It's worth noting that while the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children receives money from the US federal government, it is not a US government agency. It's a private activist group.
If you want to understand the political history of this issue in the US, read about the Mann Act (AKA the White-Slave Traffic Act), which was passed in response to unsubstantiated racist hysteria about black men kidnapping white women and sexually enslaving them. (This was especially galling, since at the time black men in the US were a lot more likely to be the victims of de facto slavery or forced servitude.)
The FBI does regular nationwide 'trafficking sweeps' that almost never turn up underage victims and rarely uncover evidence of forced sex.
This is despite laws in the US that give prostitutes an imposing incentive to claim that they were trafficked: If they do, they're teated as victims and given free services; if they say 'No I wasn't forced, I just needed the money to pay off my exploitive college loan' or 'It was easier than working in a factory,' then they're charged, fined and jailed.
So pause on that for a moment: Several hundred million dollars a year, tens of thousands of man hours and a stark carrot-and-stick ultimatum to each possible victim can't turn up more than a dozen possible cases of trafficking - many dubious - in a nation of 300 million people.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
