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Issue Paper: Understanding
CSEC and the Prostitution of Children
People often think of a “prostitute” as an adult
woman who is consenting to sex in exchange for money. The
realities of sexual exploitation, pimping and trafficking
mean that the majority of adults, whether female, male or
transgender who are in the role of ‘prostitute’
have been forced or coerced into the sex industries by violence,
addiction and/or economic vulnerability. The word “prostitute”
is a misfit when applied to many adult experiences in the
sex industries because it implies an unrealistic degree of
choice, and because it carries with it stereotypes which are
degrading or victim-blaming.
The term “child prostitute” is problematic for
these same reasons, and for the additional reason that the
idea of a child ‘consenting’ to sex in exchange
for money excuses the responsibility of the so-called “johns”
who use children in the sex industries, and masks the realities
of child sexual abuse. The implication of calling a child
a prostitute is that if a child can consent to sex with an
adult, than this is “just prostitution”, not child
sexual abuse, and that men who buy girls and boys for sex
are “just tricks”, not child rapists.
While many societies understand or have come in the past decades
to have increased clarity that children are not to blame for
child sexual abuse and that child sexual abuse is a real problem—the
stereotype of the ‘child prostitute’ is sometimes
used as a justification to ignore what we know about child
rape. In the United States, the criminal justice system still
tends to criminalize children who are sexually abused in prostitution,
while failing to recognize the so-called “johns”
as pedophiles or statutory rapists. This failure to recognize
child sexual abuse endangers the children used in systems
of prostitution. For some of the men who use so-called “child-prostitutes”—the
sex industries also create the first opportunity and encourage
interest in pedophilia—ultimately helping to create
new sexual predators who may also rape and abuse children
outside of the sex industries.
While calling a child a prostitute—with the implication
that the child is therefore responsible for being sexually
exploited or is not being sexually abused—is very problematic,
recognizing that children and youth are abused on a mass scale
in systems of prostitution is crucial. It is not true that
children should be thought of as “prostitutes”—and
it is also not true that the individuals we do term “prostitutes”
(who are primarily sexual exploitation survivors) are mainly
adults. Systems of prostitution ultimately rely on the vulnerability
of and exploitation of children and youth to create new “prostitutes”.
The average age of first recruitment into prostitution is
14. Children and youth make up the majority of victims of
global sexual exploitation. When we consider that the vast
majority of adults in systems of prostitution were first recruited
as children or youth—and that of those who were first
recruited as adults the vast majority are child sexual abuse
survivors, we can understand systems of prostitution as an
enormous industrial market built on the rape and sexual exploitation
of children.
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