostly hidden,'' said Richard J. Estes, a social work professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the study's main author.

Equal numbers of boys and girls are involved, but the activities of boys generally receive less attention.

Most people who have sex with children are men, 25 percent of whom are married and have children.

About 47 percent of sexual assaults on children were committed by relatives, 49 percent by acquaintances and only 4 percent by strangers.

The study - titled ``The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico'' - found gaps in policies and services intended to combat sexual exploitation of children and help the victims.

It criticized state and local governments for ``benign neglect,'' because too many agencies lacked the resources to detect the problem.

``It's invisible because many people aren't primed to see it. They are attuned to abuse and assault and see the sexual exploitation as more of an adult problem. They can't believe a child would be asked to perform such acts,'' Estes said.

Additional funding would enable government and private agencies to train more people to detect such exploitation, he added.

For the project, researchers selected 28 cities in the three countries, based on the cities' size and reputations for having problems with commercial sexual exploitation of children. Seventeen of the cities are in the United States.

The researchers examined public records and interviewed about 1,000 children, law enforcement officials and human services groups. They used previous data and field research from 288 federal and local agencies to extrapolate their findings to the U.S. population as a whole.