15 Year Old Schoolgirl Working as a Prostitute

This makes me angry.

So, c'mon kiddies - when did this girl become a victim?

Was it:

- When she started working the life of a prostitute, earning thousands of pounds for trading on her looks, youth and charm?

- Or was it when her teacher, a person supposed to act in her best interests, assumed the right to search her bag based on mysterious "suspicions", reported their findings to the authorities instead of offering her direct assistance and support and finally, when the government took all of her fucking money?


The knee-jerk reaction to this situation makes me feel ill. I mean, that this story hit the media at all is indicative this girl's best interests are not being served here, but the system is reacting hysterically to a situation it has no dot point guidelines it can go down the list for.

I want to know why:
- The fact she had a bag full of safe sex equipment is not being recognised as evidence this girl has been practising her work in an informed fashion, safely and therefore skillfully
- The fact she has been maintaining what can only be an intense schedule of schoolwork and a job in a physically and intellectually demanding industry and keeping it concealed is not acknowledged as an incredibly impressive feat?

I get quite a lot of things from the scant information we've been given. I get an impression of a highly intelligent, precocious young lady on the cusp of adulthood whose own sexuality has developed to a point she sees it can be of financial gain to her, and who then concertedly enters the sex industry, deceiving the people she works with and her clients into thinking she is of legal age to consent.

And I also get the impression of someone who has been victimised - by the system meant to protect her. Not only is her trust betrayed by her teacher, but the courts clearly can't stand the fact this girl is smarter than the rest of them, that they can't hold anyone else culpable and so they're giving her a spanking and sending her to her room by confiscating the money she rightfully earned. Legally or not - she fucked people for that money. She worked for it. She earnt it.

What the hell kind of message do they think they're sending to her by taking it away? This is so transparently their way of punishing her for bucking the system it makes me feel physically ill.
The sense of violation and degradation I would experience if someone took away the money I earned would be intense - I can only imagine how this girl feels.

The whole idea of underage sex work is a very contentious and sensitive one, as is underage sex itself. Implicit in the media reporting of this story is an incredible sense of shock and horror that an underage girl would knowingly use her sexuality for personal gain. It seems we understand teenagers are going to have sex (though we certainly don't have to like it, do we Abstinence Advocates?) but they have to be naive and uninformed and uncalculating about it.

Wake up! Teenagers are not children. They're young adults. Their sexuality is in rapid growth and they will respond accordingly. Nothing is gained by keeping them ignorant and treating them like stupid little monkeys.

Numbers are arbritary when applied to human beings. Individuals develop at an individual rate. Trying to apply a blanket standard is only going to seriously disadvantage people - like this girl, for example.

All signs point to her having entered the industry consensually and by herself. While I concede that the issue of informed consent at a young age is a very contentious one, that she deceived the people around her suggests a certain level of maturity and considered thought.

There's more to it than that, as well... the entire hysteria surrounding this has been to do with the fact she's been a sex worker as though the situation begins and ends there - as though this must be the worst thing about this situation and the fact her parents didn't know is what makes them bad parents.

I have known many people who began sex work underage. They are all incredibly different people with different reasons for doing so, but all those reasons had one thing ultimately in common: they sought out sex work as a means of freedom.

Sex work offers remuneration and flexibility no other job possibly can for a teenager.

Think about that, and then think about what that might mean for someone from an abusive home.

Money is freedom.

All of those sex workers don't regret for an instance they began their sex work when they were, according to law, too young to truly consent. The money they made gave them the opportunity to get out of the situations they didn't want to be in.

Not all of those situations were outright abuse - some of them were environments that were damaging or confining in other ways - but all of them were intolerable to those individual people.

The fact the girl was clearly saving this money indicates she had a purpose for it.

But I don't want to rush to assume the parents were abusive. Because there's another option, and people really don't like this one:

Maybe she just wanted the money.

Maybe it's as simple as that. Maybe she wanted to buy beautiful things, or have enough money to go where she wanted. Maybe she has a dream - a place she wants to visit or a school she wants to go to - and she's working to achieve that.

No one likes to think about that - that maybe a teenager - a creature we insist must not be sexual even as they are relentlessly sexualised and moving through the process of becoming sexual - could be that mercenary.

I mean, we can't forget all the sex work phobia inherent to this whole situation. Imagine! A 15 year old selling herself as a dirty whore! Oh God, is that hoofbeats I hear, cos I think the end is nigh!

The hysteria sex work is treated with when the underaged get involved, no matter how peripherally, is second to none. It's bad enough being a mother exposed as a sex worker (seriously, what do they think, that the child is in the room watching and not, oh I don't know, at school with the other kids? Any sex working mum could tell you that only makes sense since, uhhhhh, NO BODY really finds it easy to work with their kids around since they're worrying constantly about the kids and trying to concentrate on work at the same time, it's not a good mix and most avoid it where possible. Yes, clients do want to fuck during the day too! Amazing, isn't it?) but forget about it if you're a teenager who takes part in it.
I mean, the stigma towards sex work is so intense that people find it hard to believe that people do it by choice (or acknowledge that choice is not black and white) unless they're evil/mentally ill or a victim (and possibly mentally ill too). Throw in the fact that any sexual interaction teenagers have even with each other is usually characterised as a situation full of victims too (complete with desperate casting about for someone to blame), and underage - even teenage - sex workers are regarded with a paternalistic, hysterical horror that is second to none.

But at the end of the day? It's not helpful. It ignores context. The focus is always on ending "child prostitution" rather than looking at why some young people turn to the sex industry. Punishment is meted out to any adult who might be involved - and while I absolutely agree that any adult who takes advantage of the power disparity to exploit a young person in the industry SHOULD be punished, and harshly as well - it still ignores the fact that teenagers who go looking to get into sex work have a reason. These situations are not always kidnapped young person is forced at gunpoint to service clients. Sometimes they are young person seeks out industry and is aided by adult. Punishing the adult involved is important, but it will not stop young people from seeking out the industry and the reasons we need to ask are why. It does not begin and end with the adult who enables entry into the industry. Locking up owners and operators who knowingly employ 17, 16, 15 year old people is appropriate, but what about the next 15, 16, 17 year olds who go looking for work? They'll find another way to work.

And then look what happens in this situation, where they cannot find an adult to punish - they steal her money!

There are four factors here I think are not easily apparent to non sex workers that suggest to me this situation is extremely complex and this girl was acting largely in an informed and consensual fashion:
1. She was maintaining both her studies and her job - not an easy feat, regardless of what you do. I mean, she was working school nights as well.
2. She was using safe sex equipment.
3. She deceived the people around her in order to be able to work.
and finally:
4. She was saving the money.

This last strikes me most of all.
Most people are fairly useless with money. But in the sex industry, where the money is so easy come and easy go, where you're often handed large lump sums and know there's more around the corner - managing money can be really tricky. For such a young person to be saving it speaks volumes to me and strongly suggests there's much more going on here than meets the eye.

Of course the media cannot help but sensationalise this story - starting off by trumpeting the fact that she's making 100,000 pounds a year! Which is a sum they've calculated based on what she was apparently earning week to week - ignoring the fact that wages from sex work are rarely consistent and reliable week to week. There's an extra special horror being subtly communicated in that amount of money - not only was she a hooker she was making heaps of money - as though it is somehow more grotesque that way.
And just check out the stock photo they used to go with the article! Could it be any more fucking cliche? Seriously. Did they even try? Sickening.

The use of the term "child prostitutes" is also highly misleading. A teenager is not a child. A teenager may not be ready to consent to sex, may not always be able to make an informed decision, but she is not a child. The word child carries a very different connotation and its use here is entirely inappropriate.

That heinous woman, Michelle Elliott - the way she infantilises and diminishes this young girl in the words she says, under the guise of concern for her, is making me feel physically ill. Her horrendous generalising and condescension, her pathologising attitudes... this makes me concerned for this girl. Now that she's been entered into the system and is being told by everyone around her she's a victim for what she chose to do, when they've stolen her money from her. STOLEN HER MONEY.

I'm distressed and angry and upset and can only hope she is as mature as I feel she may very well be, and so is able to resist their insistence on victimising her. I hope she is able to find a true support network and someone who is able to listen to her without judgement or imposing preconceptions. I hope they don't wear her down.

I'll concede the details on this story are scant. I am not in favour of the exploitation of ANY one, whether child, teenager, YA, adult, elderly - no matter what labour they are in. But those four elements I mentioned above are, to me as a sex worker, HIGHLY suggestive.