Knowledge of Evil

Alyson Brown, David Barrett

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134033188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book aims to document and analyse the enduring involvement of children in the commercial sex trade in twentieth-century England. It uncovers new evidence to indicate the extent of under-age prostitution over this period, a much-neglected subject despite the increased visibility of children more generally.

The authors argue that child prostitution needs to be understood within a broader context of child abuse, and that this provides one of the clearest manifestations of the way in which 'deviant groups' can be conceived of as both victims and threats. The picture of child prostitution which emerges is one of exclusion from mainstream society and the law, and remoteness from the agencies set up to help young people in trouble, which were often reluctant to accept the realities of child prostitution. The evidence provided in this book indicates that the circumstances which have led young people into prostitution over the last hundred years amount, at worst, to physical or psychological abuse or neglect, and at best as the result of limited choice.

Chapter 1

Introduction – concepts and contexts

Due to increasing globalisation and internationalisation of capital during the 1980s and 1990s,¹ child prostitution has become an issue of growing concern in many parts of the world.² Here, however, we largely confine the scope of our discussion to the situation in Britain during the twentieth century and explore the socio-economic and policy context in which child prostitution occurs, the existence of child prostitution, and legal and public service responses to child prostitution.

The twentieth century has often been referred to as the century of the child, the historical period in which the concept of childhood was clarified and elucidated in law, the labour market, education, the medical arena and a wide range of other contexts. If the idea of childhood as distinct and requiring particular accommodation and restraint was established by the end of the nineteenth century then childhood has been examined, elaborated and further provided for during the twentieth century. Certainly, the ideas and language used to express thought and action on this subject cannot be understood apart from the society and historical contexts which produced them. Indeed, this publication has paid particular attention to establishing the importance of the sometimes quite broad contexts which have determined and informed the discourses on children, and specifically on child prostitution and child sexual abuse.

While important areas of the understanding and protection of children have developed considerably, many areas have been relatively ignored. To a great extent such areas have been given little consideration because they have represented a threat to fundamental social institutions, most notably, the family. Children have been and continue to be perceived as conceptually integral to western notions of the family as the primary institution of socialisation. The avoidance of some issues regarding children has been particularly evident when violence and/or sex and sexuality, long-standing taboo subjects, have been involved, so that child sexual abuse and child prostitution remained, until the last thirty years or so, sensitive issues largely spoken about in restricted circles.

In this respect the silences, distortions and euphemisms surrounding child sexual abuse and child prostitution speak volumes and should be seen as a part of the strategies underlying discourses. This was, if anything, more especially the case for child prostitution in consequence of the long established stigmatisation of adult prostitution. The involvement of children in prostitution, and the causes and consequences of this for them, have been largely ignored between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century. When this issue has emerged into the public domain over the last hundred years, it has often been in a form that has been dramatised and stereotyped to such an extent that it promoted not understanding, or positive action, but an obscuring and social distancing of the problem, thus we have seen repeated moral panics caused by white slave trade accounts. This approach has also meant that the meaning of child prostitution, and the characteristics of a child involved in underage commercial sexual activity, have been abstracted largely from what it and they are not, that is to say that meaning has historically been abstracted from negatives. Child prostitutes have been perceived, therefore, as not asexual, dependent, moral or a ‘real’ child, but also not an adult. This tendency for negative abstraction leads to assumptions about what child prostitutes are, so that they have been seen as sexually assertive, independent, immoral, and as a distorted or perverse form of childhood or something ‘other’.

One of the purposes of this publication is to examine the origins of the negative presumptions and judgements made about children involved in under-age commercial sex. To a large extent the focus of individual chapters has been led by the availability of sources. It is clear, however, that over the last century, as discourses of child sexual abuse were being constructed, those discourses relating to child prostitution have taken a distinct and separate journey more likely to lead to condemnation and criminalisation than sympathy and protection. Such distinctions between child prostitution and child sexual abuse have only been seriously challenged during the 1980s and 1990s, when the continued existence of the phenomenon of child prostitution gained academic, government and public attention. As one writer has noted ‘Within the field of child welfare, the emergence of new areas of need is more often than not the rediscovery of some very old ones’.³

Jeffrey Weeks’ comment on male prostitution, that ‘much of our evidence for British prostitution is… sporadic, often the result of zealous public morality drives or of spectacular scandals’⁴ can also be applied to child prostitution.

However, the evidence accumulated is sufficient to make a convincing case for the continued existence of child prostitution throughout the twentieth century and to stimulate discussion and research of a subject which has received considerable recent attention but little historical analysis. While the evidence is sometimes indirect and tangential it is significant and builds to undermine the depiction of child prostitution as purely a phenomenon of late twentieth-century society. Therefore an important aspect of this work is a laying out of some of the available sources for the consideration of the reader. A greater subjective approach which would have enabled a fuller appreciation of the individual feelings and rationales of child prostitutes, in line with the paradigm promoted by Allison James and Alan Prout,⁵ would have been desirable, but is largely unobtainable for the period before the 1980s. As Harry Hendrick has pointed out, much of the history of childhood is ‘really the history of what adults have thought about and done to children’⁶ so that, in agreement with him, this publication seeks to offer a text which, although ‘written from above’ affirms an overtly sympathetic stance towards children in their relationships with adults.

The particular circumstances of children as having generally less power and self-determination than adults pervades the way in which services have been provided for them and restrictions been imposed upon them, ostensibly to defend them against exploitation. As Anna Davin has pointed out, adults at most times have the power to set the terms of childhood according to their present and future priorities.

Whatever resistance (open or covert) young individuals might attempt, adults are always in a better position to impose their ideas and definitions, their authority in the family buttressed by emotional bonds, in other contexts by their class or function.⁷

This imbalance of power has also been used by adults to sexually abuse and/or exploit children, both inside and outside of the family.

The accumulation of new forms of knowledge through institutions and the professions has increased what Foucault has called the ‘regulatory impact’ of social provision for children. As the emergence and operation of the children’s voluntary organisations and the development of the welfare state shows, the surveillance of children and the accumulation and usage of information regarding them has served as a means to intervene in the family, establishing new expectations and standards of child rearing and child behaviour. In this respect, Foucault maintains that the categorisations brought about by the accumulation of professional knowledge act as a control mechanism.⁸ According to Foucault, the apparatus of sexuality is of central importance in modern power relations⁹ and among his four strategic discourses of sexuality he cites the pedagogisation of children’s sex. This is a discourse which poses a ‘double assertion’, that practically all children indulge in sexual activity – Foucault’s focus here is upon masturbation, which is at the same time ‘natural’ and ‘contrary to nature’. He states that such ‘sexual activity posed physical and moral, individual and collective dangers’ so that children were ‘astride a dangerous dividing line’ policed by parents, families, educators, doctors and eventually psychologists’.¹⁰ This discourse of the dangerousness of child sexuality has been persistent in the records of social institutions and instrumental to the often unsympathetic way in which child prostitutes have been treated. It is also a theme that has been highlighted by other prominent writers and is evident in Harry Hendrick’s discussion of the dualism inherent in the portrayal of children as both victims and threats.¹¹

In a debate of 1978, Foucault made clear his belief that because children were never listened to they were effectively denied the right of sexual consent. Furthermore, he maintained that due to the adult bringing their own sexuality to the child’s, sexual relations between adults and children should not be condemned.¹² Foucault (1978) identified in such condemnation what he saw as the emergence of a new penal system based on protecting populations regarded as vulnerable, in particular children at the mercy of adult sexuality. He found the rationale of professionals, especially psychologists and psychiatrists, who maintained that the sexuality of the child was ‘a territory with its own geography that the adult must not enter’, and that consequently ‘the child must be protected from his own desires even when his desires turn him towards an adult’, ‘extremely questionable’. However, as Louise Jackson, following Vicki Bell, has asserted, this reasoning depends upon Foucault’s exclusion of, for example, gender, class and age as fundamental categories of analysis and as determinants of power relations, some ‘individuals do have more power than others’.¹³ In recognition of these inequalities Roger Matthews asserts that, despite its inadequacies, legislation has served as a protective mechanism.

There can be little serious doubt that legal intervention over the past century, with all its anomalies and inconsistencies, has acted to reduce the level of prostitution and provide some protection for women and girls against exploitation.¹⁴

Crucially Foucault’s stance, therefore, tends to negate consideration of moral frameworks or the moral legitimacy of forms of behaviour between adults and children. Nevertheless, Foucault’s (1978) comment that sexuality would become ‘a kind of roaming danger, a sort of omnipresent phantom, a phantom that will be played out between men and women, children and adults, and possibly between adults themselves’ does have considerable modern resonance.

It is the contention of this publication that child prostitution is a form of child abuse. The language evident in historical rhetoric around child prostitution indicates that while a division between child prostitution and child abuse has been made, this division has frequently been contested, especially by feminist organisations. The legal definitions of commercial sexual transactions have continued to emphasise payment, whether in a monetary or material form. Yet not all forms of sexual transaction or payment have been perceived as prostitution, so that public opinion and police discretion have made distinctions taking into account specific circumstances, and this is especially the case with children under 16 years of age. This age is also applied here to boy prostitution, including homosexual prostitution, since the emphasis is upon the youth of some of those involved in commercial sex. Furthermore, such an emphasis is not to assert that adult prostitution is considered to be a legitimate activity, but to suggest that child prostitution highlights additional and specific issues. It is important to note this since it has been suggested that concentration upon child prostitution somehow legitimates or makes tolerable the prostitution of adults. For example, Barry has asserted that separating child prostitution from that of women ‘distorts the reality of the practices and conveys the impression that on some level it is tolerable to enslave women while child slavery is still reprehensible. Within that distinction lies the implication that one form of slavery is intolerable and worth attention while the other is not’.¹⁵ This stance is denied on specific child welfare grounds.

Any definition of child prostitution must also incorporate consideration of the direct consequences of this activity upon the child; the rights and development of the child. Thus, the broader definition of child abuse offered by David Gil in 1970 is informative. He defines child abuse as any ‘act of commission or omission by individuals, institutions, or society as a whole, and any conditions resulting from such acts or inaction, which deprive children of equal rights and liberties, and/or interfere with their optional development, constitute, by definition, abusive or neglectful acts or conditions’.¹⁶ Definitions, therefore, must incorporate economic activity over which there has been a high degree of agreement, such as street soliciting or working in a brothel as a prostitute, but also refer to social and cultural consequences.

On the face of it the process of child prostitution is merely a commercial transaction, but underlying the action have been extensive and deep associations which have varied according to the social, political and economic climate: the ideologies of childhood and the family; the threat of working-class social standards; a section of the criminal underworld; the decline of morality; the threat of the foreign to Imperial Britain; the vulnerability of women moving to find work and the threat this posed to contemporary social structures. The variations in the predominant depictions of child prostitution have also been reflected in the responses to child prostitution by child welfare agencies and by the police. An important factor is the malleability of such a ‘dangerous’ image as that of child prostitution, which has provided additional impact when related to other social problems. The difficulty has often been attempting to de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction – concepts and contents
• 2 Debating late nineteenth-century child prostitution
• 3 Edwardian England and the ideal family
• 4 War and the 1920s
• 5 Prostitution, child abuse and feminism during the 1920s and 1930s
• 6 Reconstruction and a new society
• 7 The rediscovery of child prostitution during the 1960s and 1970s
• 8 Child prostitution in the 1980s and 1990s (Margaret Melrose and Patrick Ayre)
• Postscript
• References
• Index