Rethink Resources

In the circles of people who consciously think about issues affecting youth in the sex trade, a few main themes emerge of rescuing, criminalizing, or pathologizing youth, or some like myself on working together with youth.

But this is different than the popular understanding of youth in the sex trade. The kind of talk you might hear on ‘urban radio’ stations, some internet sites, in a community meeting or talking with a neighbor on the street about ‘those kids out there.’

Part of that understanding is informed by adults as consumers, buyers, exploiters of young people in the sex trade. So a level of knowledge that we as youth workers know – that young mothers are pushed into the sex trade to support themselves and their families gets translated into something like the above t-shirt graphic. It’s actually demonstrating an understanding and making it clear the wearer doesn’t care or finds it amusing.

Oh and for anyone who might think this understanding is more about young adults than teens, many people believe that someone at 16 or 17 years old doesn’t really count as a child anymore, no matter what the federal government says. Besides the police will incarcerate you at 15 as an adult, so our society’s concept of when adulthood begins is complicated to say the least.

Community members will say “those kids are just wild,” “you can’t help them, they want to run the streets,” and “some girls are just whores, golddiggers, bustdowns.” I’ve heard all of these comments many times in neighborhood meetings or talking with people outside the social service world (and that doesn’t mean some youth workers don’t believe the same but they aren’t as blunt with me usually)

In addition while community members are generally opposed to youth involvement in prostitution, I still see a contradiction as people are willing to accept it more if you get a lot of money than if you don’t. People are more willing accept the humanness of youth who seem to make a lot of money for having sex than those who do it for very little money or basic needs. “She seems smart, she’s making her money” as opposed to “She must think very little of herself, why would she do that for hardly anything?”

Money and our emotional connection to money is a really intense, complicated part of the sex trade. You can make tons of money and never see a dime. Or make thousands a month, only to have it seemingly disappear through your hands paying for hotel rooms to stay in, eating out and taking care of everyone around you. You can start out making tons of money, only to eventually make far less and have to do far more for it. Or you can start out making far less because that’s all anyone offered to you. These realities are less about the individual and more about the system that affects us in different ways because of what we bring in with our family history, cultural background, sexual identity and much more.

As we develop new ways to help youth, we need to consciously think about how to impact popular understanding in a meaningful way. Some would advocate trying to portray youth as victims more. I think this is a mistake on many levels.

For example, we underestimate the way adults are deeply a part of creating and maintaining youth involvement in the sex trade. While people who do harm report it can be helpful to be confronted with the reality of what their harm has done, the efforts of people talking about youth as victims act as if adults simply don’t know and aren’t responsible for this system. The way the stories are pitched (take a look at some of the news reports on this site that could only serve to sexually excite someone who believed “some girls are just whores.”

And I won’t even go into the way daytime talk shows have made this problem worse - a post for another day.