Portraits of Juvenile Prostitutes: Reconsidering the Mainstream Trafficking Victim Narrative

The dominant narrative of prostitution in public media and even much scholarship equates sex work with trafficking – giving rise to the ubiquitous expression “sex trafficking” – and portrays sex workers as women and girls who are kidnapped, sold, and violently coerced into a life of slavery from which they need to be rescued. This narrative has been much sensationalized and set as the basis for rigorous criminal legislation against alleged traffickers (i.e., pimps) and clients, as well as reflecting the hegemonic media attention and policy influence of “new abolitionist” feminist scholars and activists who oppose pornography and prostitution as exploitative degradations of women.  A bitter divide exists between these abolitionists and “sex worker advocate”  feminists, who maintain that sexual commerce is not simply a story of victimization, that sex work can be, and often is, consensual and empowering, and that sweeping anti-trafficking policies are misinformed by exaggerated, sensationalized statistics. The ensuing “Sex Wars” have suffered from a lack of empirical evidence about the nature of sex work among those who engage in it, and the paucity of data is especially prevalent among juveniles, presumably the most vulnerable (and likely victimized) population.  This study examines the experiences of 19 juvenile street prostitutes – twelve girls and seven boys – working in Las Vegas, Nevada, using in-depth interviews conducted between February and March 2012.  We investigate the circumstances of these adolescents’ sex work, including age, gender, race, pathways to prostitution, involvement with pimps, and abuse.  In addition to using entry narratives to explore the pathways to sex work, we go beyond simply describing why juveniles become prostitutes and examine the ways that their lives contrast with other traditional narratives about gender and sexuality, race, social arrangements, and economic consumption, all of which speak to harm reduction needs for all street prostitutes.