Rethink Resources

After a recent presentation to medical students, I spoke with an outreach worker about intake questions designed to tell if a youth is involved in the sex trade. Now intake questions can be a way to find out crucial information and realities for someone accessing services. Intakes can also be irritating, unhelpful and a barrier to finding out real information – especially when workers are unhappy about having to ask the questions and youth are trying to figure out what they need to say to access whatever the agency is offering.

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of intakes. I like information to come naturally through conversation and in a pace that’s set by the youth. But many youth workers don’t have that option and work at agencies that are required to do intakes.

So in an effort to address youth involvement in the sex trade some agencies do add questions asking youth if they are involved. To develop an effective question or more likely a set of questions, I recommend asking youth you know about how to phrase it and what words to use. Just because someone heard that the phrase to use is commercial sex worker doesn’t mean that youth know what that means. Same goes for commercially sexually exploited.

Of course your tone of voice and body language is as crucial as the question itself. Eventually your beliefs about the sex trade will come through to the youth. So it doesn’t work to use a more neutral phrase like “exchange sex for money” if you automatically slip back into calling it prostitution. Many youth will distance themselves and say “not me.”

And it’s not necessarily that the young person doesn’t see it as ‘prostitution’ or may have a whole range of terms they use to identify it. It’s about what that means when you tell an adult ‘helping person’ that you’ve done it; what happens as a result of that disclosure. Too often if a young person says yes, the information is noted in their file but nothing positive results from it. Only a reputation that can be used against you sooner or later as the adult pulls it out like a weapon in an argument (“you just did that because you’re going back to your prostituting behaviors”).

Many adults report that even though they ask, youth deny any involvement. Even in places where you’d think many youth were involved like homeless youth programs.

The question really is though why should someone tell you? What makes it positive and helpful to tell an adult? What would have to change to make that possible?