St. Augustine Beach is a small coastal city of fewer than 10,000 residents, located just south of St. Augustine in St. Johns County near Palatka, Florida. On at least one occasion, law enforcement has launched an investigation aimed at curtailing local demand for commercial sex. In August 2014, the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, in partnership with […]
Cartersville is a city of roughly 23,000 residents, located in the northwestern suburbs of Atlanta in Bartow County, Georgia. Cases of local prostitution and sex trafficking have been documented for decades. Local law enforcement has conducted operations that are designed to demand for commercial sex. For example, in early March 2016, the Cartersville Police Department […]
Green is a city of approximately 26,000 residents, situated roughly equidistant between Akron and Canton in Summit County, Ohio. Prostitution activity, at times involving the commercial sexual exploitation of minors, has been documented in the community for over 20 years. Violence against women in prostitution, including armed robbery, have also been documented in the city […]
Cranston is a city of roughly 83,000 residents, located just south of Providence in Providence County, Rhode Island, near Johnston and Warwick. Prostitution activity has been reported in the community for several decades. For example, in June, 2021, six massage parlors in Cranston were raided by police following complaints of a possible prostitution ring. The […]
McLennan County is located in central Texas and has approximately 263,000 residents. The city of Waco is the county seat, and other noteworthy communities within the county include China Spring and Woodway. Prostitution and sex trafficking activity has been reported in the county for several decades. In 2017 it was reported that the county ranked […]
Harrisonburg is a city of roughly 51,000 residents, located in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia, northwest of Charlottesville. Prostitution activity, including incidents of sex trafficking of both minors and adults, has been reported in the community for decades. Cases of prostitution-related homicide have also been documented locally. In their efforts to reduce the wide […]
St. Cloud is a city of approximately 69,000 residents, located in central Minnesota’s Stearns County about 60 miles northwest of the Twin Cities. Numerous cases of prostitution and sex trafficking, often arranged online, have been documented in the community for many years. In a relatively recent example in 2019, a 25-year-old man was sentenced to 20 […]
Tewksbury is a city of approximately 31,000 residents, situated in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, near Lowell and Andover. Prostitution, often arranged online, has been reported in the community for decades. Cases of sex trafficking have also been documented locally. Though the majority of their efforts appear to target sexually exploited persons for arrest over sex buyers, local […]
Shelby is a city of roughly 20,000 residents in the western part of North Carolina, near the western edge of Charlotte. It is the county seat of Cleveland County, and is located about 20 miles west of Gastonia. Prostitution, sex trafficking, and child sex trafficking have been reported in the community for several years, and […]
Lyons is a town of about 5,700 residents, located along the Erie Canal in Wayne County, New York, near Newark. The small city drew media attention following the arrest of three local residents for their participation in the trafficking and sexual assault of a minor girl in December 2015. At that time, Wayne County Sheriff’s […]
Demand Forum is powered by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) and directed by Dr. Michael Shively, NCOSE's Senior Advisor on Research and Data Analysis. It was originally developed by Dr. Shively and Abt Associates with grant support from the National Institute of Justice. In January 2020 the website transferred to NCOSE. In January 2021, work began on a new grant from NIJ (#2020-75-CX-0011) to update and expand the content presented on Demand Forum.
