Hortense of Jezebel has some good news
Several states have begun taking steps to better protect teenagers who end up in prostitution rings, treating the teen prostitutes not as criminals, but as victims of abuse, and charging their pimps with human trafficking.
Prosecutor Nancy O’Malley, who wrote California’s sexually exploited minors law, tells Christina Hoag of the Associated Press: “This is an institutional shift. It’s about getting people to shift their attention and judgment from the minor and seeing what’s beyond this criminal behavior.” Several other states, including New York, are following suit, offering rehabilitation programs rather than jail time for children caught up in the sex trade.
The thing is there’s a bit of a chicken/egg problem with legalizing adult sex work: because it’s currently a criminal enterprise criminals have considerable latitude to not engage in activities that ought to be legal but also to engage in acts that decidedly shouldn’t. Yet resistance to legalization is high precisely because of the corners criminals cut. Corner cutting, incidentally, that legal or decriminalized sex workers would be unlikely to tolerate were it legal and non-jeopardizing for them to complain. But I digress.
The real point is that conflicting social priorities have tended to treat prostitutes in general, and child-prostitutes in particular as nominal victims but actual criminals (see item #1 in the Two Rules of Desire. Especially since victims of child prostitution are generally seen as especially “broken” since they’ve already had Teh Sex and all.) Anyway a move to instead treat child-sex laborers as actual victims is pretty welcome.
The next step in that direction, of course, would be to prosecute pimps and customers with (generally overreactive but in this case laudably and, even better, enduringly punitive) child-sex and child-exploitation offenses. As it currently stands sex with a minor tends to be “washed away” if the child is a sex worker. Turning that on its head where prosecutors disregarded the sex-work angle and simply started putting customers on life-long, wherever-you-live sex-offender registries would have a marvelously “chilling” effect on customers who currently needn’t worry at all about age.
Anyway, if you’re anti-sex-work you should be fine with that. And if you’re pro-sex-work you should be fine with that too. Any time the question of legalization comes up the anti-sex-work side raises the child-prostitution issue. The best thing the decriminalization/legalization side could do is take the issue away from their opponents with vocal support for initiatives like Nancy O’Malley’s.
Submitted by 2865 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-04-21 23:20.
I guess this overlaps quite a bit into dealing with socio-economic situations that play a large part in influencing disadvantaged youngsters into prostitution. How do you begin to deal with the kind of religious conservatism that enforces both puritan standards and cannibalistic capitalism? It creates as many victims as it demonises.