Prostitution of Children

“ . . . the use of a child in sexual activities for remuneration or any other form of consideration.”
- Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. Article 2(b).

As the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) notes, the prostitution of children is one manifestation of the use of a child in sexual activities for remuneration or any other form of consideration. Most generally, it means that a party other than the child benefits from a commercial transaction in which the child is made available for sexual purposes - either an exploiter intermediary (pimp) who controls or oversees the child’s activities for profit, or an abuser who negotiates an exchange directly with a child in order to receive sexual gratification. The provision of children for sexual purposes may also be a medium of exchange between adults. The prostitution of children is closely connected to the trafficking of children for sexual purposes and child pornography, while child sex tourism generally falls into the category of prostitution.

The prostitution of children is usually conducted in particular environments, such as from brothels, or bars and clubs, or homes, or particular streets and zones. Sometimes it is not organised, but most usually it is, either on a small scale through individual exploiter-pimps or on a large scale through extensive criminal networks. Children also engage in prostitution, however, when they exchange sex outside these locations and in return not only for basic needs such as accommodation, food, clothing, drugs or safety, but also for favours such as higher grades at school or extra pocket money for desired consumer goods otherwise out of their reach. In all these cases, the key issue is not that children opt to engage in prostitution in order to survive on the one hand or to buy more consumer goods on the other, but that children are pushed by social structures and individual agents into situations in which adults take advantage of their vulnerability and sexually exploit and abuse them. An all too common example of structure and agency combining to force a child into commercial sex is where the prostitution of a child follows on from prior sexual abuse, most likely in the home.

Child prostitution is the most commonly used term in relation to commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC), and the most clearly identifiable manifestation of CSEC, as opposed to commercial sexual exploitation through child marriage, domestic labour and the trafficking of children for sexual purposes. It was the limitations of the term ‘child prostitution’ that led to the development in the mid-1990s of ‘commercial sexual exploitation of children’ as a more encompassing description of specific forms of sexual violence against children. Nevertheless, ‘child prostitution’ remains in common usage and is indeed embedded in international instruments. Yet ‘child prostitution’ and ‘child prostitute’ continue to carry problematic connotations. This is because these constructions, on their own, fail to make it clear that children cannot be expected to make an informed choice to prostitute themselves; the act of prostituting a child is in fact carried out by another party, as is made clear in the definition provided by the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. These terms do not adequately express a child’s experience of force, exploitation, and physical and psychological harm inflicted through their engagement in prostitution. In addition, worldwide public understanding of ‘prostitution’ and ‘prostitute’ has been shifting as a result of the introduction of terms such as ‘sex worker’, intended to raise the perceived status of women in prostitution. However, when it comes to children, to refer to ‘sex work’ is wholly misleading; again, it downplays the criminal exploitation committed against a child forced into prostitution and suggests that a child ‘worker’ has somehow chosen to follow a ‘profession’. In light of these concerns, it is preferable to avoid the term ‘child prostitute’ altogether, and always to make it clear that a child engaged in prostitution has been forced by other people and by circumstances into commercial sex. It is adults who create ‘child prostitution’ through their demand for children as sexual objects, their misuse of power and their desire for profit.