PHILADELPHIA -- University of Pennsylvania social work professor Richard Estes, co-editor of the new two-volume "Medical, Legal, & Social Science Aspects of Child Sexual Exploitation," hopes that the release of this work will guide lawmakers, human service planners, child advocacy groups and others to work together to create a comprehensive plan to combat child sexual exploitation.

Estes and his co-editors will hold a press conference June 15 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., with both the National District Attorneys' Association and the American Prosecutors Research Institute to bring attention to the problem of child sexual exploitation.

"In the two-volume handbook, we make 14 recommendations that we believe could make a real difference in eliminating child sexual exploitation," Estes said.

Recommendations include:

- Parents monitoring children's access to the Internet.

- Better training of teachers and others who interact with children to spot and report sexual exploitation.

- Creation of a federal agency dedicated to child sexual exploitation.

- Having law enforcement re-focus the bulk of its activities on adult perpetrators of sex crimes against children pimps, traffickers and customers -- and not the children themselves.

- Treating all sexual crimes against children as felonies.

- Creation of a National Child Sexual Exploitation Intelligence Center, comparable to the National Drug Intelligence Center.

- Fuller cooperation between the public and private sectors in their shared efforts to combat child sexual exploitation.

"Sensational child sexual abuse cases like pedophile priests might make big headlines, but the truth is that sexual exploitation of children is an international scandal that gets scant attention by the media or government officials," Estes said.

Of the estimated 600,000 to 800,000 men, women and children trafficked across international borders each year, approximately 80 percent are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors, the majority of whom are trafficked into economic servitude or commercial sexual exploitation, or both, according to the U.S. State Department's just released 2005 Trafficking in Persons report.