Early efforts to protect youth from sexual abuse date back to the nineteenth and early twentieth century campaigns for laws against criminal seduction and the “white slave trade” as well as age of consent laws. Building on this legacy, campaigns against juvenile prostitution in the 1970s arose in response to a spike in youth homelessness and historic shifts occurring in the juvenile justice system, including a recognition of due process rights for youth and the deinstitutionalization of youth status offenders. As a result, it became harder for states to detain youth, but communities often lacked social services to help runaway and homeless youth. These factors combined into a perfect storm: youth with few opportunities or social supports on the streets vulnerable to entering the sex trade. Meanwhile, as a result of the civil rights and women’s movement, changing gender and sexual norms as well as increasing racial integration combined with the increased visibility of the commercial sex trade to make adults anxious to protect youth from what they perceived as growing sexual threats. All of these changes made the 1970s ripe for the emergence of activism against juvenile prostitution.