This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 42, Summer 2001.
Most men who use child prostitutes are ordinary punters, not the monstrous ‘paedophiles’ of popular stereotype. The reasons and justifications they give for their behaviour derive from ideas about sex, race, gender, and money which are widespread and indeed ‘normal’ in the societies punters come from. Unless we acknowledge that the commercial sexual exploitation of children is more than just a law enforcement issue, argues Julia O’Connell Davidson, we will not be able to produce an effective response.
Over the past two decades, child sexual abuse has increasingly been treated as a newsworthy topic in the West, and media coverage almost invariably invokes the concept of ‘paedophilia’ to explain the phenomenon. So, for example, child prostitution and child sex tourism are widely assumed to involve ‘paedophiles’, abnormal individuals who specifically seek out contexts in which pre-pubertal children will be made sexually available to them. Though shocking in themselves, such stereotypes are also comforting for Western audiences because they help to establish a clear boundary between prostitution and child prostitution, between sex tourism and child sex tourism, between ‘normal’ clients and morally repugnant ‘paedophiles’. They make the problem of child prostitution appear to be a simple matter of good versus evil, and the policy response appears equally simple — all we need to do is devote more and better resources to catching the ‘baddies’.
However, the commercial sexual exploitation of children cannot be reduced to a simple law enforcement issue. Unless we are willing to face the unpalatable fact that the people who use prostitutes (including child prostitutes), are not monstrous ‘Others’ but are actually members of our society, produced by us, we are in danger of formulating policies that, at best, do nothing meaningful to address the problem, and at worst, intensify the vulnerability of those already most vulnerable within prostitution.
Beyond the ‘paedophile’
Popular stereotypes are not entirely without basis. The existence of ‘paedophilia’ (a clinical condition or personality disorder involving a specific and focused sexual interest in prepubertal children), and of ‘preferential child sex abusers’ (individuals whose preferred sexual objects are children who have reached or passed puberty) is not in dispute here. The attraction of child prostitution to adults who have a focused sexual preference for children is obvious. Laws and social conventions make it very difficult and dangerous for such people to satisfy their sexual interests in non-commercial contexts, but prostitution potentially provides ‘instant access’, often to a selection of children. Since there are very few countries where large numbers of prepubertal children are prostituted, those which have a reputation for child prostitution attract child abusers from around the world-at least those who can afford to travel. However, the idea that child prostitution in the contemporary world is sustained solely by demand from ‘paedophiles’ is actually quite untenable.
Childhood is a socially constructed condition, rather than one which can be clearly defined through reference to biological fact or chronological age. Its boundaries vary cross-culturally and historically, and even within any one nation state, they are often indistinct. For the international community to concern itself with the condition and experience of children around the globe, however, it must necessarily employ some universal definition of childhood, and the United Nations and many other international bodies define a child as a person under the age of eighteen.
Even when a definition of childhood is agreed, it is extremely difficult to obtain accurate information about the extent of child prostitution in the contemporary world. Yet the more general body of empirical evidence on prostitution around the world does provide enough reliable information to enable us to challenge popular myths and stereotypes about child prostitution and child sex tourism on a number of grounds.
To begin with, academic and journalistic research suggests that the vast majority of child prostitutes in the contemporary world are postpubertal, rather than prepubertal, children. This is, of course, irrelevant to questions about the harm caused by prostitution, but it does have implications for our understanding of the demand for child prostitutes-it means that not all of their clients can be technically defined as ‘paedophiles’.
Moreover, the existing body of research evidence suggests that most child prostitutes of whatever age are actually integrated into the mainstream prostitution market serving all prostitute users, rather than working in some discrete ‘market niche’ that caters solely to the desires of ‘paedophiles’ or child molesters. So, for example, girls between ten and fourteen years of age are variously reported to be prostituting alongside older teenagers and young women in brothels serving demand from local men and migrant workers in Latin America, India and Bangladesh, and in tourist areas in the Caribbean and Thailand, as well as on the streets in red light areas in affluent Western countries.
The same research further suggests that, depending upon the setting from which they work, child prostitutes ‘service’ between two and thirty clients per week, that is, somewhere between 100 and 1,500 clients a year. Even if the lowest estimates on the numbers of child prostitutes are accepted, the number of clients of child prostitutes would still run into several millions annually. These millions of clients are a disparate group in terms of their nationalities and their socio-economic, cultural and religious backgrounds. To explain the behaviour of such a large and varied group through reference to a clinically defined personality disorder, paedophilia (a diagnostic category which is itself based on research with a relatively small and atypical sample of Western men) would clearly be unsatisfactory. Indeed, it is more reasonable to assume that a majority of these people are first and foremost prostitute users who become child sexual abusers through their prostitute use, rather than first and foremost paedophiles using prostitution as a means of obtaining sexual access to children.
If we want to understand the demand for child prostitutes, we therefore have to concern ourselves with questions about the sex trade and the demand for prostitution more generally. This means addressing much broader and more difficult questions about prostitution, gender and sexuality; it means questioning the way in which we socialise our children and the attitudes that we tolerate. Here I look at the stories men tell about their own prostitute use and the ideas they use to justify even the use of minors in the sex trade. I argue that these ideas are not aberrant or abnormal, but widely accepted or tolerated in European and North American society.
Punter Fictions
In the course of research on prostitution and sex tourism over the past seven years, I have interviewed more than 350 Western men about their prostitute use. Prostitute users and sex tourists are not a homogeneous group, and it is particularly important to distinguish between ‘habitual’ and ‘situational’ prostitute users. Large numbers of sex tourists, men and women, can be termed ‘situational’ prostitute users. They end up having sex with a prostitute not because they have gone out with that intention, but because they find themselves in situations where they can tell themselves that prostitute use is acceptable or ‘different’, or that the woman/man/child involved is not really a prostitute, and that they themselves are not really paying for sex. The habitual prostitute user is someone who makes a both a conscious choice and a habit of prostitute use, and the vast majority of habitual prostitute users are men.
Clearly, not all men are habitual prostitute users. Sven-Axel Mansson’s review of research in European countries shows significant differences between countries in terms of the percentage of men who admit to ever having used a prostitute, but this percentage varies between around 7% and 39%. Mansson argues that of those men who have used prostitutes, only a minority engage in habitual prostitute use. This minority nonetheless ‘consume’ a large quantity of prostitution contracts. Here, I want to focus on this minority of men who habitually use prostitutes. They are the ones who furnish the core demand for both adults and minors in the sex trade. Without them, the sex trade could not exist on its current scale, and others would not find themselves in the ‘situations’ where prostitute use seems normal, acceptable, and so on. My aim is to show that the stories such clients tell about their own prostitute use are not the product of ‘warped’ or ‘aberrant’ individual minds, but are instead perfectly consonant with widely accepted European and North American ideas about economic life, gender and sexuality.
The Natural Born Client
One explanation that clients typically offer for their prostitute use draws upon the idea of male sexual ‘needs’. Some men view themselves as lacking the physical or social charms necessary to meet these ‘needs’ in non-commercial contexts. Because prostitution affords them instant access to a selection of females, they can, as one man put it, get their ‘sex drive out for the night’. Other clients describe their prostitute use as a quick and simple expedient in situations when no other ‘outlet’ is available. For instance, a sailor told me that he was visiting a red light district in a port town because ‘I’m a man, I have biological needs. I’ve been on ship for months without a woman. I had to have one’.
There are also clients who have wives or girlfriends from whom they are not physically separated. They tend to explain their prostitute use as a function of rather more specific sexual ‘needs’ which would otherwise go unsatisfied or else as a response to their wife/partner’s lack of sexual interest in them. Finally, there are clients who say that they use prostitutes as a means of satisfying a ‘natural’ impulse to have sex with as many different females as often as they possibly can.
The idea that people have sexual ‘needs’ rather than ‘wants’ or ‘desires’ is very widely accepted in European and North American society. Indeed, it is quite rare to find anyone who challenges the basic assumption that human sexual behaviour is shaped by biologically based sexual ‘appetites’ or ‘drives’. But what does it actually mean to say that people have sexual ‘needs’? Deprived of sexual gratification, people do not wither and die as they do when deprived of water, food or sleep, or suffer in the same way they do when other basic bodily needs are denied. There is no biological imperative to orgasm any set number of times a day, week or year, and whilst an individual may on occasion find it unpleasant or even uncomfortable to go without sexual release (assuming s/he is unable to masturbate), the absence of another person to bring him to orgasm does not actually threaten his continued survival.
An article in a British broadsheet newspaper, headlined ‘Disabled people don’t have sex, do they?’ is interesting in this regard. It describes an English travel agency that was set up to take disabled people to Amsterdam for holidays which include commercial sex. It tells of a Dutch businesswoman who will supply details of sex workers willing to service disabled people ‘be they men or women, straight or gay’. The Dutch woman is keen to point out that these sex workers are not all older people, a good thing, she says, since ‘If you are twenty-five you don’t want to ask someone who is old enough to be your mother to make you come’.
This draws attention to the fact that human sexual desire is grounded in emotional and cognitive, as much as physiological, processes. If the urge to reach orgasm were a simple biological function, such as the impulse to evacuate the bowels, it would hardly matter whether the person you asked ‘to make you come’ was old or young, or man or woman. But sex is not a mere bodily function. A person’s erotic interests are inextricably bound up with the ideational world, and this surely renders the idea of a ‘need’ for sexual gratification hugely problematic. Since non-masturbatory sex by definition involves another person or persons, to grant one the right to control if and when they have sex, with whom, and how, would very often be to deny those same rights to another.
Notions of biologically based sexual ‘drives’ and ‘needs’ cannot provide a direct explanation for prostitute use. They leave unanswered questions as to why some men do not use prostitutes, even when they are ‘deprived’ of other sexual ‘outlets’, and why those who do use prostitutes are not indiscriminate as to how their ‘need’ for sexual ‘release’ is satisfied and by whom. Biology is an enabling, not a determining, factor in human sexual arrangements, and the story of the ‘Natural Born Client’ does not, therefore, describe a biological reality. But naturalising prostitute use through reference to ideas about male sexuality does allow clients to construct the sexual license and/or services alienated by the prostitute as a ‘good’ or ‘commodity’ which satisfies a perfectly understandable and reasonable demand on the part of the ‘consumer’. And this is the second way that the stories habitual prostitute users tell about their prostitute use can be seen as reflecting and reproducing very ordinary, everyday attitudes and beliefs about the world.
Sovereign Consumers
Prostitution involves the exchange of sexual license and/or sexual labour across a market, and it is usually (but not always) organised and constructed as a commodity exchange like any other. In order to imagine the prostitute-client transaction as a commodity exchange, clients have to treat sexuality as though it were something which can be detached from the person. The prostitute’s sexuality then becomes something which she can freely alienate, and the client’s sexuality is also imagined as somehow estranged and divisible from his real self. He enters into the exchange merely to ‘control’ his ‘sex life’ or satisfy his ‘sex drive’. One client I interviewed even compared his sexuality to a vehicle which the owner has to maintain, describing his visits to prostitutes as being ‘a bit like taking your car to the garage to get it serviced… you’re paying for the services of an expert, someone who really knows what they’re doing’. Thus ‘sexual needs’, which are in reality nothing more than productions of the human imagination, are invested with a life of their own and viewed as an external force driving the client to behave in particular ways.
By telling himself that prostitution is a commodity exchange (he and the prostitute meet freely in the market place and voluntarily contract to dispose of their property), the client can conceal his own power from himself. He can also overlook certain facts about the person to whom he secures sexual access, facts which would often make sexual contact with her illegitimate in terms of the rules and conventions which, in non-commercial contexts, he would himself endorse. The prostitute may be extremely young, a child even. She may be another man’s wife or girlfriend or pregnant by another man. She may be being coerced into prostitution by a husband, boyfriend or pimp. She may even be debt-bonded or otherwise enslaved to a brothel keeper. But because his relationship to her is constructed as a commodity exchange, the client does not feel morally compelled to interrogate what lies behind her sexual ‘consent’. She is a seller, he is a buyer and he can simply think in terms of an exchange of ‘values’: x amount of money for x sexual benefit (and clients do really talk about ‘value for money’).
I have interviewed many American and European men who would not dream of asking their daughter’s teenage friends for sex, let alone think it right to coerce them into performing sexual acts. Yet they will quite happily enter into sexual-economic exchanges with girls of fifteen or sixteen years of age in Latin America, the Caribbean or Thailand, because, they say, the girls approach them, rather than vice versa. The same undoubtedly holds true of many Finnish and German men who travel to Russia or Latvia or Estonia for business or leisure purposes and find themselves approached by teenage girls or boys working in prostitution. Because prostitution is contractually organised as a commodity exchange like any other, the buyer can tell himself that his own actions are quite legitimate. He is simply behaving as a sovereign consumer in a free market behaves, and if he does not accept the child’s offer, the man behind him will.
Moral indifference
In this sense, many men’s use of child prostitutes is best understood as an act of moral indifference, and again, this is perfectly consonant with the dominant moral codes of liberal democratic states. In a book which starts from a consideration of the holocaust, the British political theorist Norman Geras asks how we can make sense of ‘the depressing but widespread fact that so many people do not come to the aid of others under attack, whether fellow citizens or merely other human beings, and also do not come to the aid of them in dire need or great distress’ (1998, 26). Geras’ idea is that people imagine themselves as parties to a contract of mutual indifference, whereby they do not feel obligated to come to the aid of others who are under grave assault and do not expect others to feel obligated to help them in similar emergency. Geras goes on to argue that this kind of moral indifference is underwritten by liberal political thought:
The principal economic formation historically associated with liberalism, defended by liberals — whether confidently or apologetically — today as much as ever, is one in which it has been the norm for the wealth and comfort of some to be obtained through the hardship and poverty of others, and to stand right alongside these. It is a whole mode of collective existence. Not only an economy. A world, a culture, a set of everyday practices (1998, 59).
Prostitution is one such everyday practice; a practice which expresses moral indifference, and justifies it by invoking the liberal concept of contractual consent. At base, the client is saying: ‘I will not recognize any connection with you or obligation to you beyond paying the sum we agree, and I do not expect you to recognize any connection with me or obligation to me beyond providing the agreed service. I will not concern myself with questions about why you are willing to enter into a prostitution contract, and I do not call on you to concern yourself with my motivations for entering this contract’.
In the contemporary world, this often means that the client is willing to disregard immense human suffering and hardship. The vast majority of sex tourists and habitual clients I have interviewed are entirely morally indifferent to questions about why the women and teenagers they exploit are willing to enter into prostitution contracts with them. Some even feel that the prostitution contract can be morally executed with women they know to be debt-bonded to a brothel-owner, or with ten and eleven year old children they know to be homeless, destitute and/or addicted to solvents. They reason that they do not expect the child, or anyone else, to give them help or care, and thus they are under no obligation to give help or care to the child or to anyone else.
The Prostitute as Other
Habitual clients seek to justify and defend the power they exercise over prostitutes as power over commodities, rather than power over persons, and to tell themselves that this is a commodity exchange like any other. But at another level, they are quite conscious of the fact that they enter into the contract precisely in order to exercise personal, and not material, power over the prostitute. Clients know that in reality they contract for the use of a human embodied self, for the right to temporarily command what is embedded in and cannot be detached from the prostitute’s person. Indeed, they complain bitterly when, in their view, the prostitute fails to keep to ‘her side of the bargain’ by refusing to respond to this kind of command. To quote one client:
[Some prostitutes] they just lay there, like a dead fish on the slab. They just lay there. I don’t know how you can get any satisfaction with a woman just lain there like that. You might as well go home and have a wank.
Furthermore, few clients really accept that the prostitute’s sexuality can be estranged as a ‘thing’ or ‘commodity’ separate from her person. In fact, quite the reverse. Habitual clients actually tend to buy into very traditional ideas about gender, sexuality, and prostitution. They generally believe (just as strongly as do religious fundamentalists and moral conservative politicians and journalists), that there is a firm and meaningful line of demarcation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women, ‘Madonnas’ and ‘whores’, the sexually pure and the impure. A female who sells sex is considered by most habitual clients (as well as by many non-prostitute using men and women) to be somehow different from other women. The client may see the prostitutes he uses as ‘dirty whores’ or as ‘tarts with hearts’, but whichever image he finds erotic, the point for him is that she is Other–she is not like his own wife, sister, mother, daughter or any other ‘respectable’ woman.
In this, he accepts and reproduces what is widely socially endorsed: the idea of the female prostitute as somehow outside the imaginary community of good, respectable, heterosexuals. This idea of the prostitute as a socially excluded, sexually deviant, Other is very necessary to habitual clients. If prostitute women were imagined as part of the ‘community’, then men’s access to them would be circumscribed in the same way that their access to non-prostitute women is circumscribed, and prostitution would no longer function to ‘safeguard’ the status quo by soaking up men’s excess sexual ‘needs’ and ‘appetites’. Prostitute women have to be imagined as outside the community.
Because they ‘agree’ to sell their sexuality as a commodity, prostitutes are held to have placed themselves outside the remit of the socially agreed rules which govern sexual life. They are expelled and excluded from the community, and thus the rape, even the murder, of prostitute women does not evoke the same degree of popular outrage as the rape or murder of women who are covered by the rules, and the sexual abuse of a child is adjudged differently according to whether it takes place within a commercial or a non-commercial context. Equally, the sexual use of women who would normally be considered ‘off limits’ (for instance, because they are pregnant, visibly ill or injured) becomes acceptable when those women are prostitutes. To exercise personalistic power over females who are included in ‘the community’ in order to have sex with them is considered transgressive, but exercising personalistic power over the prostitute is viewed as perfectly acceptable-implicit in ‘the deal’ even.
The extent of the prostitute’s exclusion from the imagined community can be graphically illustrated by a story told by a British sex tourist in Thailand. This man, like many of his compatriots, was quite happy to sit through live sex shows in which prostitutes (some of whom are debt-bonded, some of whom are under the age of sixteen) pull strings of metal bells, scarves, or razor blades from their vaginas in front of an audience of leering men. He would also happily visit brothels where women and children are lined up, numbered and displayed in order that clients can ‘select’ an anonymous, visibly objectified female body for his sexual use. And although he claimed to disapprove of the sexual exploitation of children, neither he, nor any of his ‘mates’ had ever challenged another sex tourist about their abuse of child prostitutes. However, he did tell me the following story:
When I was in Ko Chang there was this old Austrian bloke, must have been 70 at least, and he was enticing the dogs into his beach hut, tempting stray dogs in there with food. It was fucking disgusting. Anyway, someone told the police and they had words with him, but I was telling this bloke at the bar one night and I pointed the bloke out to him and he just walked over to the Austrian bloke and punched him in the face. He said ‘You dirty fucking poofter’ and he floored him. He says to me after, ‘He comes to paradise and what does he do? Fucks dogs’.
In other words, it was easier for this man to imagine dogs as part of his community, covered and protected by rules pertaining to sexual life, than to include prostitute women and children amongst those worthy of protection.
Prostitutes, not children
This has great significance for our understanding who uses minors in the sex trade and why. For many men, the child prostitute’s status as ‘prostitute’ is far more significant than her or his status as ‘child’. A fifty-four year old Italian sex tourist I interviewed in Cuba described picking up a thirteen year old girl off the streets, taking her back to his apartment and having sex with her. Yet he attributed agency to the child: ‘She was expecting something, and it wasn’t a lollipop’, he said.
This notion of children in prostitution as sexually experienced, as spoiled goods, as agents in their own exploitation, as exploiters of adult men’s frailty even, is widespread amongst the men we interviewed who practice sex tourism including child sex tourism. And again, their attitudes are not so very far away from ordinary, mainstream beliefs about childhood, gender, sexuality and sexual community. Men and women who do not use prostitutes also equate childhood with sexual innocence and inexperience, such that a minor who is involved in prostitution is no longer deemed to be or treated as a child.
In Britain, as well as in ‘Third World’ or ‘developing’ countries, girls who work in prostitution have historically been legally constructed as ‘prostitutes’, not as sexually abused children (and as recently as 1998, the police in England and Wales cautioned 260 girls aged between sixteen and eighteen, and just over twenty girls aged under sixteen, for prostitution offences.
Racism also often plays a vital role in helping the client to imagine the prostitutes he uses as Other, as outside or beyond the rules which protect ‘good’ women and children. European beliefs about ‘racial’ difference have historically constructed ‘racial’ Others as sexual Others, and sexualised racisms are still widely accepted in Europe and North America (for example, racist myths about black men and women as sexually aggressive, Latino women as naturally ‘hot’, Asian women as sexually passive, and so on). White western sex tourists and clients draw on these popular, everyday racisms to tell themselves that the ‘racially’ or ethnically Other women and children they exploit are ‘different’, and so either do not deserve or do not require the kind of protection or respect that is merited by ‘their own’ women or children. Thus, for example, European and American sex tourists will say that children are not really children in the Caribbean-they ‘grow up faster’ than do children back home, they are ‘naturally’ more sexual, and so on.
The client’s tale of woe
Behind the stories considered thus far, there is another tale which men who habitually use prostitutes tell about their prostitute use. It is a tale about masculinity, but this time, the focus is on how their gender has exposed them to exclusion, grief and loss. The habitual prostitute users I have interviewed invariably describe a childhood in which they suffered repeated and humiliating attacks upon their gender identity. They report frequent incidents in which they were physically chastised or verbally reprimanded for not being sufficiently ‘manly’, they describe having been told not to cry, not to display emotional vulnerability or physical fear, having been expected to perform well in competitive sports, and so on.
Clients typically move from such descriptions to express enormous resentment of women. They tell you that life is easier for women, and in particular, that it is easier for women to achieve intimacy and to give and receive care from others. In the words of one interviewee, a fifty-five year old man who habitually seeks out minors in the sex trade:
Mothers train their daughters, they prepare them… They teach girls how to look pretty, tell them how to sit, how to cross their legs. They teach them how to be attractive and how to please a man. But they don’t teach boys anything. Boys are neglected, and then, next thing you know, you’re expected to be a man, to be in charge. You’re expected to know what women want. They expect you to fight in wars, go out and fuck whores, be a real man. The mother’s even happy if her son dies for his country so long as she gets a flag, all neatly folded, and a letter saying that her son was brave. She doesn’t care if he goes out and fucks some dirty whore. She just says ‘Good, that shows he’s a man’. Boys get nothing. They might be hurt, but they have to hide it, they’re not allowed to cry. And no-one tells them how to please women. The boy reaches the age of 15 or 16, he has biological urges, he needs to find a girlfriend. So what happens? He goes out and gets humiliated. Girls are just laughing at him… Men are like yo-yos, emotionally they’re controlled by women. It’s always women who hold the strings.
In this story, the client presents himself as emotionally victimised, neglected, vulnerable and misunderstood, and describes non-prostitute women as powerful, vindictive, careless. The ‘good’ women (mothers and wives) upon whom men depend for love, care and emotional support have too much power and control. As another habitual prostitute user, again a man who regularly sexually exploits child prostitutes, put it:
You get the gold-diggers, the women who’ll do anything to get a bloke because he’s got a few bob, and once she’s got in, that man is caught, because if he tries to get out, she’ll take him to the cleaners. It’s a web… I found when I was married, I felt caged… Men are very insecure in relation to woman. They want the woman for security, at the same time they feel insecure in the marriage because they know they can be taken to the cleaners any time. And I honestly feel that the prostitution side… it’s because they’re… trapped.
In this way, clients shift from explaining their prostitute use as a simple consequence of biologically given male sexual ‘drives’ and start to explain it as a consequence of the supposedly ‘excessive’ social and emotional power exercised by women.
A recurring theme in the stories of woe which clients tell about their prostitute use is that men are weak and non prostitute women are strong. ‘Good’ women are berated for their power to ‘incite’ sexual desire and then ‘withhold’ sexual access, for their power to refuse unconditional emotional support, for their ability to freely withdraw from intimate relationships – in short, for being autonomous individuals. Prostitution is valued because it strips women of this kind of autonomy (and, of course, minors in the sex trade are amongst the least autonomous of all).
If ‘femininity’ is imagined as the right to care and be cared for (i.e. to acknowledge one’s relation to others), and ‘masculinity’ rests on rejection of such ‘femininity’ (i.e. to deny one’s relation to others), then it is small wonder that sexual relationships often represent such difficult terrain for men, or that prostitute use seems to promise a means of resolving inner conflicts. With a prostitute, clients can manage their sexual and emotional life in any way they choose. They can treat the prostitute as nothing but a sexually objectified body, they can play-act intimacy and romance, they can command the prostitute to perform as the phallic woman they dread and in so doing symbolically conquer their fears, etc., without incurring obligations or expectations, and with little threat of any real mutual dependency developing. Furthermore, prostitution provides a forum in which men’s fantasies of unbridled sexual access can be momentarily realised, and thus with a prostitute, clients experience none of their usual rage and frustration about their inability to control their own and other people’s sexual behaviour. The female prostitute’s sexual behaviour is controllable through the simple medium of money, and the younger and more the vulnerable the prostitute, the more controllable she is.
The client’s tale of woe is a story which centres upon both a longing for and a dread of intimacy. This is a story in which men fear entering into close and dependent relationships with women because they feel that in so doing, they risk being infantilised, engulfed, out of control, open to rejection and humiliation. It reflects a fear of their own need for care. Again we need to recognise that such a dread is not simply the product of individual pathology. In European societies, many ordinary people-perhaps even the majority-are complicit with a set of beliefs about gender that refuse and deny men both the right to care and to be given care.
Not just a criminal justice issue
I welcome the fact that in the European Union more resources and greater priority are now being attached to policing ‘paedophiles’ who sexually abuse children at home and abroad, and to policing third parties who use violence or the threat of violence to force women and children into prostitution. But I do not believe that the problem of minors in the sex trade can be reduced to a criminal justice issue.
To begin with, we have to recognise that the state plays a significant role in shaping the sex trade and the experience of prostitution, not just through the prostitution laws it enacts and enforces (or doesn’t enforce), but because it is implicated in creating the conditions under which for some individuals or groups, prostitution comes to represent the best of a bad bunch of economic alternatives. State policies on welfare, employment, education, health, immigration and, in many countries, tourism, make certain groups vulnerable to prostitution, and also increase their vulnerability within prostitution. Though it is the state upon which we must rely to police violence against and abuse of prostitute women and children, the paradox is that states are also heavily implicated in making certain groups vulnerable to, and within, prostitution.
This paradox should not be forgotten by those lobbying governments in relation to particular prostitution issues. We need to insist that governments recognise and take on board the complexities of prostitution as a whole and address the inequalities of economic, social and political power which underpin it, rather than treating problems such as minors in the sex trade, or trafficking, as simply or primarily law enforcement or criminal justice issues.
Second, instead of comforting ourselves with the idea that those who sexually exploit minors in the sex trade are monstrous Others, we need confront the more difficult fact that they are products of our own societies. Most of the European men who pay for sex with prostitutes, including child prostitutes, hold attitudes that are perfectly consonant with their own societies’ dominant, popular discourses on gender, sexuality, race, prostitution and sexual community. And Europeans are, in general, socialised to tolerate massive global, class, race and gender inequalities. Many will happily take advantage of those inequalities to obtain cheap consumer goods, or package holidays, or domestic workers when it suits them to do so. In campaigns against sexual exploitation, we would do well to remember that prostitutes’ clients do not have the monopoly on moral indifference.
Ending children’s exploitation in the sex trade requires Europeans to do more than think about the law enforcement problems posed by ‘paedophiles’ and ‘traffickers’. We must also begin to think critically about how to transform our own societies’ attitudes towards economic action, gender, class, sexuality, race and prostitution.
References
Paul Bebbington ‘Disabled people don’t have sex do they?’, Guardian, March 9, 1996: 6
Norman Geras The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust (Verso, 1998).
Sven Axel Mansson ‘Prostitutes’ clients and the image of men and masculinity in late modern society’, in B. Pease and K. Pringle (eds) Globalising Men (Zed, 2000).