Texas has a $155 million crime victims compensation fund to help pay for counseling, medical and other expenses cause by the abuse victims have endured. The role of money in legal proceedings or the financial implications of legal decisions can influence outcomes for victims.
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North Texas child sex trafficking and child pornography victims denied restitution in state or federal criminal cases have another option for obtaining needed financial support.
Texas has a $155 million crime victims’ compensation fund to help pay for counseling, medical and other expenses cause by the abuse victims have endured.
There’s a problem, though. Survivors of those particular sex crimes receive a miniscule amount of the money — largely, it seems, because they are not aware they can.
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Texas’ annual crime victim compensation reports show less than 1% of all payments went to human trafficking victims from 2021 to 2025. Over that same period, about 0.03% of payments went to child pornography victims, ranking last or second-to-last among all crime categories, according to Texas AG reports.
A spokesperson for the Texas Attorney General’s Office said in a written statement that victim demand drives payments from the fund.
“Applications are processed as they are submitted by victims and claimants,” the statement read, “so payment totals across crime categories are reflective of this incoming claim volume.”
Put more simply, those victims receive so little because so few apply. Consider: From 2020-2025, victims of child porn submitted an average of 93 applications per year, according to the AG. According to FBI crime data, from 2021-2026 there were an average of 4,895 child porn crimes reported.
Denials, according to the state, are not the issue. The AG’s Office said 2025 data show a 78% approval rate for human trafficking claims and an 88% rate for child pornography claims.
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The AG’s office notes it paid out $82 million last year to crime victims, who received on average $6,484.
The Dallas Morning News’ analysis of the AG’s 2025 report reveals the average amount paid to victims of human trafficking and child pornography was less: $4,555 and $1,834, respectively.
The AG’s office, in its statement to The News, said medical costs, which accounted for 50% of 2025 payments, or $41 million, tend to be higher for certain violent crimes that require surgery or emergency room services. The state in 2025 paid much less for mental health counseling, which falls under medical costs and totaled $1.4 million — 3.5% of the medical payments and 1.7% of the overall amount provided.
Every state has a crime victims fund to help survivors with various costs. Texas’ Crime Victims’ Compensation Program is administered by the Texas AG’s office.
The fund received a total of $155 million in revenue last year: Convicted offenders provided $47 million of that through court costs; the Legislature added another $40 million; $36 million came from a federal victims grant; and another about $23 million was generated by criminal offenders through prison telephone fees and parole supervision fees.
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Texas’ compensation fund distributes most of the money to adult victims of violent crime such as assault, according to state attorney general annual reports.
The compensation fund could be particularly beneficial to victims of child sex trafficking because they so rarely receive court-ordered restitution, even though it is mandated by state and federal law.
The News found as part of a year-long investigation that North Texas federal courts ordered restitution for child sex trafficking victims just 6% of the time from 2015 to 2024. Restitution is also mandated in federal child pornography cases. The News’ analysis revealed that only happens 13% of the time in the North Texas district.
Texas does not similarly track restitution for cases prosecuted locally. Dallas County prosecutors acknowledge they rarely request restitution in court at sentencing.
The case of one 13-year-old North Texas girl illustrates the all-too-familiar pattern of missed opportunities by the government to force abusers to provide financial compensation for the harm caused.
Her trafficker sexually assaulted her multiple times, advertised her on Backpage.com, and sold her to about 20 men to be raped for money over a three-day period, court records show. The 31-year-old pimp abandoned her only after learning she had been reported missing to police, according to court records.
He was convicted in both state and federal court in Dallas for his crimes. Neither time did a prosecutor seek restitution and neither time did a judge order him to pay the girl restitution, court records show.
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She also was eligible to receive financial support from the state’s Crime Victims’ Compensation fund. If she had filed for it. Which she might have. If she had known about it.
“Nobody told us,” said the survivor, who is now an adult. “That definitely could’ve helped me in that time, and to know that nobody even made us aware is ridiculously upsetting.”
The maximum allowable payment is $50,000 per victim. A victim who received criminal restitution from courts cannot receive money from the fund for the same losses.
The Texas Legislature created the fund in 1979-1980 to help crime victims. The victim must have been hurt by a crime that occurred in Texas and which was reported to law enforcement. And the victim must have cooperated with the police investigation. Victims or their parents, guardians or legal representatives have three years from the date of the crime to apply. In addition, eligibility rules state a victim must not have participated in the crime or “shared responsibility for the crime due to behavior.”
Child sexual abuse advocates say those requirements work against victims of human trafficking in very specific ways.
The nature of sex trafficking, where pimps hold great power over their victims, often means the victims do not report the crime to police or cooperate to the satisfaction of law enforcement. That’s due, in great part, to the physical and/or psychological coercion and manipulation used against them.
“The whole system is designed around this ideal victim. This sort of perfect person who never made a mistake,” said Jean Bruggeman, co-executive director of Freedom Network USA, a national coalition of human trafficking service providers and advocates. “We’re blaming the victims. They weren’t the right victim.”
Child sexual abuse victims may be too scared, manipulated and traumatized to cooperate fully with police and prosecutors, advocates say. Also, police determinations about levels of cooperation can be subjective.
Brooke Grona-Robb and Cara Foos Pierce, two former North Texas sex trafficking prosecutors, wrote a 2021 article about sex trafficking when they worked for the Texas AG’s office. They argued trafficking victims often don’t report their abuse to police and thus can’t qualify for the state money.
As a result, many “fall through the cracks,” the pair wrote in the Texas Prosecutor, a publication of the Texas District & County Attorneys Association.
“If you have a criminal history, you’re not a true victim,” Bruggeman said about the attitude of fund administrators. “So we don’t have to compensate you.”
She said the rules also make it difficult for people with unstable living situations or who live in poverty to keep up with their claims while they wait months for a decision.
“The system is not designed for them,” she said, “and does not work well for them.”
Shared Hope International, a nonprofit victim advocacy group, has recommended Texas’ Crime Victims’ Compensation Act be changed to provide an exception to all eligibility requirements for child victims of sex trafficking.
Caroline Roberts, an attorney with Children at Risk, a Dallas and Houston children’s advocacy nonprofit, said service providers regularly tell her organization that sex trafficking victims have a lot of trouble accessing money from the state’s compensation fund.
Children at Risk General Counsel and Senior Director of Policy Caroline Roberts in Houston.
Yi-Chin Lee/Staff photographer
The Texas AG’s office pushed back, referring to the approval rates for 2025.
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Such a high rate is not the norm, according to Jeremy Levine, a University of Michigan associate professor who has been researching state funds for years. Levine said detailed human trafficking claims he received from the Texas AG from 2019 to 2022 showed a 64% claims approval rate.
Levine’s data showed the approval rate of claims from child pornography victims in Texas was even lower – 60%.
Levine said those approval rates are quite low “if we consider that the claims that make it to the data have already overcome so many barriers.” Many victims, Levine said, don’t know about the fund or don’t have the resources or support to apply for money.
Crimes with the highest claims approval rates for Texas victims from 2019 to 2022 were reckless driving, criminally negligent homicide and vehicular manslaughter, all of which had rates of 95% or higher, Levine’s data show.
The AG’s statement discounted Levine’s findings. “The unverified data ‘analysis’ cited from the University of Michigan professor,” it said, “is outdated and does not accurately reflect the performance of the program.”
A national problem
Academic research has raised questions about state crime victim funds nationwide.
For example, a 2024 study by a University of Chicago affiliate and the Urban Institute found human trafficking victims were considerably less likely to be compensated by the funds than other victims.
And a 2024 University of Michigan study conducted by Levine concluded subjective determinations about cooperation should not be made by law enforcement because it can lead to inequities.
“Misconduct is a fuzzy concept, open to officer discretion,” said Levine, in his report entitled Inequality in Crime Victim Compensation.
“If, for example, an officer believes a victim is not being truthful or is withholding information about the circumstances of the crime, then the officer can choose to label the victim uncooperative,” his report said.
Levine’s report recommended eliminating the “cooperation with law enforcement and contributory misconduct eligibility restrictions.” And it called for a rethinking of the practice of using police “to determine victim innocence.”
Earlier studies produced similar findings.
“The message is clear: states prefer compensating legally innocent victims,” wrote Amanda Peters, then a professor at the South Texas College of Law, in a 2016 law review journal. She is now associate dean. “These criteria make compensation for most sex trafficked victims highly unlikely.”
Assault and aggravated assault victims have been the top recipients of payments from Texas’ compensation fund since 2020, receiving 55% or more of the distributions each year. They also are much more likely to seek compensation.
It’s not that children are rarely victimized.
The FBI’s annual crime statistics show a majority (51%) of sex trafficking victims in Texas from 2020 to 2025 were young, between the ages of 10 and 19.
Besides those over the age of 65, younger victims received the smallest share of money from Texas’ crime victims fund over the same five-year period. About 5% of all 2025 payments went to victims who were 17 or younger, according to annual reports. That rate was similar in previous years.
“That’s another function, in part, of the lack of representation for these victims,” said Carol Hepburn, a Seattle lawyer who represents child pornography victims.
Mothers with a sexually abused child will not know about these resources, she said. And if they did, Hepburn said, they would have to navigate a bureaucratic maze without anyone helping them fill out the paperwork.
Kerri New is an attorney adviser for AEquitas, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that provides training and resources for prosecutors on sex trafficking cases and other sex crimes. She also is a former state prosecutor in Rockwall and Dallas counties.
She said she spent years meeting with groups of people across the state, including prosecutors, law enforcement and victim advocates. All said the same thing: It’s too difficult for victims to get their reimbursement requests approved, New said.
Victim compensation programs are considered “payors of last resort” because they only pay when victims’ expenses are not covered by health and other insurance, social welfare benefits, workers’ compensation, or any other source, including previously court-ordered restitution.
When victims do receive money from the fund, the state can ask the court for an order of restitution that requires their abusers to repay the fund. Those receipts averaged about $692,300 per year over a six-year period from 2020 to 2025, according to the fund’s annual reports.
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How Texas compares
The federal Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) keeps annual data on every state’s victim compensation fund that is reported by the states. The most recent data from OVC is 2024, while the data provided by AG is from 2025.
Texas did not compare favorably to the nation in terms of compensating trafficking and child sexual exploitation survivors, according to the OVC data. Human trafficking and child pornography victims in Texas received a smaller share of state compensation money than did their counterparts nationwide.
Nationwide, in 2024, human trafficking survivors received $6.6 million or 1.6% of all victim compensation money. Child pornography survivors received $345,690 or 0.09% of the total, according to OVC.
In Texas, human trafficking survivors were paid $38,050 or 0.05% of all state compensation money in 2024. Child pornography survivors received an even lower share — $21,254 or 0.03%, according to OVC data.
Children in Texas accounted for 15% of all compensated victims in 2024. Nationwide, minors represented 29% of the total.
However, Texas performed better than the nation in one particular measurement in 2024: a smaller percentage of claims in Texas were denied for “failure to cooperate with police” and “contributory misconduct” — two reasons viewed by survivor advocates as blaming victims.
The AG’s statement said state comparisons taken from federal data are “unreliable without full context.”
“Percentage-based figures do not account for the significant differences in total claim volume and payout amounts between states,” the statement said.
Levine, of the University of Michigan, has been researching victim compensation funds since 2017 and is writing a book on the topic. His 2024 study is based on data from 18 states, including Texas, that submitted usable data in response to his requests.
He said it’s not possible to tell whether victims didn’t apply because they didn’t know the state funds existed or whether they were advised against applying due to eligibility restrictions, denial rates, wait times or other issues. Denials over lack of police cooperation and contributory misconduct were “relatively consistent” across most states, Levine said.
The funds were established as a public benefit, Levine said. “This is social welfare for crime victims,” he said. And the eligibility criteria, he said, were established to ensure recipients were helping law enforcement and “were not criminals themselves.”
“That’s the root of this,” Levine said, “that it needs to be about fighting crime and about preserving it [money] for innocent victims only.”
The rules, Levine said, leave a lot of discretion to administrators.
“The reason I find it frustrating,” he said, “is because it’s so fuzzy.”