36% of Young Adults Report Paid Sexual Exchanges, Survey Finds

The new national survey covered four virtual acts — sexting or phone sex, sexual photos, filming oneself, online companionship — and six in-person acts, including sexual touching, oral, vaginal and anal sex, in-person companionship, and erotic dancing.

What did the numbers show?

• 28% had provided virtual sexual materials or services for pay; 26% in-person acts.
• Among the 1,142 reporting any exchange, 56% did both forms, 23% virtual only, 21% in-person only.
• Paid sexting or phone sex was most common (22%); erotic dancing least (5.8%).
• About 22% started before age 18; 75% began as adults.
• 65.5% reported experiencing force or coercion at some point — including 85% of those who started as minors.

Cisgender women, transgender and nonbinary respondents, sexual minorities, and non-Hispanic Black participants reported higher rates than their peers. So did parents, households earning $60,000 or less, and people with a high school education or less. Male-female differences were not statistically significant.

Reasons varied widely. Roughly four in ten cited wanting to please someone (39.7%), pleasure or fantasies (38.5%), or living expenses (38.3%). Far fewer — 23.5% — listed feeling pressured, and 15.2% physical force. That gap with the 65.5% coercion figure is striking, and the paper doesn't detail how broadly the coercion item was worded.

What about mental health?

Here's where caution is essential. After adjusting for gender, race, and income, young adults with paid sexual experience showed about twice the odds of screening positive for depression, three to four times the odds for PTSD symptoms and problematic drinking, and nearly six times the odds of problematic drug use. They also had about five times the odds of reporting rape victimization after age 14.

But this is a one-time snapshot. It cannot tell us whether depression, trauma, or substance misuse preceded the exchanges, resulted from them, or shared a common root in poverty and childhood adversity. The 36% figure also lumps a one-time paid sext with ongoing sex work and coerced exploitation, and the study doesn't report how often or how recently these acts occurred.

The researchers argue consensual sex work and trafficking shouldn't be conflated, even though both sit on a spectrum of agency and victimization. They recommend harm-reduction approaches, updated clinical screenings that account for virtual platforms, and stronger economic safety nets.

Other caveats: fewer than one in ten people contacted completed the survey, the English-only sample likely missed unhoused and incarcerated young adults, and routing gender-identity questions to a separate platform — amid the current political climate — may have discouraged some from identifying as transgender. The team corrected 21 records where respondents mistakenly reported unpaid acts; a few more may have slipped through.

The study is preregistered and carefully weighted. Still, one number this surprising deserves replication before it becomes conventional wisdom.