In recent years, there has been a growing awareness that we lack a comprehensive understanding of how sexual exploitation affects boys. In 2019, ECPAT International began a Global Initiative to Explore the Sexual Exploitation of Boys to focus attention with dedicated research—including new primary data collection in ten countries—as well as advocacy and programming to put the sexual exploitation of boys firmly on the global agenda. Data on the sexual exploitation of all children is generally lacking. When it does exist, it tends to focus on girls. In the rare cases that governments collect good data on sexual exploitation and abuse of children, samples are often limited to adolescent girls, or youth engaged in other service systems, such as child welfare or juvenile justice. Yet, evidence suggests that boys may be as, or even more, vulnerable than girls in some contexts. The sexual exploitation of boys continues to be relatively under-researched, sometimes unrecognised in legislation and policy, and broadly unaddressed in programming.
As a foundational project, and in order to ensure that lessons from existing research were observed, ECPAT International partnered with a Canadian Institutes of Health (CIHR)—funded team in boys’ and men’s health and sexual violence victimization (CIHRTeamSV: youthresilience.net), from the Department of Pediatrics at McMaster University, to undertake a systematic, multi-language, global literature review of all research exploring the sexual exploitation of boys. The review identified publications via a search of the formal peer-reviewed literature as well as by conducting a global search of relevant grey literature through the global network of 122 ECPAT member organisations in 104 countries. The project was informed by an earlier 2018 literature review on the topic that identified 33 studies from 18 countries5 but also went further by accommodating a series of exclusions from the earlier study that were identified as limitations.
The review included non-refereed or ‘grey’ literature, research published by non-government organisations and other organisations working with vulnerable youth populations, and non-English language publications. Key findings from these two literature bases help define the ongoing research agenda on the topic of sexual exploitation of boys.