Flutterby™! : child prostitution in SF?

Wow. Looks like someone is going all Marc Klaas on the statistics: Group says 3,000 girls sold for sex in San Francisco. Funny, you'd think half a percent of the population, especially if they're clustering:

They work in the Tenderloin, Mission, Haight, Bayview and Polk Street neighborhoods.

Would be more noticeable. The clincher seems to be:

It also found that in a recent survey of more than 7,000 high school-age kids, 17 percent reported they or their peers traded sex for money or other forms of payment.

Now I'm not going to condone coercive sex among minors, but I'm betting that someone's using loose labels, and if we phrased the question right we could probably get a whole lot of married couples to answer a question in such a way that we could paraphrase it to "sex for favors". I've no reason to doubt that "174 minors had been arrested for prostitution last year", but if we compare this to the couple of hundred non-related abductions per year it's pretty clear that the real issue here that needs to be solved relates to the home lives of these children.