Safe Housing, Safe Environments

[Note: I'm on vacation in what may what's proving be very limited internet service. I've been mostly relying on \pre-recorded and (I very much hope!) a self-publishing posts. I'm taking the opportunity to use (limited) access here in a car-repair waiting room to try to catch up on a couple of ideas, but I may not still won't have much opportunity to reply to comments but you're comments are still very welcome. I'll reply as soon as I can. You're some of the best commenters in the blogsphere so you're always welcome to respond spiritedly but respectfully to each other's comments while I'm away. --fl]

Speaking of legalizing prostitution, on the way out of town last Friday my partner and I heard an interesting set on a local interview program at our local NPR affiliate. It was about the problems faced by underaged women in, at least the Seattle area and, I'm assuming, much of the rest of the world.

The interviewer (sorry, I was driving and couldn't take notes) said first that a huge number of underage sex workers in the area are associated with street gangs that use them to raise money, keep each other "satisfied," and measure each other's relative status (the intra-gang exchange part, in particular, strikes me as unambiguous "trafficking.")

She said it's a huge problem for these young women because whereas they're pretty clearly victims inside a criminal enterprise (in fact as minors they're *expressly* victims) they're also *legally* criminals and therefore subject to arrest and prosecution rather than mitigation through social services.

Gang members, like all pimps, use the illegal status of prostituted girls to *bind them closer* to them rather than drive them away.

The woman who did the research said based on her interviews, research, and analysis the #1 need for these young women is safe housing -- a perhaps unusual, and certainly little mentioned, need in most discourse on the subject.

Evidently most recruited girls are homeless. Ironically (or perhaps not) they're kicked out of "good" homes in suburban/exurban communities where (as happened to the niece of a friend) the advice of church and community leaders is "cut them loose and kick them out, they're already damaged goods."

At any rate, their legal status is a problem in a variety of dimensions including, duh, the fact that girls with active or recent criminal pasts aren't terribly welcome, nor are they in any position to be terribly trusting of authorities. Nor, incidentally, are they necessarily terribly interested in testifying against the men who prostitute them, both out of direct fear of violence or death and indirectly out of the commonly-pimp-inspired belief that their pimps are their "boyfriends." None of the above combine to make them accessible to law enforcement (who's key mechanism tends to involve plea bargaining, not ways out for those who want out.)

Any rate, one more reason why straight-up criminalization isn't working as well as advertised. No, I'm not advocating that child prostitution be legalized (as the title of this blog should make fairly clear.) But it *does* suggest that if you want to actually *help* those involuntarily in prostitution the solution probably *isn't* to just leave it illegal and let shame and fear take it from there.