Are You Kidding Me? A Review of Current Anti-Prostitution Law Enforcement
Photo by Flickr user tuis. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Quick question for anti-prostitution types all bent on upping detection and arrest rates for sex workers (remembering that most anti's assume *all* sex workers are coerced.) How does the justice system and social services in your area deal with the current load of sex workers?
I ask because the more I read of "Who Pays the Price? Youth Involvement in Prostitution in Seattle" (pdf), a report produced by Debra Boyer, PhD, for Seattle's Human Services Department, Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Prevention Division, the more aggravated I become.
The report is on children in prostitution -- for those keeping track at home one clue that sex workers start very young is that police and social service agencies report that the mean age for children arrested for prostitution in 2007 was 15.5. (50% of those arrested were either 14 or 15.)
The clue for why so many young prostitutes come from abusive families? Because a) their customers may be the same age as their fathers but at least they're not *their fathers!*; b) they leave to escape from home, discover there's no, zero, none safety net beyond, maybe, foster homes, and either turn to prostitution based on input from street peers or else wind up "taken care of" by pimps; c) they grow up that way at home and don't necessarily see any other lifestyle as possible for them.
Disturbing quote from the report?
Youth with prostitution arrests are developing their identity based on their life in prostitution. They need more focused prostitution and trauma recovery services.
So! You want them to get picked up more quickly and more often. Hey, so do I! (Seriously! I'm more sanguine than a lot of folks about affirmatively voluntary sex work but I'm dead set against child sex work whether or not it's conscripted or coerced.)
But as the report makes clear their ain't a lot of places for them to go assuming they are intercepted.
Youth cycling through the juvenile justice system are more likely to be involved with a pimp or gang, and will need safe and secure housing when they are released. It is within this group that youth whose lives are in danger from pimps and gang affiliation are most likely to emerge. Youth with prostitution arrests are developing their identity based on their life in prostitution. They need more focused prostitution and trauma recovery services.
Youth are not released from detention if they do not have a place to go. Since there is seldom family to pick them up, youth, with the assistance of a probation counselor or case manager, may go to a DCFS group home, back to foster care, or to shelters if there are any of the few beds available such as YouthCare Shelter, Dove House, or Teen Hope. None of these are permanent placements; the only transitional independent living program for youth under age 18 is YouthCare’s eight-bed [emphasis mine --fl] Pathways programs.
"Their families are just not there." (Social Worker)
"I believed I had to accept this life; this is what was dealt me. Someone would have to prove I could go somewhere he couldn’t get at me. Do you really have somewhere I could go?" (Prostitution Survivor)
"Girls with pimps or with gangs need out of here!" (Prostitution Survivor)"There is nowhere to send them." (Interview responses from juvenile probation officers, attorneys, and social service providers)
Oh yeah, and speaking of intercepted, you know how cheerleaders for hijacking enforcement of international sex and labor trafficking in favor of cracking down on pure anti-domestic-prostitution by instructing prosecutors and police officers to treat every prostitution arrest as a Federal trafficking incident?
How about putting a little effort into investigating, or arresting, let alone bringing prostitution charges in the first place? As Boyer's report says
"Often they have come in under other charges such as drug offenses or a stolen car and have previous arrests. If they
are brought into detention, we would only learn about prostitution from their social history if it came up." (Social Worker)...
Youth may be arrested but referred for charges other than prostitution, which is up to the
discretion of officers if multiple crimes are involved. Youth who are involved in prostitution are
often referred on drug or theft charges, for example. These arrests are not included in the
prostitution category, and their involvement may or may not surface as a part of their social
history. We do know that King County police agencies identified at least 82 youth in 2007.
Surely, the 82 youth identified in 2007 more realistically reflect the local problem than arrest
data from prior years suggest....
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has
supported studies to increase statistical and research information on the prostitution of juveniles.
David Finkelhor and Richard Ormrod have analyzed data from 76 agencies in thirteen states on
juvenile prostitution based on the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).v
Finkelhor and Ormrod found that prostitution offenses are scarce in police reports. The
investigators reviewed 14,230 prostitution incidents recorded in NIBRS data from 1997 through
2000, which represents only 0.17 percent of all crime incidents known to police (2 out of every
1,000 incidents known to police involved prostitution). The NIBRS data for 1997–2000 identify
only 241 prostitution incidents with juvenile offenders, juvenile victims, or both (five percent of
incidents). Of these incidents, 229 individuals are identified as juvenile offenders and 61 as
juvenile victims. Analyses of the small data set are complicated because prostitution arrest
categories may combine categories including patronizing and promoting with offering and
agreeing to prostitution. It can be concluded that police reports are not reliable indicators of
the scope of juvenile involvement in prostitution. The scarcity of juvenile prostitution reports
suggests it is a low-priority crime. [emphasis mine --fl]So! We should be not just enforcing laws but crafting *policies* that, say, make it safe and non-complex for underage victims to give evidence while minimizing stigmatization by jurors and minimizing interference from family members. Because laws just say what we think we ought to do. Policies say *how* we're going to do it.
And whether we're really serious.
Final quote from Boyer's report?
Washington state data are similar to national data regarding the low number of prostitution arrests involving juveniles.
Sounds to me like it's not just Seattle, or Washington State then. And what's the solution? Just pass another law, double the penalties, clap the dust off your hands and go look for some other good deed to do? I don't think so.
Recommendations in the report?
#1: Safe housing.
#2: Dedicated local housing.
#3: Training for service and law-enforcement agencies.
#4: Deal with the contradictory legal status of youth prostitutes (if they're under 18 -- Washington's statutory age of consent -- they should be considered victims of sex offenders rather than arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to juvenile detention.)
#5: Get real about charges against customers of child prostitutes. Current penalty for sex with a child? Life on the sex-offender registry. Current penalty for sex with a child *prostitute?!?!?!* Average $500, maximum $1,000!Seriously, if you're pro-prostitution what are you doing about the deplorable situation of children in prostitution in *your* vicinity? Because you know as well as I that there'd be way less opposition, and maybe even a little more support for your cause if everybody's age of entry (that's "age" not "average age") was 18 or higher.
Even more seriously, though, if you're *anti*-prostitution what are *you* doing about the deplorable situation of children in prostitution, in *your* communities, *in spite of* the coverage already extended to minors under the *current* Trafficking Victim's Protection Act? Because guess what? Extending that coverage to adults isn't going to do what you think it's going to do you can't even get authorities excited about or even interested in digging into *child* prostitution, m'kay?
%!@*%#!$!!
[** "Conscripted" for my purposes here include those who wind up sex workers due to the TVPA's force or fraud provisions as well as the more frequently understood and recognized direct coercion. --fl]
it sickens me, the mentality that you can do whatever the hell you want to a person as long as they're a "whore." even if they're a child! and it's so ingrained in people...
my mother (my mom!) forwarded me one of those "what happens if you get scared half to death twice?" emails that's just a list of intended-to-be-humorous rhetorical questions, and one of them was something along the lines of "if you force a prostitute, is it rape or theft?"
personally, i'd have thought the answer to that question was pretty damn obvious, and i have to wonder, since when did it become acceptable to treat rape as a laughing matter? i mean, that's right up there with those "dead baby" jokes...maybe it's a "pushing the boundaries" thing, but isn't our society desensitized enough?
As a sex worker I'm often frustrated by the legalization debate. Tackling the demand (inequities between women and men for one) to get to the root of why prostitution exists in the first place is just too much work. Finding out what makes abusing children such a turn-on for so many people requires some social soul-searching, intelligence and time. Drafting more policies is just the lazy way to "solve" the problem.
Hmmmm. So if a sex worker is aged 17 years, 11 months and 30 days they're an innocent victim and need protection from sick perv customers? Yet the next day when they turn 18, they are somehow an autonomous adult with agency who truly decided to do sex work?
No coercion, no trafficking, etc. but as you say, most prostitutes are very young when they start working, even just 14. Most come from abusive backgrounds. Most didn't really have an alternative. The majority of prostitutes want to leave - like 90% - but most don't see that they have a choice.
Sorry - I don't think you can just draw some arbitrary line between "children" and "adult women".
Women who are prostitutes deserve the safe houses, immunity from criminal prosecution, help to find proper work, and so on that you advocate only for those lucky enough to be under 18.
["...aged 17 years, 11 months and 30 days..." Eh, I tend to leave the reductio ad absurdum to pedophiles, although they argue in the other direction. There's some point where society pretends that for developmental purposes a person transitions from "child" to "adult" and thereafter they're considered capable of making free and fair decisions. It could be 18, or 21, or, if you like, 99, but I think we can agree it's *not* 14, m'kay? (Not sure where you got that child vs. adult *woman* business either but it's creepy.) And where did you get that I advocate safe houses *only* for child prostitutes anyway? The report I discussed is about child prostitution. Proposals in the report were for reducing child entry and facilitating child exit from prostitution -- a position I think we *also* agree on. But otherwise my concern for coerced or conscripted sex workers *really* doesn't stop age 18. Sorry if there was any confusion. Thanks, Anon. --fl]