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The “Age of Entry” Statistic is a Fake: Silencing Sex Workers With Numbers

By Chris Hall
September 8, 2014
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Last Friday, I published an article that I’ve wanted to write for a long time: it’s a debunking of the too-common claim that the average prostitute starts when she’s 13. It’s an excellent example of how myths are privileged over the voices of the people who are actually affected by the laws and policies against prostitution. It’s also my first article in The Atlantic, which is one of the few big magazines that I still respect. Now I know why. Working with Rebecca Rosen, the Business Editor, was a genuine pleasure. She was supportive, enthusiastic, and actually asked me to expand the piece when I expected her to cut it. I think it’s a much better piece because of her.

Most current government and nonprofit policies on sex work define their goals as “rescue,” which makes perfect sense if the age-of-entry statistic is central to your understanding of the sex industry. Child abuse and trafficking are crises that require certain types of interventions. But these crimes do not characterize the sex industry more generally. In reality, many sex workers come into the industry as adults and without coercion, often because of economic necessity. By seeing the sex industry through the lens of the misleading age-of-entry statistic, we overlook the people who are most affected by discussions about sex work—the workers themselves.

♦ ♦ ♦

One of the strongest and most thorough critics of the statistic is activist Emi Koyama. Koyama says that even when applied only to underage subjects, the stat doesn’t hold up, which does a disservice to the most vulnerable in our society.

Emi Koyama has done some of the best research into the problems with the "age of entry into prostitution" factoid.

Emi Koyama

“It conceals the reality that most of the young people in the sex trade come from families affected by poverty, racism, abuse (including homophobia and transphobia in families), parental imprisonment or deportation, or from broken child welfare systems, and do not have safe places to return to,” she told me in an interview. “In fact, many young people are trading sex as a way to escape from violence and abuse that they have experienced in their homes and child welfare systems. By treating them as innocent and helpless ‘children,’ we fail to listen to the young people who are struggling to survive in hostile circumstances. We also fail to address the root causes of their vulnerability, and instead promote further surveillance and criminalization of street culture—which actually harms young people who survive there.”

Even by mathematical standards, the numbers don’t add up. In order for 12 or 13 to represent the national average age of entry, there would need to be a significant number who enter at ages younger than that. “The vast majority of young people who are ‘rescued’ by the law enforcement during Operation Cross Country sweeps are 16- and 17-year olds,” Koyama says, “and there are rarely any under the age 13… For the average age to be around 13, there needs to be many more 5-12 year olds that are forced into prostitution than are empirically plausible.” If the massive numbers of children exist in quantities enough to offset those who enter in their late teens or as adults, they’re not showing up in the arrests made by the Federal government, even high-profile ones like Operation Cross Country.

In addition, Koyama says, the age of entry statistic flatters Americans that their own communities are safe, while playing on the fear of outsiders: “It gives the impression that children were safe until ‘bad people’ came into their communities to take them away, and therefore we must arrest and prosecute these ‘bad people’ (often racialized).” —Read More

Mindy Chateauvert, author of "Sex Workers Unite!" traces the early history of the "age of entry into prostitution" stat.

Melinda Chateauvert, author of “Sex Workers Unite!”

After you read that, I strongly suggest that you go and read this piece, by Melinda Chateauvert, who goes even farther than I do in my article. Just after the article went up, she said on my Facebook comments, “I really wish you’d contacted me about this,” and boy, do I wish I had. Turns out that she had some of the exact information I’d been looking for. See, although the most common reference for the statistic nowadays is The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U. S., Canada and Mexico, by Richard J. Estes and Neil A. Weiner, it’s been around before 2001. The earliest citation I’ve seen is a 1982 paper by Mimi Silbert and Ayela Pines. Unfortunately, I couldn’t for the life of me find a copy of the paper. All I had was a title. Mindy does a great job of debunking the pre-2001 version of the “average age of entry” factoid:

The original academic article, “Victimization of Street Prostitutes,” was published in the journal Victimology in 1982 (7 [1982]: 122-133). The data came from research conducted by Mimi Silbert of the San Francisco Delancey Street Foundation and Ayala Pines of UC Berkeley, who interviewed 200 women and girls in SF, all of whom were Delancey Street clients. The authors note that the number of juveniles arrested for prostitution had “doubled” from 38 to 86 from 1976 to 1977. Still, this was 86 minors among more than 2,300 adult women arrested for prostitution in 1977. (FWIW, I was one of the women arrested that year. The SFPD and was engaged in a major crackdown at the time, especially in Union Square and the Tenderloin areas as developers had begun eying those neighborhoods. There were arrests across the entire /hetero/ sex industry: clubs, parlors, bars, hotels, streets, etc.)….

It’s important to understand this data from a historical perspective. In 1977, the drinking age was 18. That meant that “juveniles” could work in strip clubs, serve liquor, and obtain a license from the city to work in a massage parlor or encounter parlor. (There were no educational requirements to receive a massage license at that time). A young person only had to show an ID stating she was 18. (And remember, this was when many states issued a driver’s license on paper, and did not necessarily include a photograph.)

 

 

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Filed Under: Featured, Politics, Sex Work Tagged With: Audacia-Ray, civil rights, emi koyama, Kristina Dolgin, Melinda Chateauvert, Sex Work, shannon williams, social justice

The Shrinking Public Square

By Chris Hall
September 28, 2008
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As you may or may not know, I’m the co-founder of a web site called Sex in the Public Square. Although the name seems straightforward enough to me, it seems to perplex a lot of people. If you want to get a good idea of what we’re on about with the title of our site and why the concept of “the public square” is so important to us, go on over to Audacia Ray’s site, Waking Vixen. You should be doing that anyway, but if you haven’t been checking her out recently, she’s had some experiences lately that illustrate neatly the realities and risks of talking publicly about sex.

  • First of all, Dacia tried last month to open an account at Citibank for her business, Waking Vixen Productions. After filling out the preliminary paperwork, she received a voicemail delicately informing her that her line of business made them unable to take her account.
  • Then, early this month, she got a similar notice from iTunes, notifying her that her podcast, Live Girl Review, could no longer be included in their directory. ITunes was less direct than Citibank, saying only that podcasts could be excluded “for a variety of reasons.” On checking out their podcast spec sheet, she found “strong prevalence of sexual content”  included among the possible reasons that Apple can kick you to the curb.
  • And just last week, Google yanked her Google Checkout account, barely twenty-four hours after she’d put her new short film The Love Machine up for sale. According to the e-mail Google sent Dacia, “the products or services [she’s] selling on [her] website are considered ‘Restricted’ per our policy- Adult goods and services.”  [Read more…]
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Filed Under: Media, Sex in the Public Square Tagged With: Audacia-Ray, Blogging, Sex

Audacia Ray on Brian Lehrer

By Chris Hall
June 16, 2007
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I was at Viviane’s tea party for the NYC pervert community last Sunday when Audacia Ray mentioned that she was going to be on the Brian Lehrer show the next morning, debating with a member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) about sex work.

“Oh, really,” I said, eager to show off my naïveté, “I kinda thought that NOW had gotten smarter about that stuff.”

Apparently not. Although NOW officially takes the stance that sex work should be legalized, the New York State chapter has recently sponsored legislation that increases penalties for patronizing a prostitute, and is engaged in a campaign to get newspapers and magazines to refuse advertising from escort agencies and massage parlors. This all happens under the guise of fighting “trafficking.”

I am, in general, a supporter of feminism. Our gender roles are a complete mess, and we need to keep questioning them. My problems with feminists usually arise when they stop asking questions about gender and instead become gatekeepers against inquiry into gender. NOW and the Ms. Foundation have, despite much good work, traditionally acted as guardians of middle-class morality in certain areas, such as pornography and sex work.

Dacia does a great job, as usual, of putting forth an alternative, radical perspective on sex work. Although trafficking is an atrocity and needs to be dealt with seriously, it’s often used as cover for a barely-suppressed horror of sexuality and a paternalistic attitude towards poor people of color. I find that there’s a very visible difference between the philosophies of those who see sex workers as pitiful things to be rescued (e.g., Nicholas Kristof) and those with a more layered view of sex work. For the former, the emphasis is on the word “sex”; for the latter, the key word is “work.” To talk about the realities of prostitution or stripping, whether as an individual choice or as forced exploitation, we have to approach it as a labor issue, not a failure of sexual morals. Work is something that we all understand. We don’t like it, but we do it every day, and a lot of us wind up getting screwed. That part is happening more and more as corporate power becomes more hegemonic and the protections that we gained through so much hard work and organizing turn into ash. The story of most Americans in the workplace is this: no union, no health care, no vacation, and little, if any, right to sue when our employers’ abuses get to be too much to bear.

But no matter how much shit we take in the straight workplace, we can always think of ourselves as better off than a whore or a stripper, both morally and materially, because even the legal kinds of sex work are only barely so, and just doing it makes you disposable in the eyes of a lot of people.

If there’s ever going to be a humane solution to the problems that come with sex work, we have to legitimize the work itself and see those as labor issues, not moral ones. The fact that the woman on my favorite porn video is working in shitty conditions is a problem in the same way that it’s a problem that my shirt was made in a sweatshop by underpaid, abused workers. Both are realities of the society that we live in. Both need to be taken seriously, but the reality invalidates neither the use of porn nor of shirts. In a way, the average American worker is in a situation much closer to that of sex workers than they like to admit; too many Americans have accepted that their bosses can do whatever they want with their lives and livelihoods, and passively allow themselves to be trafficked by the corporate hierarchy.

The major point that Audacia made in her discussion with Brian Lehrer is that the NOW plan is a very, very bad one because it doesn’t do anything to address trafficking as such; it targets both voluntary and involuntary sex workers, and drives the ones who need help further underground. What NOW is proposing is much more effective as a strategy to protect mainstream moral sensibilities: out of sight, out of mind. She also points out that Amsterdam, rather than increasing punishments against johns, has had great success with using them as a resource to identify women who don’t want to be there. The American model of vengeful law ‘n’ order plays well in headlines and serves the reputation of politicians, but in the end does bupkiss for any of the people who matter.

You can listen to Audacia on the Brian Lehrer show in the player below, or download it at WNYC.

Resources for sex workers’ rights:

  • Sex Workers’ Outreach Project
  • $pread Magazine
  • Network of Sex Work Projects
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Filed Under: Politics, Sex Work Tagged With: Audacia-Ray, feminism, sex-workers, trafficking

Happy Birthday to Audacia

By Chris Hall
April 25, 2007
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As of today, one of my favorite perverts, Audacia Ray, turns 27. Happy birthday, Dacia. But birthdays happen every year. They’re almost mundane. Far more important is that Audacia has finished her thesis. Mazel tov to her. That’s an amazing accomplishment, especially when I reflect that I graduated two months after the rest of my high school class and only barely managed not to slit my wrists when getting a Bachelors’ in Liberal Arts. I’m sure that it will be worth every tear and moment of frustration.

If you want to show Dacia your admiration and congratulations, be sure to show up at the opening of Sex Workers Visions II this Tuesday, May 1 at Arena Studios in NYC.

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Filed Under: Art, Smart Pervs Tagged With: Art, Audacia-Ray, sex-workers

Give Me Smut! (And Nothing But)

By Chris Hall
March 11, 2007
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“I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity. I’m for it.” –Tom Lehrer

When I first became politically aware, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, AIDS was making lunch meat out of every gay boy and leatherman within reach, and the term “feminist pornography” was an oxymoron to all but a very, very few people. What has come to be called the “feminist sex wars” was going at full bloody force back then.

Things have changed a lot since then, but not as much as I allow myself to think. Yes, Reagan has been put into his grave, but his legacy remains in the body politic like a festering tumor. Yes, gay men no longer have to bury their friends and lovers 25, 50, 75 times a year, nor are HIV-positive people classed as “innocent” or “guilty” and fed poisons disguised as medications. And yes, you can now declare yourself pro-feminist and pro-pornography without your fellow progressives staring at you like you’d just admitted that you moonlight as a contract killer.

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Politics, Sex and Gender Tagged With: Alternet, Audacia-Ray, censorship, Lux-Nightmare, pornography, Robert-Jensen, Sex Work

Audacia Ray Explains It All For You

By Chris Hall
December 12, 2006
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I consider Audacia Ray to be one of the smartest women in New York when it comes to sex, and her recent post on the female condom shows why.� The female condom has never quite caught on since its introduction. This is partly because of the price ($4/condom, as opposed to 25-50¢ for the standard boy model) and partly because they’ve remained kind of mysterious, more suited to the punchline of a joke than something you pack for a hot date.  Audacia does a good job of sweeping away the mystery with a smart, sensible explanation of the whys and wherefores of the girl condom:

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Sex and Gender Tagged With: Audacia-Ray, female-condom, safer-sex, sex-education

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