About SAGE and CSE/CSEC
The bottom line on exploited children and young women, and how SAGE helps

What is The SAGE Project?
The SAGE Project, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California and provides important—and ultimately life—and cost-saving—services to sexually exploited children and adults in the San Francisco area. SAGE’s very effective and efficient efforts are increasingly modeled by communities throughout the country and world.

The SAGE Project works closely with law enforcement, public health and social service agencies, and the District Attorney’s office, on restorative justice programs, trauma and drug recovery programs, education and outreach, and—since a high percentage of prostituted individuals are sexually abused and trafficked into the sex trade as children—efforts to end the escalating sexual trafficking of our children and youth.

Commercial Sexual Exploitation, or CSE, is not a victimless crime; it affects everyone it touches—from the exploited and abused children and adults, to the purchasers of CSE-based services and their families, to the communities and cultures in which it flourishes. CSE has high costs in dollars and lives, yet it flourishes because of outdated assumptions, biases, and policies, as well as from a lack of understanding, high-quality research, and updated policy.

Thus, the ultimate “project” of SAGE is to help bring about the end of CSE—stamping out the supply and demand for commercial sexual exploitation, while effectively addressing the issue and its problems and costs in the interim. SAGE does that through its more localized programs, services, outreach, and collaborations, as well as through the group’s broader advocacy, education, replication, and public-awareness efforts. SAGE has consulted on both state and federal legislative initiatives related to CSE and trafficking, as well.

Why are SAGE’s efforts necessary?
In the United States alone, between 300,000 and 600,000 children get forced into the sex trade or are trafficked – by adults – into prostitution and other forms of CSE. Internationally, that number rises into the millions of women and children who are trafficked – transported, bought and sold – for sexual abuse and commercial sexual exploitation. The average age of entry into prostitution and CSE is 14, though many children are sexually abused and trafficked into CSE at a younger age.

CSE is big business for those who benefit financially from the sexual exploitation of others—with profits estimated by some experts to be $20 billion a year worldwide.

What’s more, the customers who purchase CSE-services are often deemed “more respectable” members of the community and are often not arrested or prosecuted. For example, one sting operation in the Midwest netted a local minister, a high school coach, a business man, and a college professor for purchasing sex from prostitutes in massage parlors and through escort services.

Unfortunately, the “business” of protecting sexually exploited children and adults gets far less attention, and far fewer dollars, because it’s an uncomfortable and often-misunderstood problem. Yet it’s an area where just a little money can go a long way – and save taxpayer dollars and community problems down the road.
Most metropolitan areas spend an average of $7.5 million per year on prostitution-related costs, and some spend more—New York City, for example, spends $27 million annually. Sexually exploited and prostituted children and adults are also susceptible to physical and mental health deterioration—drug use, depression, Hepatitis, HIV, and physical and sexual assault and other types of violence.

Current policies in most communities are punative rather than preventative, focusing primarily on street prostitution, though it constitutes a fraction of the CSE trade. In addition to street-prostitution, the CSE trade also includes massage parlors, sex and strip clubs, pornography, etc. Most arrests center on prostitutes, with much lower rates of arrest for pimps, traffickers, and sex-trade purchasers. Teens are often arrested and prosecuted as adult prostitutes, despite being under the age of 18, and despite the fact that most prostitutes were molested, abused, and trafficked into CSE as pre-adolescent children.

SAGE works to shift policy to address demand as well as supply, and to shift the attitudes and resultant policies that allow minors to be arrested as “child prostitutes” instead of being treated as sexually abused and exploited children whose abusers, traffickers, and purchasers are the targets of law enforcement and prosecution.

How effective is SAGE?
SAGE is very effective. The SAGE model has received recognition and validation for its effectiveness and efficiency, including:

• Innovations in American Government Award, from the Ford Foundation and JFK School of Government at Harvard;


• Peter F. Drucker Award for Innovation in Nonprofit Management;


• Oprah Winfrey Angel Network Award;


• a previous one-time federal appropriation of $1.25 million, sponsored by Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA).

SAGE, in collaboration with the San Francisco District Attorney and Police Department, was a pioneer in creating the First Offender Prostitution Program, or FOPP, and the Early Intervention Prostitution Program (EIPP). FOPP works directly with adult “first offenders”— both those arrested for selling sex, and those arrested for buying sex.

Through FOPP and EIPP, adult first-offenders may have an opportunity to attend “John School”—an educational program to raise awareness among those who’ve purchased services from adult prostitutes; or participate in services geared towards prostitutes and prostituted minors. The programs also include an “early intervention” youth component designed for more sensitive handling of minors involved in CSE, to help divert youth from the justice system—and the system of violence in which they’ve been involved.

In the coming few years, SAGE’s local service model will be expanded to include a safe house, a 24-hour hotline and 24-hour outreach services; and will be replicated by other communities throughout the country and elsewhere in the world.

SAGE helps to save children, lives, community quality of life, and ultimately tax-payer dollars that are spent because earlier interventions and effective services don’t occur—or don’t exist at all.

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