Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors says (bold emphasis Professor Bartow’s, italic emphasis mine)

The BBC News reports:

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Officials say a 16-year-old girl who recruits children as prostitutes is being sought as a priority.

Special Agent Melissa Morrow, of Washington’s FBI, said adult prostitutes who were among those arrested tipped authorities off about the girl.

“She is currently 16 and started when she was 13,” Agent Morrow said.

“Now she is out there recruiting other juveniles as well,” she said, adding that finding her was “at the top of our list”, the Associated Press news agency reported.

The 13 to 17 year olds are recognized to be victims, but the “adult prostitutes,” anybody 18 years old or over, are arrested as criminals, rather than rescued…

Read the quote and links in context here.

Including, I’m guessing, the adult prostitutes who tipped authorities that a juvenile was recruiting other underage prostitutes.

I mean, geez gang, you don’t have to like prostitution to recognize that if child prostitution is really a concern of yours then you really want adult prostitutes on your side of the law. And the best way to get that would be, maybe, you know, not arresting them for prostitution.

(Let alone “rescuing” them by… having the cops who were shaking you down for sex last week “rescuing” them this week with… arrests, strip searches, jail time, and — if I recall correctly — zero consideration for arrangements for the often-latch-key children of “rescued” prostitutes. Beyond the standard “one phone call” thing. But I digress…)

Seems to me you can even be dead cynical about prostitution and still have the system work — legal sex workers aren’t exactly going to sit around smiling when their livelihoods are undercut by children.

And by the way, it doesn’t sound like the “rescued” children are faring much better. Here’s the LA Times, via Professor Bartow again.

“We may not be able to return their innocence but we can remove them from this cycle of abuse and violence,” said FBI Director Robert Mueller.

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Most of the children are put into the custody of local child protection agencies.

Yeah, because juvenile holding facilities, group homes, and foster care are such bastions of compassionate intervention.

That’s not to say there aren’t numerous ways to actually, you know, rescue coerced or even self-emancipated juvenile prostitutes. But when the only hammer you’re even remotely interested in using is the criminal justice system child sex-workers no less than adults are just going to get nailed.

I mean, seriously, you go spending multiple years and millions of dollars arranging multi-state arrests, and making pious statements about lost innocence and rescue, you damn well ought to have a better idea for what to do after the rescue than putting children “into the custody of local child protection agencies.”

Just sayin’

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And another thing! When are we going to start seeing regular and spectacularly publicized, perp-walked-on-CNN prosecution of johns for pedophilia, statutory rape, and anything else on the books when they buy sex with children?

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Oh, and while I’ve been meaning to mention this in its own post, on a related note check out the embedded Cherry.tv video at Nikol Hasler’s Midwest Teen Sex Show. It’s actually chock-a-block with hints about why early sexualization doesn’t particularly do young people any favors.

Nick Confessore, former political blogger and now of The New York Times, says

September 26, 2008

[New York] Gov. David A. Paterson on Friday signed into law a bill shielding sexually exploited girls and boys from being charged with prostitution.

The law, known as the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act, will divert children under the age of 18 who have been arrested for prostitution into counseling and treatment programs, provided they agree to aid in the prosecution of their pimps.

He said it here.

[Via $pread magazine online. —fl]

The law has evidently been held up for year in the New York state legislature by law-n-order types, Senate Republicans and NYC Mayor’s office who believed it would just make it harder to “crack down on prostitution.”

The compromise bill allows charges to be reinstated for child prostitutes who refuse to cooperate with court mandates and also includes a sort of “one strike you’re in” provision where reoffenders just go to jail.**

While I’m actually, eh, sympathetic with qualms that if poorly administered the new law could just provide new avenues for gaming the system, on the other hand system-gaming-wise it’s already pretty much nickel night at the casino. So what’s wrong with attempting an approach that sidesteps that system?

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere there’s a bit of a disconnect between the standard protective impulse “OMG, here’s an underage victim who’s been conscripted into prostitution” and the standard response which is “arrest the little whore.”

Whichever way we might feel viscerally about sex work we can not be proud of the pure oxymoronics of “criminal victim.***” And on the face of it, anyway, this looks like a step away from punishing victims and towards punishing (silly me for asking, I know) the actual criminals in such cases: pimps, traffickers, and customers who buy and sell children’s bodies.****

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Next up, one hopes, would be diversion initiatives along Safe Housing / Safe Environments lines? The answer would appear to be… yes. According to a summary of the bill from something called the (randomly via-Google) Polaris Project Action Center there are provisions for…

Safe Houses

• Every local social services district is required to provide a short-term safe house to sexually exploited children who live in its district. In addition to secure housing, the facility should include 24-hour crisis intervention and access to various medical care and other supportive services. Existing resources, including respite beds or runaway and homeless youth programs, can be used if appropriate, and local social service districts may work together to provide these resources on a regional basis.

• The Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) is required to contract with an appropriate agency with experience working with sexually exploited youth to provide at least one safe house for longer-term care, in a geographic area that would meet the needs of sexually exploited youth and that cannot be readily accessed by perpetrators of sexual exploitation.

Planning
Every local social services district is required to:

• Determine the needs of sexually exploited children in their respective districts;
• Include the determination of the need in the integrated county plan;
• Provide crisis intervention and community-based programs to meet the determined need; and

• Recognize and plan for the separate and distinct needs of girls, boys, and transgendered youth who have been sexually exploited.

Oh, but wouldn’t you know? Perhaps the bigger objections to the bill weren’t so much about about law ‘n order as some people not wanting to pay to do the right thing.

A recent study conducted by the state Office of Children and Families reports that counties are currently not equipped to handle the needs of this victim population. The study, New York Prevalence Study of Commercially Sexually Exploited Children, was released April 18, 2007. It examined 159 agencies from a sample of local departments of social services throughout the state, including New York City. Among its conclusions, the study details the service availability and capacity, as well as the problems preventing local departments of social services from providing the necessary services.

Hmm… should we help victims or lock them away? Yeah, “which one’s cheaper” is always a moral choice.

[** If convicted. If I’m not mistaken one of the big problems for pimped or trafficked sex workers of any age is that their pimps and traffickers a) know the ropes and b) can afford good successful lawyers. —fl]

[*** I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere my strong preference for a different, more appropriately focused construction… like treating customers of child prostitutes as Level 1 or Level 2 lifetime-registerable child sex offenders. The act, incidentally, mainly covers children under age 16 so “chilling effect” on what really ought to be legitimate adult sex work customers? Not so much. —fl]

[*** Oops, maybe I’m not so happy: Based on Confessori’s article it looks like Bloomberg et.al. pressed for requiring cooperation against traffickers but… as usual no mention of prosecuting the customers of pimps and traffickers. —fl]

Jessica of Jezebel keeps it all in perspective…

Here we are, worried about the sexualization of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus, when 31 out of 53 girls from the ages of 14-17 from the Yearning For Zion ranch are pregnant or already have children. Although the polygamist Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints have been claiming that they do not marry off 13 and 14 year old girls to older men, the number of very young yet pregnant girls seems to refute these claims. What’s more, there are 53 girls ages 14-17 who were taken from the ranch, while only 17 boys in that age group were living with the sect. (The gender divisions in children under 14 were about 50/50.) This gives credence to the tales of “lost boys“ of the FDLS: adolescent males who were exiled from the sect to keep the gender imbalance favorable for polygamous unions.

Read the quote in context here.

So the other night the photos that were blasted wall to wall on the big-screen tvs were all about Hannah Montana in entirely inappropriate circumstances. Not sure what Annie Leibovitz was thinking. On the other hand I can kind of gues what the news blasters were thinking for wall-to-walling photos and videos of Cyrus in those inappropriate circumstances.

But here’s the deal. I think people like Leibovitz, and Vanity Fair, and wall-to-wall cable is comfortable sexualizing 15-year-olds precisely because they’d be horrified by 15-year-olds having sex. Sexualized virgins… have-it-both-ways virgin/whores… are the only salt and savor one is permitted in the “no-sex” class paradigm where the best way possible to insure women’s legitimate sexual arousal is never detectable is by making everyone look aroused (lipstick-red lips, eye-shadow blue eyelids, high-heel-presented boobs and ass, etc.) even when, and maybe especially when they’re not.

On the other hand, when the same media discovers girls who’ve actually had to be sexual instead of being merely sexualized, and especially when they can’t find a way (a la Britney Spears) to blame them for it, they just fuse and sputter. Thus the complete failure to confront what the fuck was going on at that little child-rape-and-forced-labor factory in Texas.

And, based on inside scoops I’ve gotten from friends in the white-American southwest, it ain’t boy children doing the forced labor either, it’s girls — just like it was sets of exhausted-looking too-young girls pushing shopping carts ahead of wary, hard-eyed older women too young to be their mothers and too different-looking to be their sisters, and too close in age to be their babysitters that I saw in the grocery store in that nice “we don’t have internet in our hotels, I guess we’re just quiet folks around here” Small American Town near the four corners we stopped in a few years ago.

And I just want to know, really, where are those boys? I know one man, in his 60s now, who in classic recent-refugee fashion became a cab driver after being “excommunicated” from a polygamist “splinter group” at a very young age. But yeah, if children under 14 are half boys half girls, and for those over there were 53 girls and only 17 boys then what the fuck happened to the other 36 boys? Where are they?

Why aren’t their mothers crying for them on TV the way they have been for their lost girls? By law and by right a minor is a minor till 11:59PM of the day before they turn 18, and so those missing boys need — and I suspect really need — to be in shelters as well.

And can I just close with an obvious answer to the question “whut about teh menz, why urn’t ther any menz?” What if there weren’t that many men to begin with because it was an FLDS-designed beacon-on-a-hill wet-dream poligamist compound? How many hand-picked-by-Warren-Jeffs “spiritual husbands” would be needed to “tend to” 170 women and girls over age 14 anyway? Seventeen might not be too many, especially since (said one of my sources years ago) older “sister-wives” are frequently given responsibility for day-to-day operations anyway. And, um, yeah, given that “spiritually married” or not it’s illegal in Texas to have sex with children under age 17, and given how many of the children taken into custody have themselves been pregnant or had children, then you’re probably not going to see a lot of those guys coming forward to appear on Larry King Live either, because shortly thereafter they’d appear in orange jump suits.

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And if I may just editorialize for a moment, this just seems like such a good time for BFP, and BlackAmazon, and Jill, and maybe Hugo, and all the other good bloggers who think they’re so pure-of-heart they can’t learn from their or anyone else’s mistakes to do Take-Two CEO Ben Feder** a favor, to do Justice Arthur Cooperman a favor, to do the slave traffickers in Sudan, and all the other MRAs in the world including Warren Jeffs a favor and go dark on their own. Yeah, yeah, you’re all sensitive and shit. Me too. Now put away the violins and get back to work.

[** Take-Two produces Grand Theft Auto™ —fl]

The AP’s Michelle Roberts, via The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has an update on the recently raided pedophilia/polygamy “compound” in El Dorado, Texas.

SAN ANGELO, Texas — Lawyers for a polygamist sect that is the subject of a massive child-abuse investigation argued in court Wednesday that although its members’ multiple marriages and cloistered ways may be unusual, they have a right to their faith and privacy.

Gerry Goldstein, a San Antonio lawyer representing the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also told a judge that the search of the temple in the sect’s West Texas compound is analogous to a law enforcement search of the Vatican or other holy places.

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Prosecutor Allison Palmer countered that the purpose in seizing the documents was to uncover evidence of criminal activity, not to malign a religion.

State troopers and child welfare officials began a search of the FLDS compound in Eldorado last Thursday after a 16-year-old girl there called a local family violence shelter to report her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. The search warrant covered all documents related to marriages among sect members, including photos and entries possibly written in family Bibles.

Rest of the article here.

Look. Here’s the deal. First of all it’s fine with me if people want to practice polygamy. It’s even fine for me if they want to do power-gradient role playing if that’s what floats you and your partner’s and your friend’s boats. Freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of sexual self-determination all demand that I tolerate that whether or not it floats my boat.

But nothing in church doctrine (even, as far as I know, LDS doctrine) dictates that girls under age 18 are obliged to participate. And, sorry, too bad for doctrine if it did. (Which, remember, it doesn’t) Worshipers of the (Biblical version) of Baal might argue their doctrine required live cremation of all first-born children before age three, and claim that their “compound” be treated like the Vatican too. And that would be tough shit for them too.

And just to be clear it wouldn’t be tough shit for child sacrificers because children are God’s little angels. No more than it’s not tough shit for the child molesters in El Dorado because children are holy innocents. It’s because in the 21st Century, in all but the most thoroughly regressive cultures, children are recognized as distinct civil, moral, ethical, and spiritual entities from their parents and therefore children are not their parents to dispose of or consume in ways that subtract from the child’s ability to take up the reins of the world upon reaching adulthood!

As Hannah Arendt said back in Between Past and Future (paraphrasing since my copy is in storage), we can train dogs because we know we’ll be here to train their offspring and their offspring’s offspring as well. With humans, though, we cannot train children. We must instead educate them because we know we will not be there to train their children and certainly not to train their children’s children. And this is the fallacy of all claims (conservative and liberal) that society may have no say in what custodial adults choose to do with their children because they’re only “their” children for 18 years. After that they become our fellow citizens and our children’s fellow future colleagues, partners, friends… or — if their parents have self-indulgently fucked them up enough — they become burdens on ours and our children’s society.

Children grow up. They outlive their parents. And until they’re old enough to give full, informed, and legal adult consent that’s why no matter how religiously, culturally, or socially tolerant we otherwise might be, it’s a problem letting even passionately, sincerely religious adults buy, sell, “marry,” or just slake their pedophilic lust into the bodies of theirs or other people’s children. It’s why the more tolerant our society the less we could tolerate infant sacrifice, no matter how religiously justified. It’s why we can’t tolerate “honor killings.” It’s the real reason why surgical genital alteration on children is intolerable as well. It’s even why we can’t just let these fuckers yank girls out of 5th grade for fear that they might learn enough to get themselves and their own children away from the nightmare cultural-not-religious cycle of female child-sexual and child-labor slavery.

It also happens to be why I call this blog Real Adult Sex. Just in case anyone ever wondered.

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Oh, and just for the record, from another AP story on the same “sect” (emphasis mine)

Church leaders have kept a strict hold on every aspect of FLDS life – from the modest prairie-style clothes worn by members, to amount of time their kids stay in school and which house a family calls home.

Marriages, which sometimes have included unions between teenage girls and older men, are arranged through the church’s prophet and leader. Sect dissidents say the rules got even tighter in 2002, when Warren Jeffs took over the church.

Jeffs, now 52, demanded more from followers, asking for steep increases in the 10 percent monthly tithe. Dozens of men were excommunicated. Their wives and children were given to other men deemed more worthy.

Source: Seattle P-I

Sorry, it’s possible for adult men to consent to a system whereby they can be excommunicated for failing to sufficiently obey the whims of their leader. And it’s possible for adult women to consent to a system whereby they obey the same leaders no matter how loathsomely he dehumanizes them. (Do I even need to say that in all cases one would always be ready at the drop of a penny to, um, aggressively support and defend men or women participants’ right to withdraw from their self-imposed agreements at any time.) But neither the men nor the women have the right to consent to the sale or “gift” of their children to anyone else in the course of their role playing. Because, no that it needs saying, children are first and always people.