Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country. – Karl Kraus
As we’ve discussed many times before, Americans have the distressing tendency to pretend that all prostitutes are streetwalkers, even though any person who isn’t living in a fantasy world has at a minimum heard of escorts and massage parlor girls. And in the past few years this already-distorted view has become even narrower as the rhetoric that the “vast majority” of streetwalkers (whom the fanatics represent as the “vast majority” of whores) are both underage and coerced. And though people like Kristin Davis try to build their fortunes on these lies, the truth is that only about 3.5% of all prostitutes are underage. This means there are only about 15,700 underage prostitutes in the United States, and as we shall see only a small percentage of those are coerced in any way, much less “trafficked sex slaves”.
When I wrote the above-linked column in January I had no way of estimating what percentage of underage girls are coerced, but I recently came across that information in an article from Feministing written in response to the media hullabaloo surrounding the publication of Rachel Lloyd’s book Girls Like Us. Lloyd is a former underage prostitute who founded the Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS), a New York City organization dedicated to offering a refuge to young girls involved in street prostitution. And though Lloyd has done some important work, including advocating for the decriminalization of underage prostitution, I’m afraid that her message (she points out that criminalization hurts prostitutes of all ages) has been hijacked by creeps like Nicholas Kristof (a trafficking fetishist of the most transparent kind whom I have mentioned before) to promote persecution of adult prostitutes and clients. The Feministing article appeared on April 25th and includes this long excerpt from a comment written by one of the organizers of an organization called INCITE! in response to this article on Colorlines:
The Safe Harbor Act, along with initiatives like it that Lloyd and others are promoting across the country, are NOT simple or solutions for most of us. First, they don’t stop arrests of young people for prostitution-related offenses, or the police abuses of young people in the sex trades, including police trading sex in exchange for promises of dropping charges. They also don’t stop arrests of young people in the sex trades that involve “charging up,” i.e. charging young people with weapons or drug-related offenses which may be easier to prove. Second, while they may stop criminal prosecutions of young people for prostitution-related offenses, these laws do not eliminate detention and punishment of young people involved in the sex trades, they just shift young people from the jurisdiction of the criminal courts to family court systems, where they can remain entangled until the age of 21. And, in the end, only a very narrow group of people can benefit from these laws.
For example, in order for the Safe Harbor Act to benefit a young person, they must be under 16 and arrested for the first time and must never have been in family court before. Young people between the ages of 16-18 continue to be charged in adult court. Even those under 16 who can meet the Act’s criteria must still convince a judge that they are a “victim” of a “severe form of trafficking” – a hurdle that both Sen and Lloyd acknowledge is almost impossible for young girls of color. This is also a problem because most young people’s stories do not fit into a neat box. A National Institutes of Justice funded study by researchers at John Jay College in New York City found that only 8% of young people involved in the sex trades in New York City had been forced into prostitution by a “pimp,” and only 10% currently worked with one. The same study found that 16% of girls and 6% of boys trading sex were coerced, but the vast majority of girls (84%) engaged in the sex trades in New York City had never come into contact with a “pimp.” When young people can’t respond to police and prosecutors’ pressure to give up a “pimp” they never had they get punished by law enforcement and service providers alike, and find themselves back on the delinquency and detention track. Even when the Safe Harbor Act (and other laws like it) is found to apply to a young person, they must still follow the rules a family court judge sees fit, which can involve attending a court-mandated program…, many of which enforce Christianity on participants. Additionally, for young people for whom no such services are available, including LGBTQ young people and young men in the sex trades, such legislation offers little or no relief whatsoever.
The Feministing article includes a great deal more and is, I think, worth your time; it contains points such as “…it’s important to remember – there are people, including young people, who want to do sex work in a safe environment, without experiencing state violence at the hands of the police and social services – which is the greatest danger they face according to young people in the sex trade.” But the thing which caught my attention the most was the John Jay study: only 16% of underage female prostitutes are coerced, which is a direct repudiation of Estes and Weiner’s ridiculous claim that ALL underage female prostitutes, without exception, are coerced. If we apply that 16% to my estimate of the total number of underage prostitutes, we arrive at a total of 2511 coerced underage female prostitutes in the United States…roughly 1% of what the trafficking fanatics would have us believe. And that certainly explains why they, the cops and the FBI have so much trouble finding any.
I was reading a story on a blog about how this one woman started prostitution (she is a born again christian now and from what I read believes in escapism). But she states:
“I started working as a prostitute when I was 14. I did it for kicks at first. I spent the money on drugs and clothes. It was easy and I sort of drifted into being a part-time call girl. I thought of it as a form of free enterprise.” (http://born2partyfoundation.wordpress.com/about/)
And even as I stated, my first ‘introduction’ was as a teen runaway tired of dumpster dining and gas station sink baths. Wait, is it still coercion if I talk myself into it? There certainly wasn’t a third person trying to convince me or force me. I’ll have to post that story someday…
Well, you see, you were acting out because of whatever abuse you’d been subjected to in childhood.
(if you were in fact subjected to abuse in childhood I am so genuinely sorry and did not mean to trivialize it! I’m simply pointing out the antis inevitable claim sigh)
Awful abuse! My parents tried to tell me what to do, what time to be home, who I should hang out with, and that I couldn’t date a known pothead. The NERVE! (Note sarcasm) My rebellious 16 y/o brain couldn’t take anymore!
LOL, as was I. By the time my 18th bday rolled around I’d had damn well enough of that shit for the rest of my life and to this day I hate being told what to do 🙂
I’d be interesting in hearing your story (and other ladies’ stories) if it’s not already up (I just started reading your blog).
it’ll get there in full eventually 🙂
I always find myself struggling with defining terms whenever the word ‘pimp’ is mentioned. It means so many different things to so many people. What is clear is that they are generally perceived as male (though not even that can be guaranteed) and live wholly or partly off the sex work of others.
But is the almost universal demonisation of ‘pimps’ always justified? Do they always coerce? Are they of positive utility or mere parasites? Could they reduce rather than cause violence? Are there sex workers who owe their lives to ‘pimps?’ And if the public sector won’t defend sex workers, and the private and voluntary sectors won’t or can’t through legislation, who, exactly, will?
But I deviate from your posting. By under-age I take it you mean under 18? Attempts have been made to remove the soliciting offence for under-18s here in England and Wales (where the age of criminal intent starts at an obscenely low 10!) but they always come up against the barrier of ‘it’s for their own good’ etc.
We have a very low number of confirmed sex trafficking cases, about 90 a year are being confirmed across the UK, but a high percentage of these (just over a third) are under 18.
I’ve also discovered we have an NGO fighting trafficking for every two confirmed sex trafficking cases! As in the States, there’s an awful lot of rescuers but an acute shortage of damsels in distress.
Full list of the NGOs discovered to date here:
http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/beyond-the-edge-of-reason%e2%80%a6/
There again, insofar as trafficking is concerned (and it’s obviously not much) there is much confusion concerning under what age underage is in different countries.
I seem to recall reading (I think in Superfreakonomics), that, in general, a streetwalker working for a pimp makes more money, is injured less often, used drugs less frequently, and were arrested less often.
The majority of pimps work for the streetwalker rather than the other way around, but nobody wants to hear that because both social conservatives and neofeminists insist the man MUST control the woman. 🙁
Hehehe, you’re probably right… my experience with prostitutes is about 0 — the only experience I have with a prostitute was with a woman who told me she had “worked” as a prostitute. I use quotes because she was both coerced and underage.
I was thinking of the right book — it is Superfreakonomics, chapter 1 “How a Street Prostitute Is Like a Department Store Santa”. It does have statistics on prostitution from 1910:
But as for working with a pimp.. a prostitute working solo made an average of 325$ a week and turned an average of 7.8 tricks a week while a prostitute working with a pimp made an average of 410$ a week while only turning an average of 6.2 tricks a week. The difference was that the pimped tended to go to nicer parts of town to recruit customers.
The book points out that before prostitution was illegal, most pimps were women…
Women who work with pimps get arrested far less often — during the study, only 1 prostitute who worked with a pimp was arrested.
The research was done by Sudhir Venkatesh, about whom you’ve already written. Having read Superfreakonomics first, I was surprised at the Wired article.
The book does point out that research on prostitutes is limited because most of the time the interview is done long after retirement and often in places like drug rehab or church shelters and that participants either understated or exaggerated depending upon what the participant thinks the interviewer wants to hear.
Interviewer expectation is a huge problem, which is why it’s so dangerous that so many “prostitution researchers” are prohibitionists who clearly advertise their bias. But I think it isn’t nearly as big a problem as the fact that nearly all American “research” concentrates on streetwalkers, which is rather like trying to study the apples in an orchard by counting and describing the ones on the ground without ever looking up at the branches.
The problem is that those with axes to grind grind them and those without don’t. You don’t need me to tell you that the US has a well organised, well financed, prohibitionist lobby, which often finances and in any case siezes upon any study reinforcing the notion of sex workers as victims and shouts it from the rooftops. And the world being what it is, these are generally studies of survival street sex workers.
It’s not that other studies don’t exist, although street sex work is the most problematic and has perhaps rightly been seen as a priority. It’s that other studies are carried out quietly, that very often they’re pay to view if they’re published at all, and unlike the prohibitionists there’s no effective, well-financed lobby group waiting in the wings to communicate their findings to the public.
I’ve found a lot of useful stuff on Michael Goodyear’s site, for example. I’m more familiar with his UK pages than his US ones (+ we have some very good UK academics), but I’m sure you’ll you’ll find this a most useful link:
http://myweb.dal.ca/mgoodyea/usex.htm
Couple of good UK-based studies here:
http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/poppys-petition-poppycock/
We need a good bloggers network to get this stuff across.
Another issue I see with the prohibitionists, besides interviewing the downtrodden, is that they only publish or announce the interviews that fit their agenda. They seem to toss the interviews that don’t fit what they preach. I need to republish the interviews I did on TCAA.
In other words, they would be more believable in their research if they published ALL interviews, including the ones that don’t fit, but I see why they don’t.
As it so happens, we have a magnificent case of that just coming up….and we might be getting our first case of the biter bit…follow the links on the VERY LAST PARA of here (Eaves/Poppy is very neofeminist):
http://indiandelightlondon.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/old-faces-and-schoolgirl-roleplay/
The last part of Chapter 1 is a vignette of an escort named Allie. I read it after I posted (the second part was how Title IX reduced opportunities for women in some fields). She was a twice divorced computer programmer who, on a lark, listed “escort” as her profession on a dating site and met a guy at a hotel for a date. The guy could tell it was her first time and gave her a talking to on all the things she did wrong.
After a few dates, she discovered she could make much more as an escort than as a computer program with much less work.
The interesting thing about her story is she started off charging 300$ an hour and then raised it to 350$, then to 400$, 450$, and finally 500$ to discourage her least liked clients from coming (she kept charging her favorite clients 300$) but never saw a drop in demand.
Fortunately, there’s groups of Muslim and Christian women (and some men) working to CHANGE the mentality that men have to run the women. They’ve made progress. If anyone wants me to post links to these groups, I’ll be glad to. In Christianity this has been a BIG problem since day 1. Too many have twisted/taken out of context the Scriptures about how married couples are supposed to live, etc. I’ve heard some male preachers speak out against this also. Unfortunately, there’s also preachers who do the opposite along with men not in the clergy. I read a book years ago about how the women of the Old Testament had it better in a lot of ways compared to other groups of women at the time. But, I personally struggle with all of that, even though those women did have it better. Why did there need to be any inequality to begin with in ANY group?
You know, my heart really aches for those 2500 underage prostitutes who have been coerced. It does. I can only imagine what kind of hellish lives they have lived.
But how the fuck does arresting them, throwing them in jail and then entangling them in a legal process that are extremely unlikely to understand, let alone influence help them?
Underage prostitutes should be given a tuition waiver. How about that? But then, the streets would be flooded with smart girls looking for free tuition.
Wait a minute! Girls are smart? Even teenage ones?
Well fuck me hard. Who knew?
Why doesn’t anyone shed tears over teenage male athletes coerced by coaches and parents with dreams of glory into shattering their spines and blowing their knees on a football pitch? Exploiting masculinity is just plain old good American fun. Exploiting femininity is criminal?
You know, I have been up since 4AM watching the Royal Wedding (let’s talk whores, Batman!) and those five glasses of champagne I had before 6AM didn’t help. Then I spent the entire morning at church (don’t even ask) and now I need some sleep before the girls come over and we go out and dance our asses off.
So pardon my fucking French.
I heart you! have fun dancing and drinking tonight 🙂
The tuition waivers would save the taxpayers some money. Somebody who was never going to be president was nonetheless right when he pointed out that it costs less to send a young person to Yale than to send her to jail, and that sending a young person to Penn State was cheaper than sending that same young person to the State Pen.
Speaking of Prince William and Kate, they said they don’t want any gifts. They want the money to go to charity instead. http://yourlife.usatoday.com/mind-soul/doing-good/kindness/post/2011/04/in-lieu-of-gifts-prince-william-and-kate-middleton-request-charity-donations-instead/148363/1 This is wonderful! They could easily accept many gifts. They’re practicing a “higher standard”. This act of theirs also disproves the stereotype that people in the monarchy are greedy and don’t care about and/or practice giving.
Laura, while I do think it’s a great thing they’re doing, it doesn’t “disprove” anything. The actions of one person do NOT disprove general rules. If I show you a man with six fingers on one hand, does that disprove the rule “humans have five fingers on each hand?” Of course not. The ONLY rule without exception is the one which states “all rules have exceptions”.
Now, I’m not saying that the claim that royalty are greedy is a true one; I’m merely saying that the behavior of one prince says ZERO about the behavior of royalty in general.
Now then, to return from this siding back to the main theme of this blog, it would be interesting, would it not, to reflect on all the arranged marriages our Monarchy has had in the past in which vast sums of money changed hands, and to reflect upon the lives of the women thus trafficked?
I’m sure there must be plenty if we can just put our hands on them…
Than you, Stephen; that’s one of the central tenets of my philosophy! People insist on pretending prostitution is something different from “normal” female sexual behavior, some clearly separate and distinct “perversion”, when it fact it’s merely one end of a long continuum with no line of demarcation whatsoever, much less a distinct and legally-provable one.
I love to bring up the positives whenever I can, OK? Yes, I know that MANY in royalty through history were ###***. It the same with elected leaders. However, I get so tired of the ###*** like all politicans are ###***. They’re not and I enjoy bringing up the names of 1’s who aren’t. It’s the same with royalty. Princess Diana I admire greatly for several reasons. I think it’s wonderful her son learned from her giving and working for many charities. Cynicism is everywhere online with so many things. Also offline. I love to show the exceptions, the 1’s who break stereotypes from whatever group. I think it’s sad there’s so much fear and thinking there’s a threat from ANY exceptions and/or small groups. I learned quick when I became an MVS how much cynicism and stereotypes with JUST that group there are. Prostitutes are also a group with a lot of ###*** about them being said, etc. To be honest, I believed some of the unfair stuff about them before I started reading here. That’s changed since I’ve been here. I see the “exception people” and small groups are mainly positive in the world. Yes, some of them are ###***, like with most groups of any size. I don’t agree that Prince William doesn’t disprove at least 1 negative stereotype. I say thank God for anyone who disproves any of them. Sailor Barsoom pointed out a while back that “wild women” (like me) and prostitutes and/or ex-prostitutes (like you) are BOTH small groups and why should anyone feel threatened by each other? I say instead learn from and encourage each other.
Some in the world don’t want any part of the mindset that all sex women have is some kind of prostitution. I’m 1 of them and it’ll never change with me. I 1st saw this mentality as a teenager and resolved to never be part of it. I believe everything should be as FREE as possible including sex. I know these views aren’t popular (which to me is part of its appeal) but there’s room for all kinds of views in the world. Not once did anyone physically stop me from practicing my form of “free love” OR order me to not do it. Not once have I ordered anyone to not be a prostitute or stopped anyone from doing so. To me that’s 1 proof that mindsets aren’t the “threat” they’re sometimes made out to be. Thanks for listening.
http://www.garlikov.com/philosophy/slope.htm
The above link is for a piece about the “slippery slope” argument which exceptions can be a part of.
I wasn’t the 1st 1 to bring up the royal wedding in this thread. I figured since it was already brought up it was OK to mention what I did.
I ♥ you, too!
The Safe Harbor Act.
You see, they are desperately afraid that if they decriminalize under-aged prostitution, it will lead to decriminalization for all ages. So they come up with bullshit like the Safe Harbor Act to make it look like they’re doing something about the problem. But the Safe Harbor Act itself would become too much like decriminalization if it applied to every under-aged person, so they attach all these conditions on it (only up to age 15, never been in court or jail before, etc.)
Rachel Lloyd is right when she says this doesn’t benefit girls of color very much. The conditions put on it pretty much guarantee that those most helped by it would be white girls.
Hey Maggie, long time no talk, been busy this week in China with tests and stuff, just dropping by to link you to yet another ridiculous story and wanted to get your thoughts on these “superheroes”:
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/cas/2329212396.html
Monday’s column (that is, May 2nd) will be about the superheroes. 🙂
I posted about them here: http://brandysbedroom.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/i-fing-love-it-the-new-york-initiative-aka-real-life-super-heroes/
Then came to find out that other activists don’t share my sentiment in regards to the NYI. Course I’ve always been a face value type of person as opposed to looking for hidden meanings type of gal 🙂
I’m curious; how do some others feel about them? Links if you’ve got ’em. 😉
http://audaciaray.tumblr.com/post/4985610165/real-life-superheroes-offer-sex-workers-protection-from
How could Audicia not see that this is EXACTLY what the NYI is doing? And that nonsense about “what if they aren’t pretty?” is just embarrassing; it sounds like something a “womyn’s studies” teacher would say, and that is beneath her level.
Sorry, but they get my support until and unless I see evidence that they’re hurting sex workers, betraying them to cops or something like that. 🙁
The claim that all underage prostitutes are coerced is an obvious outgrowth of the old style “Feminist” assertion that all heterosexual sex is coerced (see Dworkin et al).
I always wondered at the obvious derangement that that idea represented, and at the incredible mental slight-of-hand involved in it being received respectfully by otherwise sane people.
This kind of rational news will never get good play.
Totally right, which is why I quote statistics like these every chance I get; its not like anyone’s going to get the truth from the media. 🙁
@Laura,
The reason there wasn’t equality before is that there’s no equality between people. No two people are the same, and no one is “equal” to any other.
Like other social primates – chimpanzees, gorillas, rhesus macaques – humans organize themselves into hierarchies.
These can be based on age, sex, social status from birth, innate qualities like size, strength, ability to find food, ability to steal it from others, tool-using ability, ability to learn new things, etc.
Between men and women, very obviously we evolved different social roles. Male primates are generally larger and more powerful : this can’t be an accident. They’re competing with each other for access to females. Genetic evidence shows that more females than males contributed to our genetic past: it means many males never make it in the mating game. Others steal the females (beat, kill, rob, rape, sneak, avoid getting killed)
So women and men were never equal.
What I suspect is that we had complementary roles. We moved between them, but by and large, most female humans did some things and most males did others; some crossed over and there was overlap.
Men are better at spatial tasks and math. That’s not sexism: you can see it in the stats. Women are much chattier and have far superior linguistic abilities.
These are innate tendencies. There are good female accountants and very good male writers; but look at fiction: Almost the entire audience is female. The publishing industries of every country know it.
There are great male language experts. But as a rule, there are strong differences (as well as obvious similarities) between the sexes.
So obviously, we were “equal” in a general sense of both being important for humanity. But we were different: we had different roles.
What those roles were probably depended on when and where we were. We’re a very flexible species. No strong men around? Women aren’t useless; some are quite strong. Have to hunt? Some women will be good at it, though not as many as men; still respectable.
Etc.
SO “Equality”:
Remember, nature doesn’t care about “equality”. It doesn’t give a damn.
We evolved to reproduce. Anything else is irrelevant to our biology. Nature never cared about “fair”. It engineered for breeding success – and nothing more.
You want to see what’s not fair, … look into the world of insects. The horrors of parasitic insects will dispel any illusions you have about “fair” or “equal” in nature.
One fly attacks ants – injecting its eggs into the ants. The larva burrows its way through the ant to the head; there, after 2 weeks of the ant appearing to be normal, it causes the ant’s body to fall apart (a chemical) and then eats the contents of the head; it uses the head as a shell, then pops it open after pupating and then goes on to attack other ants.
It only attacks fire ants.
Then there are the parasitic wasps: They paralyze spiders, then lay an egg on it. The spider lives for days or weeks. But it’s eaten alive by the wasp’s larva. It’s gruesome.
There are so many tales of horror, …
In some fish, the male is tiny. It attaches itself to the female, becoming part of her body. It loses its head – literally. It gets absorbed. It provides sperm.
Is it fair?
Whatever. Fair is irrelevant. Equality is irrelevant.
If WE want equality, it’s clear we have to go some distance to defy nature – not that much; we’re not fish.
But we do.
And some things – well, just don’t expect men and women to achieve real absolute equality, ever.
The same way you can’t expect any two people to achieve equality.
Life isn’t about fair.
“Complete equality isn’t compatible with democracy, but it is agreeable to totalitarianism. After all, the only way to ensure the equality of the slothful, the inept and the immoral is to suppress everyone else.” – Iain Benson
[…] number also coincides fairly well with a study that Maggie McNeill over at the Honest Courtesan has cited a number of times. A study done in New Zealand, where […]