Book Reviews
| Author | John Crichton,Nigel Parton,George Mair,Jo Deakin |
| Published date | 01 February 2003 |
| Date | 01 February 2003 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1466802503003001459 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Alyson Brown and David Barrett
Knowledge of Evil: Child Prostitution and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-
Century England
Cullompton, Devon: Willan, 2002. 212 pp. (incl. index). £25.00 (hbk)
ISBN 1–903240–63–8
•Reviewed by Nigel Parton, University of Huddersfield, UK
This is a fascinating and frustrating book at the same time! In many respects it
provides a very valuable contribution to a previously very under-researched
area. It provides a fairly detailed critical appraisal of the way we have thought
about and responded to the issue of child prostitution in England through the
20th century. More particularly, it provides a detailed analysis of the way
policies have been developed and undeveloped in relation to child prostitution
and debated in parliamentary debates, important official and semi-official
reports and in the news and newspapers more generally. Chapters 3 to 7
inclusive draw on a range of original research that looks at the period from
Edwardian England through to the 1970s in some detail. Chapter 2 draws on
a range of secondary sources and other research to outline how the issue was
first articulated and discovered in the second half of the 19th century.
A key theme running through these chapters is that the way child
prostitutes have been conceptualized is in terms of a number of characteristics
that they are not. More particularly, they are perceived as not a sexual,
dependent, moral or a real child, but also not an adult. The argument, which
is very convincing, is that there is a tendency for this negative abstraction to
lead to assumptions about what child prostitutes are, so that they are
invariably seen as sexually assertive, independent, immoral and as a distorted
or perverse form of childhood or something ‘other’. A key part of this analysis
is that while concerns about child prostitution have often overlapped with and
coincided with those around child sexual abuse, there have also been
important distinctions. More particularly, discourses about child prostitution
have led to condemnation and criminalization rather than sympathy and
protection. The empirical parts of the book are detailed and convincing in
laying out this central argument. In the process not only are we given insights
into the way the issue of child prostitution has been placed on political and
professional agendas, in ways that have often marginalized it, but also into
BOOK REVIEWS
Criminal Justice
© 2003 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
1466–8025(200302) 3:1;
Vol. 3(1): 127–133; 030459
127
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