Critical Perspectives on Child Sexual Exploitation and Related Trafficking

M. Melrose, J. Pearce, M. Melrose, J. Pearce

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137294098
• eBook ISBN: 9781137294104
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume is the first major exploration of the issues relevant to young people who are affected by sexual exploitation and trafficking from a variety of critical perspectives. Issues include accommodation, gangs, migrant and refugee communities, perpetrators, international policy and the language through which we construct child exploitation.

1

Young People and Sexual Exploitation: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Margaret Melrose

Introduction

Although the title of this chapter contains the phrase ‘sexual exploitation’ this is not a term I will employ uncritically in the following discussion. The chapter will present a critical analysis of the discourse of ‘child sexual exploitation’ (CSE) and I will therefore refer to ‘young people’s involvement in commercial sex markets’ and/or ‘participation in commercial sexual transactions’ in place of this term.

In this chapter I make four key criticisms of the CSE discourse that currently dominates academic debate and determines policy and practice development in the UK. Firstly, I argue that there has been an expansion of the discourse since the turn of the twenty-first century. This has rendered the meaning of the term rather ‘vague’ and ‘ambiguous’ (Asquith and Turner, 2008; Melrose, 2012a, b). I suggest that the expansion of this discourse lends the concept a certain elasticity which means that a variety of situations and behaviours can be interpreted as ‘child sexual exploitation’ (Melrose, 2012a).

Secondly, I argue that the discourse is predicated on, and reproduces, two more fundamental discourses. These are firstly a discourse of ‘childhood’ that dominates Western thought about ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ and secondly a discourse of ‘female childhood’ – because, despite its pretentions to gender neutrality, the imagined child of CSE discourse is invariably female and as such young men are largely rendered invisible by it (Dennis, 2008; Melrose, 2010). The idea of childhood on which the CSE discourse is predicated imagines children as dependent, innocent, pure, unable to exercise choice and unable to enter contracts, whilst the discourse of female childhood constructs female sexuality from within a sexual double standard that sees women ‘primarily as objects of male desire’ (Powell, 2010: 174). I therefore argue that the CSE discourse is produced by, and reproduces, particular understandings of ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ and particular understandings of adolescent female sexuality.

Thirdly, I argue that CSE discourse positions the young people concerned as always and inevitably passive victims/objects and thereby tells only particular and partial truths about them. I suggest that these partial truths primarily serve the interests of fundraising and campaigning arms of organisations that work with these young people rather than the interests of the young people themselves.

Fourthly, I contend that the individualising character of CSE discourse reduces young people’s involvement to a problem of the (individual) morality/immorality of those who would pay for their sexual services and/or an individual problem of the behaviour of the young people. This directs attention away from the social, economic and cultural arrangements and processes that render young people vulnerable to involvement in commercial sex markets. It thereby obscures wider concerns with young people’s poverty and socio-economic disadvantage: the very factors that, in conjunction with other dynamics and experiences, underpin involvement in those markets (Melrose, 2010; Pearce, 2009; Phoenix, 2001; 2002). In other words, I argue that the ‘sexually exploited child’ of the CSE discourse is abstracted from the concrete conditions of her life and (re)presented as the pitiful personification of a corrupted or defiled ideal of Western childhood.

I conclude the discussion by considering debates about the ‘mainstreaming’ of sex in contemporary culture and locating young people involved in commercial sex markets in what has been described as an ‘unprecedented sexualised, sex-crazed and sex-everywhere culture’ (Powell, 2010: 1).

In undertaking this critical analysis it is not my intention to suggest that young people’s involvement in commercial sex markets is acceptable or necessarily advantageous to them, or that involvement in those markets should be condoned. I am not suggesting that involvement in commercial sex markets is never exploitative or that we should not be concerned with trying to protect young people from involvement in those markets. What I am arguing is that the way in which the dominant CSE discourse constructs such involvement (and consequently determines, in policy and practice, how the protection of young people involved is approached) does not meet young people’s social and economic needs and therefore does not protect them adequately.

Expanding discourse

CSE discourse fundamentally conditions how young people’s involvement in commercial sexual transactions is accounted for and thereby determines responses in policy and practice. In other words, discourses have material effects and these effects make themselves felt by delimiting what can or cannot be said (or thought – and therefore done) about any particular issue or topic (Eagleton, 1991).

Discourses are ‘strongly implicated in the exercise of power’ (Willig, 2001: 107 cited in Allen, 2003: 216) and ‘dominant discourses derive considerable power from their entrenchment within discursive fields such as the legal system, religion and the family’ (Allen, 2003: 216). Over the past 12 years a particular discourse of CSE has achieved dominance, conditioning understandings and determining responses to young people who are involved in commercial sex markets (Melrose, 2010; 2012a, b).

There has been an historical shift in the language through which young people’s involvement in these markets has been apprehended and understood: from ‘abuse through prostitution’ during the mid to late 1990s to ‘commercial sexual exploitation’ in the early years of the twenty-first century and most recently an expansion of the concept to ‘sexual exploitation’ (e.g. DCSF, 2009). This new and expanded language means that the concept of CSE no longer necessarily signals young people’s abuse through prostitution or in commercial markets (Melrose, 2012a, b). Arguably this new language stretches the concept to the point of meaninglessness and in practice this means that distinguishing CSE from other forms of adolescent sexual activity has become increasingly difficult (Melrose, 2012a).

The CSE discourse was promoted from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century by campaigning organisations (such as children’s charities) so as to establish a distinction between the involvement of young people and the involvement of adults in commercial sex markets (Melrose, 2010; 2012a; O’Connell-Davidson, 2005). This distinction enabled campaigning organisations to claim that young people’s involvement in commercial sex markets was a form of sexual abuse and thus to argue that children and young people who were involved should be afforded a child protection response rather than criminalisation and punishment (Barnardos, 1998; Melrose, Barrett and Brodie, 1999). The success of these campaigns resulted in the introduction of new government guidance (DoH/HO, 2000) in relation to the treatment of young people involved and, since its introduction, the ‘discursive separation of child and adult prostitution’ (O’Connell-Davidson, 2005: 44) has become ever more firmly entrenched (Melrose, 2012a).

The discursive separation of adult and young people’s involvement in commercial sex markets means that the weight of historical and contemporary, national and international, evidence regarding adult involvement in sex work is largely overlooked when the involvement of young people is considered. Research on adult engagement in sex work demonstrates that, for both young and old, males and females, the decision to enter commercial sex markets is frequently taken in the context of social deprivation, unemployment and poverty (Andrieu-Sanz and Vasquez, 1989; Barrett, 1994, 1997; Crosby and Barrett, 1999; Cusick, 2003; Edwards, 1992; Gibson, 1995; Green, 1992; Hardman, 1997; Matthews, 2008; Melrose, 2010; Melrose, Barrett and Brodie, 1999; O’Connell-Davidson, 1995, 1998, 2005; O’Neill, 1994; 1997; O’Neill, Goode and Hopkins, 1995; Phoenix, 2001; Pitts, 1997).

Their lack of economic autonomy and their dependence on adults of course means that young people who become involved in sex work are vulnerable in ways that adults are not (O’Connell-Davidson, 1998). However, this is no reason to suppose that evidence to explain the involvement of adults might not equally apply to young people. It can be no coincidence that, for example, in the United Kingdom the majority of those involved in commercial sex markets are single parent mothers and young people for whom state welfare benefits are ‘completely inadequate or wholly absent’ (O’Connell-Davidson, 1998: 14; q.v. Melrose, 2010; 2012c).

Alongside poverty, many adults and young people who become involved have experienced a range of debilitating processes. Many of those involved have histories of family discord and, for some, ‘child sexual and physical abuse provides a fundamental stage and set of experiences which make the decision to enter prostitution more probable’ (Matthews, 2008: 66). In short, in relation to both adults and young people, the reasons for becoming involved are complex; ‘there is no simple or single answer to the question of how people become involved’ (O’Connell-Davidson, 2005: 46) or why they become involved. Moreover, the dynamics involved may be contradictory (Matthews, 2008).

Predicates of the discourse of child sexual exploitation

The sociology of childhood has enabled us to recognise that our contemporary understandings of ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ derive from a discourse of childhood that emerged in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century (Aries, 1962). This discourse, promoted primarily by developmental psychology ‘in a pact with medicine, education and government agencies’ (James, Jenks and Prout, 1998: 17), has since become deeply ingrained in Western thinking about ‘children’ and ‘childhood’. This discourse constructs childhood as ‘an inadequate precursor to the real state of human being, namely being “grown up”’ (James, Jenks and Prout, 1998: 18).

The ‘child’ is discursively constructed as the opposite of an ‘adult’ and is thus assumed to embody all of those qualities and characteristics that an adult does not. Children are imagined as passive and incapable of independent action; innocent as opposed to worldly-wise; dependent as opposed to independent or autonomous; pure as opposed to tainted; irrational as opposed to rational (Brace, 2003 cited in O’Connell-Davidson, 2005). Furthermore, children are assumed to be asexual and childhood is imagined as a period of sexual innocence (Bragg and Buckingham, 2010; Haydon and Scraton, 2002; Pilcher, 1996). As Kincaid writes:

The child is that species which is free of sexual feeling or response; the adult is that species which has crossed over into sexuality.

Kincaid (1992: 7 cited in O’Connell-Davidson, 2005: 93)

According to the UNCRC definition of a ‘child’ a child or young person does not become ‘adult’ and thereby ‘cross over into sexuality’ until they are 18, which renders adolescent engagement in sexual activity before that age somewhat problematic. As Pilcher (1996: 78) writes, ‘Western ideologies around sexuality and childhood mean that the pairing of “children” with “sex” is morally inappropriate’ and ‘evidence of childhood sexuality undermines ideas about what childhood should “properly” be.’

In addition to imagining childhood as a period of sexual innocence childhood is envisaged through a gendered mode of discourse that constructs male and female childhoods quite differently. As a consequence, when adolescent sexuality is considered it is not thought of in the same way for boys and girls. Male and female sexuality is imagined within the ‘double standard’ of (hetero) sexuality that constructs male sexuality as active and pursuant and female sexuality as passive and accommodating (Allen, 2003; Cohen, 2011; Haydon and Scraton, 2002; Hird and Jackson, 2001; Powell, 2010). This mode of discourse considers girls’ sexual desire as an ‘aberration’ (Cohen, 2011: 13): their sexual expression is permissible only in ‘preparation for reproduction and motherhood’ (Cohen, 2011: 13; q.v. Powell, 2010; Haydon and Scraton, 2002) and they are sanctioned for expressing their sexuality outside of a ‘love relationship’ (Cohen, 2011; Haydon and Scraton, 2002; Powell, 2010: 42). Conversely, girls are ‘constantly reminded to emphasise their femininity, to respond to and excite the male gaze’ but are ‘negatively labelled should they be confident, assertive or sexually active’ (Cohen, 2011; Haydon and Scraton, 2002: 167; Powell, 2010).

In the dominant discourse of CSE a ‘child’ and a ‘young person’ are conflated, which is arguably ‘infantalising’ (Bragg, 2012: 408) and misleading given that developmental approaches to the study of childhood demonstrate significant changes occurring in young people between the ages of 11 and 18. It is also misleading in the sense that the majority of young people who become involved in commercial sex markets tend to be between 15 and 17 years old (Jago et al., 2011). Thus the majority are not pre-pubertal children as the terminology of CSE might imply.

Creating victims and objects

The CSE discourse cannot and does not account for the sexual agency of young people who become involved because this discourse suggests that all young people are coerced, manipulated or forced into selling or exchanging sexual services by predatory or abusive adults (usually men, who are often masquerading as boyfriends) (Melrose, 2010).

The grammatical construction of CSE discourse establishes in language that the young people concerned are always, and inevitably, passive objects or ‘things’. This is because the verb ‘to exploit’ is transitive verb, requiring a direct object (the thing that is exploited) and an implied subject – ‘the exploiter’. By constructing the young person as an ‘object’ that is exploited the discourse of CSE manages, in one phrase, to negate the idea that the young people concerned might be exercising their own agency. This discursive construction thereby establishes that these young people are not acting autonomously and not acting under their own volition, and they cannot therefore be understood as social actors in their own right (Melrose, 2012b). If the CSE discourse establishes that the young people concerned are not acting autonomously or exercising volition then by implication their involvement in commercial sexual transactions must be understood as forced or coerced on the one hand or as irrational action on the other.

There is limited evidence to support the idea that young people who become involved in commercial sexual transactions are always and inevitably passive objects that are groomed, forced or coerced into commercial sexual activity or that they are acting irrationally (Harris, private communication, 2011). On the contrary, there is evidence to suggest that some of these young people may be making constrained, but rational, choices within the context of highly diminished circumstances and opportunities (Melrose, Barrett and Brodie, 1999; q.v. Scott and Skidmore, 2006; Montgomery, 1998; O’Connell-Davidson, 2005). In these conditions young people may be exposed to social networks that serve only to reinforce marginalised and disadvantaged social identities and statuses (i.e. they only have access to negative social capital) (Wacquant, 1998) where only their bodily capital has any value (Bernstein, 1999). In these settings sexuality represents a form of symbolic capital (Powell, 2010: 48) and for some young people it may ‘make sense’ (Phoenix, 2001) to exploit their symbolic capital in commercial sex markets.

A ‘youthful’ body has a very high premium in Western culture (not just in the sex industry but in the culture generally), which is why ‘older’ women are exhorted by advertising campaigns and cosmetics manufacturers to ‘dispel the signs of ageing’ and to invest in all sorts of anti-ageing products and treatments. Young people involved in sex markets are similarly aware that there is a premium on youth in the sex industry and know that the younger they are, or look, the more they can earn (Melrose, Barrett and Brodie, 1999). Discussing boys involved in the sex industry, for example, Gibson (1995: 163) noted,

There is a lot of pressure on the boys to look as young as possible. The younger they are, the more physically and emotionally underdeveloped they appear, the more they are in demand. They have a ‘sell-by date’ of up to the age of nineteen.

Youthfulness is therefore a very important commodity in the sex industry. Just as adults are able to opt for sex industry ‘careers’ as a viable alternative to no or low income, so young women and young men are able to exploit their symbolic capital and their ‘youthfulness’ by selling or swapping sexual services for financial gain. In conditions of socio-economic marginalisation this might represent the ‘best’ way to survive when confronted with limited opportunities for income generation (Melrose, 2010; 2012c).

Individualising child sexual exploitation

The young person who becomes involved in commercial sex markets voluntarily, as a result of exercising their own agency, is an anomaly that CSE discourse cannot accommodate. The idea that young people might make an autonomous decision to sell or swap sex threatens the system of binary opposition that generates understandings of what children and young people are (O’Connell-Davidson, 2005). It also undermines the binary opposition between adults (who are able to enter contracts to sell sex if they wish) and children (who, by virtue of the fact that they are children, are unable to enter such contracts). Furthermore, it destabilises the binary opposition that distinguishes the exploited from the

exploiters and the victims from the villains. From within the dominant CSE discourse, therefore, young people who wilfully or voluntarily engage in such actions cannot be considered either as ‘children’ as they are conventionally understood or as ‘victims’ of ‘exploiters’. These young people therefore need to be bracketed off from the category of ‘child’ – and yet they are no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Table and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Child Sexual Exploitation and Related Trafficking
• 1 Young People and Sexual Exploitation: A Critical Discourse Analysis
• 2 Drifting into Trouble: Sexual Exploitation and Gang Affiliation
• 3 Something Old or Something New: Do Pre-Existing Conceptualisations of Abuse Enable a Sufficient Response to Abuse in Young People’s Relationships and Peer Groups?
• 4 A Social Model of ‘Abused Consent’
• 5 Looked After Young People and CSE: A View from Northern Ireland
• 6 Young People, Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation: A View from Scotland
• 7 Missing from Discourse: South Asian Young Women and Sexual Exploitation
• 8 Partners in Care? Sexually Exploited Young People’s Inclusion and Exclusion from Decision Making about Safeguarding
• 9 Constructs of Safety for Children in Care Affected by Sexual Exploitation
• 10 Intersections in ‘Trafficking’ and ‘Child Sexual Exploitation’ Policy
• 11 Trafficking of Children and Young People: ‘Community’ Knowledge and Understandings
• Concluding Thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index