A picture is worth a thousand words. – American adage
The great majority of my posts fall between 750 and 1500 words, or as we might say the general vicinity of a thousand words. So in lieu of a column today I present not one but two pictures.
Each dot on these maps represents 1000 prostitutes; those representing adults are 8 pixels wide and those representing underage girls 7 pixels wide (since, after all, it’s tough to tell the difference between a mature adolescent trying to look older and a young adult who may be trying to look younger). Red dots represent illegal prostitutes, and black dots legal ones; the first map (above) represents the current situation (in which all prostitution is illegal) and the second (below) a country in which only underage prostitution is illegal.
Pretend you’re an agency (governmental or otherwise) trying to locate underage prostitutes to “rescue”, and find them on the first map; then try the second one. Any questions?
One Year Ago Today
The Second Part of “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody”, which discusses the lyrics of five songs about prostitutes: “New Orleans Ladies”, “Roxanne”, “867-5309”, “The Taxicab” and “Next”.
Would decriminalization or legalization really make it easier to find underage prostitutes? As you say, many underage prostitutes try to look older, and many young adult prostitutes try to look younger, so how exactly can you tell the difference?
Licensed escort services and brothels, and licensed advertising venues, could simply refuse to deal with underage people. “Rescuers” could then restrict their efforts to young-looking independent hookers who use no advertising, which mostly means streetwalkers. The elimination of wasted effort alone would make a huge difference.
About licensed escort services and brothels, and licensed advertising venues: What if prostitutes refused to deal with them for fear of having their identities exposed to the government or the public? Porn performers are willing to provide identification with their real names to prove they are over 18 because porn is public anyway. But with prostitution there’s much more concern for privacy, not just because of illegality, but also because of social stigma and fear of their families finding out. Might a lot of prostitutes choose to work for unlicensed escort services and brothels just to guarantee that their identities would be kept secret?
No, because if prostitution were decriminalized (rather than legalized) there would be no legal requirement for such businesses to register names. They would merely avoid hiring the under-18s because of the possibility of legal liability, just as any business avoids doing anything which might so expose it. When I had my (legal, licensed) escort service, I checked the driver’s license of any girl who looked even close to 18, but I kept no photocopy or other such document and I avoided having to send out 1099 forms to their real name and social by allowing them to keep cash agency fees rather than writing checks for the money they earned via credit card.
If prostitution were legal for adults, then unless the costs of doing legitimate business were prohibitive, one would expect adult prostitutes to avail themselves of a registered approach to doing business. This would imply that for non-registered prostitutes, something shady (such as trafficking) is going on, with prostitutes deliberately hiding in the shadows.
Second, and probably more importantly for those concerned about underage trafficking, a legitimate outlet for the procurement of sex for money would seriously diminish the specific market for sex with a minor.
Open question: What percentage of johns who engage in sex with an underage prostitute do so in the awareness of the lady’s age? My guess is that most johns, while preferring someone young-looking, are not particular that the lady actually be a minor. I also suspect some would view the two transgressions (sex for money vs. sex with a minor) to be very different from a moral standpoint, the latter being considerably more objectionable than the former.
I strongly doubt most clients actually want an illegally-young girl; just the fact that underage sex is a felony and patronizing a prostitute is only a misdemeanor makes the former more dangerous than the latter, moral considerations aside.
This post raises an interesting question in my mind… What about underaged johns?
Are there legal issues there? Do underaged men see prostitutes? If prostitution were legal, would there be the same sort of age limits for clients?
There are no underage “men”, only teenage boys, and they don’t have any money. Most independent escorts won’t see men under 30 (some have even higher cutoffs), and even most agencies won’t accept clients under 21. Young men are just too much trouble; they’re cheap and don’t know how to treat women. In the past some fathers would take older teen boys to be initiated by working girls, but that’s pretty rare now.
It should be less rare. Even teenage girls would benefit from teenage boys having been taught a thing or three by a grown professional.
Original map: no black dots in Nevada?
Don’t read that much into it, love; the dots were just scattered randomly across the map. Their exact locations aren’t representative of anything.
>What if prostitutes refused to deal with them for fear of having their identities exposed to the government or the public? Porn performers are willing to provide identification with their real names to prove they are over 18 because porn is public anyway.
Back when I was working, there were those escorts who never showed their faces in their photo ads.On a girls night out, one night, one of the women who got a little drunk began giving me some hassle over the fact that I did show my face.
I did porn before escort, so it was no big deal to me. I had a members section of my website with hard core videos, and would do private videos with customers.
I’d rather have been legal, if only to get rid of the stress of dealing with the cops. Often, I could tell when a cop was on the phone, because he came across sleazy. And often, sure enough, later I’d get a warning about the guy.
Here’s the thing, though. If your real name is ever linked with your work, it can get exposed. Not so long ago, the medical database at AIM was hacked, and lots of performer’s real names published, mine included, even though it meant they went back years.
So it’s a risk, you can deal with it or not, like everything else.
Comixchik, I see what you mean about the risks of illegality being greater than the risks of legality. I still think whoever hacked the AIM database should go to prison, not because they published real names of porn performers but because they published people’s private medical records.
There is a neurological condition called grapheme→color synesthesia. A person with this can look at a card covered with a few dozen Os and very quickly spot the half-dozen Qs scattered over it, because after all they’re different colors.
What Maggie has demonstrated here is that decriminalization of prostitution would give law enforcement and child-rescuers a sort of legalistic age→color synesthesia, which could come in real handy.