Prostitution, Child

Generally, prostitution or involvement in commercial sex means sexual transactions for money or some form of material goods. Recent research into the problem of child prostitution confirms that, far from abating, its incidence may be higher than ever, particularly in the form of international trafficking of children for commercial sex. Precise information is difficult to obtain, since, by its very nature as an illegal and covert practice, it remains largely hidden. The involvement of children in prostitution exposes sensitive cultural areas, especially in the West, where ideals regarding childhood, the family, and sexuality have become increasingly defined. Many historians agree that the idea of childhood as distinct and requiring particular recognition and accommodation became established in the West by the end of the 19th century. The involvement of children in commercial sex clearly negates an image of children as asexual, dependent, and innocent.

Child prostitution often occurs where there is poverty, conflict, economic and social instability, and/or child labor. For example, in the late 20th century, instability and conflict in Eastern Europe increased the flow of both children and women into the commercial sex industries of the European Union. Generally, unequal power relations around gender, age, and market factors tend to make children vulnerable to adult control and exploitation and historically enabled their prostitution both inside and outside the family in the West and across the globe. Furthermore, the global mass marketing and commercialization of child prostitution enables a greater supply of exploited children from many parts of the world.

One of the first and possibly most notorious of national media exposes of child prostitution was in July 1885 in the London newspaper The Pall Mall Gazette. This series of articles reported a clandestine trade in young girls for brothels in London and Europe. The sensational and salacious “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” stories excited the first national moral panic on the subject of child prostitution. These accounts helped entrench for the next century the dual depiction of children and young people involved in commercial sex as either abducted and betrayed innocents or tainted and corrupted. These “Maiden Tribute” articles and the events surrounding them provided the crucial force in Britain to ensure the final passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885, which increased the age of consent from 13 to 16 (previously raised from 12 in 1875) and augmented police powers to deal with vice. The balance between control and protection became an enduring feature of debates on child prostitution and on youthful delinquency in general.

[Page 729]This issue of a mythology of the white slave trade with origins in the late 19th century remains widely held in modern society. This narrative has in part served to distort representations of the social problem of child prostitution by distancing it from connections with recognizable daily life. The story dramatized as the white slave trade in Britain, Europe, and the United States was of forced abduction of innocent young white girls and women, usually by foreigners, to work in brothels overseas. While this story had, and still has, a great deal to say about racism and social fears during the 20th century regarding increasing freedoms enjoyed by women, changing sexual mores, migration, and new locations of leisure activity, it reveals little about child prostitution. In the early 21st century, with Western governments increasingly concerned about human trafficking and the supply of children, the mythology of the white slave trade often serves to obscure more than it exposes real experience. The terminology of trafficking and of slavery remains a part of the debates on child prostitution, but the imperialist and racist emphasis on the victims as white has essentially ended. After the mid-20th century, trafficking became defined in terms of movement and exploitation rather than of color.

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