Rethink Resources

Just one news item this week. But it brings to mind bigger questions.

From the Edmonton Sun today, Sex for shelter Here’s a small part below.

Youth workers call them the darkest, most disturbing tales of Edmonton’s housing crunch - girls, sometimes younger than 14, turning tricks on cold winter nights in exchange for shelter. “It’s so common it breaks my heart. They’re not prostitutes, they’re not addicted to drugs or doing it for food or money. They’re doing it because it’s cold outside and they need somewhere to sleep,”

I have a lot of empathy for the youth worker interviewed for the article. Having run a drop in space for youth in the sex trade and fielding calls from journalists, I know what it’s like to offer some ideas and hope a helpful quote or two makes it into the paper.

I also know what it’s like to have my words used by the journalist to support ideas I don’t agree with or feel like my perspective, at those times it’s portrayed accurately, will be lost in an news article that’s mostly about trying to criminalize or pathologize youth.

So I’m not sure what the youth worker in this article was hoping for. But the article filled me with questions and concerns. Why the need to distance what some youth are going through - trading sex for survival needs and what those youth and adults who are labeled as prostitutes are going through? As if that wasn’t sex for survival. Then again, this is fairly common among runaway and homeless youth workers who use the term survival sex since youth understandably react badly to being labeled as prostitutes.

It’s a problem when we set up types of sex for survival that are somehow more justifiable like sex for shelter from extreme cold. Since when isn’t food a survival need? I think some of this is about workers feeling defensive and wanting to portray undeniably harsh situations for people outside this reality.

Again from the article:

Even more alarming is where they come from. She estimates 90% are non-aboriginal, the children of professional parents - doctors, lawyers, nurses and the like. “Almost every one is fleeing a home where the parents use drugs, abuse them, or are pimping them out.”

The whole “more alarming” because it’s mostly non-Aborginal youth is completely racist. Fact is Aborginal youth make up a disproportionately high number of youth in the sex trade in Canada because of racism, poverty, colonialism and the legacy of destruction of Native communities. And many journalists go out of their way to try to prove points or places where this isn’t true: “it’s happening in the suburbs” “it’s happening in middle class areas” “it’s happening to white youth.”

All not so subtle ways to say that youth of color don’t matter as much.

But again, news articles are about the media and journalists’ perspective as much as they are about the issue at hand. And I’m aware of this everytime I post a news link here. I’ve been posting news for a lot of reasons but one of them isn’t because I believe everything that an article says or how it’s portrayed. I think it’s crucial to read between the lines, ask questions of what you’re reading and wonder what you’re not reading.

Of course any one who does youth work or anti-violence work knows that what makes the paper is a small fraction of what is actually happening. Even just what it takes to get a sexual assault case or pimping case to court is so completely difficult and rare; the news items you may have seen here are a tiny portion of what’s going on in any one community.

Having said that, I know that a lot of people find this site because of looking for information that appears in the media on youth and sex trade. So for now I’ll keep posting the news links. You can also find the news archive here.