Violet Blue recently wrote a really excellent piece in her SF Gate column about the perils of child porn – specifically, the issues that have been coming up recently as teenagers under the age of consent getting arrested for making smut. Yes, its true, teenagers are being arrested for making child porn when they take consensual pictures of themselves and send them to friends, partners, the football team, whatever. In some states, this marks them as sex offenders for life. Yes, the kind of sex offenders who have to go door-to-door when they move into a new neighborhood. Though I don’t think taking naked pictures of yourself and sharing them with other people is inherently a bad thing, I do think that people (teenagers and adult alike) sometimes don’t have the best understanding of what can happen when you release nekkid photos into the wild. The consequences can (but don’t always) suck, and a drunken nudie cell phone pic can dog you for years, even if you delete it from your personal lifestream. That said, it’s troubling to think that making this sometimes questionable decision is being criminalized instead of used as a teachable moment about privacy, consent, and the long tail of naked pictures online.
In our very same United States there’s an FBI project called Operation Cross Country, which is in the business of busting child prostitution rings around the United States. They had a series of raids last June and a bunch more arrests have been announced this week. An AP article reports that the FBI has rescued 48 suspected teenage prostitutes. But of course, since they’re at it, they’re also arresting adult prostitutes. On Twitter, MadamAmbi linked to a piece about the stings titled FBI rescues child prostitutes across the nation. The first sentence reads: “Phoenix police arrested 46 adult prostitutes and 13 johns as part of a weeklong, nationwide effort to target child sex crimes.” I know its just one sentence, but please – what do arrests of adults who are able to consent to sex have to do with minors who are legally not able to consent to sex? They are really not the same thing. It’s true that not all adults who are in the sex industry consent to being there either, but adults at least have the legal capacity for consent – minors by definition do not.
The next question is of course – what do these two different things have to do with one another. It’s a little bit of a headfuck so stick with me.
Why are child prostitutes being rescued while adult prostitutes are being arrested? Why are kids who make porn of themselves being arrested while adult porn performers legally go about their business? It’s not much of a leap from child prostitutes being arrested instead of rescued – unfortunately it probably is a big leap in our culture for criminalized folks to be freed from the strong (and somewhat arbitrary) arm of the law and the punishment it metes out.
All of this is very fragile and makes me very very anxious. The lines drawn between these things are just imagined differently, but there’s great potential for it all to bleed together in one legal mess that erases the autonomy of people in the sex industry. That’s not even a broad enough brush – this style of law enforcement complicate issues of consent for sexual beings who are perceived as vulnerable, especially youth and women in these cases.
2:31 pm
This is just good old fashioned Sex Policing at work, Dacia….you use the hook of “protecting children” and “saving children from prostitution” as the excuse needed to go after adult sex workers and their clients who have nothing at all to do with illegal child trafficking at all.
And the beauty of it all is that it is totally justifiable by the public in the name of “fighting child pornography”….while its real goal is to police and criminalize legitimate, consensual, non-harmful adult sexual activity, but under a different name and cloaked rationalization.
Plus..it makes for excellent print-busting headlines and gets millions of $$$$ for law enforcement…money that could be better spent of preventing real crimes or….I don’t know…paying underpaid cops to do their work effectively???
And it the logical extension of this philosophy is frightening, just as you say…if we can justify “rescuing” adolescents by imprisoning them, than isn’t it not to far a jump than to say that adult sex workers (especially those 18 to 21) would be considered to be “not mature enough” for their consent to be respected, and thusly, we can arrest or “rescue” them from themselves??? Oh, but if only that principle could be applied to child molesting priests or adulterous right-wing politicians….
Anthony
3:21 pm
I was just checking out Newser the other day (newser.com), and it included this headline: “FBI Rescues Teen Hookers Across America.” The first sentence: “The FBI rounded up 48 suspected teen prostitutes and arrested 571 others on a range of prostitution charges this weekend, the AP reports.”
The actual headline should be: “FBI arrests over 600 prostitutes, 7% of which were teenagers.”
It’s outrageous to me that the FBI – and the press – can claim that the objective is to “rescue” teen prostitutes, when the overwhelming majority of those affected are adults.
3:06 am
@debauchette: “The actual headline should be: “FBI arrests over 600 prostitutes, 7% of which were teenagers.”
It’s outrageous to me that the FBI – and the press – can claim that the objective is to “rescue” teen prostitutes, when the overwhelming majority of those affected are adults.”
This brings the sorry state of the US education system into stark focus. Mainly, we don’t perform well in math so they put up the 47 teen prostitutes and 571 “others in a range of related prostitution activities” knowing damn well the average person is not going to pull out a calculator and figure out whether anything significant was accomplished. Which would then lead to uncomfortable questions for police departments like, “Well, why is your approach catching more adults than children” because that’d require creative solutions. And complex thought for complex situations.
Then of course reading comprehension is lacking for folks so they’ll not see a discrepancy between “rescuing” teens and arresting adults. I mean, don’t we have to arrest adults in order to rescue teens? That is the logic many Americans seem to run on.
8:51 pm
I just wanted to say, “very well said”
It is bothersome what these “sexting” kids will face the rest of their lives from some pretty innocent (even though completely) wrong activity.
8:30 am
[...] Waking Vixen » Blog Archive » Arrest and Rescue: Kids in the Sex Biz "Why are child prostitutes being rescued while adult prostitutes are being arrested? Why are kids who make porn of themselves being arrested while adult porn performers legally go about their business? It’s not much of a leap from child prostitutes being arrested instead of rescued – unfortunately it probably is a big leap in our culture for criminalized folks to be freed from the strong (and somewhat arbitrary) arm of the law and the punishment it metes out. [...]
10:06 pm
[...] Arrest and Rescue: Kids in the Sex Biz [...]
7:50 pm
It should be noted that in each Cross Country operation the children ranged in age from 13 to 17. There were no prostitutes under the age of 13.