It certainly would if it were true but as @Tor_Berg points out in their comment above, the study itself never asserted that adolescents were trading sex for food. From the article (their emphasis, not mine):
Teens in all 10 communities and in 13 of the 20 focus groups talked about some youth selling sex for money to pay for food. These themes arose most strongly in high-poverty communities where teens also described sexually coercive environments. Sexual exploitation most commonly took the form of transactional dating relationships with older adults.
I imagine it’d be pretty hard to get anyone engaged in such transactions to come forward. Still, that there’s even collective suspicion among affected teens that this is occurring should be a red neon fucking light to Congress critters that we have a food security problem. Well, that and culturally endemic contempt for the poor. That last one is going to take more than just legislation to uproot, though.
