Rethinking Youth Prostitution: National Provision at the Margins of Child Protection and Youth Justice
| Author | Joanna Phoenix |
| Published date | 01 December 2003 |
| Date | 01 December 2003 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/147322540300300303 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Rethinking Youth Prostitution: National Provision at the
Margins of Child Protection and Youth Justice
Joanna Phoenix
Correspondence: Dr Joanna Phoenix, Department of Social and Policy Sciences,
University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY. Email: J.B.M.PhoenixVbath.ac.uk
Abstract
In March 2000, the Department of Health and the Home Office issued guidance
fundamentally altering policy and practice with regard to young people in prostitution.
1
Instead of being arrested and punished for prostitution-related offences, those under 18
years old were to be thought of as children ‘in need’and offered welfare-based
interventions. The practice that has developed in the last three years has offered
interventions that are located within both child protection and youth justice work. This
article examines these changes in order to generate insights about the changing nature of
youth justice. In particular, it is argued that the drive to manage the risks posed by young
people in prostitution to specific organisations, takes precedence over either the desire to
care for, or the demand to punish them. Through an analysis of how practitioners and
policy makers responsible for implementing this new approach to youth prostitution talk
about ‘risk’and ‘responsibility’,‘liability’,‘protection’and ‘punishment’, the article argues
that the contradiction between care and control has been re-interpreted, such that there is
noticeable blurring of the boundaries between welfare and punishment at the margins of
youth justice work.
Introduction
Since the election of the New Labour government in May 1997, virtually every aspect
of how young offenders are dealt with has been subject to broad and sweeping changes.
Many of these changes concern the treatment of specific groups of offenders (for
example ‘persistent young offenders’and ‘first time offenders’), and they have attracted
attention from both within, and outside, academic circles. There have been no less
significant changes to the treatment of other groups of young people that have,
however, attracted little academic and virtually no public attention. Young people who
are involved in prostitution are one such group. Reform here, whilst ‘quieter’and at
the edges of both youth justice and child protection, has been no less sweeping or
profound. In May 2000, the Department of Health and Home Office issued guidance
(entitled Safeguarding Children Involved in Prostitution –hereafter SCIP), that enjoined
welfare and criminal justice agencies to treat young people in prostitution differently
from adults, and specifically, to treat them as potential ‘victims’, rather than as
‘offenders’in breach of prostitution-related laws. Put simply, whereas once a child in
1
A note about terminology is helpful. Throughout this paper I use the term ‘young people in prostitution’to signify all those
individuals under the age of 18 years old who are involved in the formal exchange of sex for money. Other terms, however, are
gaining popularity amongst practitioners (including sexually exploited young people, sexually exploited children, and children
abused through prostitution) who use their preferred term to indicate their discursive positioning of young people’s involvement
in prostitution. Where the argument I make is concerned with specific demarcations of young people I indicate this through
terms such as young girls and boys (that is those under 16 years old) or young womenand men (that is those 16–18 years old).
prostitution could be cautioned, arrested, charged and punished in the same way as an
adult, now they are to be treated as young people ‘at risk’or experiencing ‘significant
harm’. This paper draws on two different research projects and asks what, if anything,
can be understood about changes in youth justice more broadly through an
examination of such shifts at the margins.
The first research project examined local level implementation of SCIP.
2
For this
project, five local authorities in England and Wales were selected for in-depth study.
In each area, senior police officers (strategic and operational), social service directors,
assistant directors, team managers, senior local authority policy officers (where
appropriate), voluntary organisation directors, managers and workers were selected for
interview. The aim was to interview as many as possible of the people in the particular
local authority tasked with actually drafting protocols and implementing SCIP. For this
reason, the use of snowball sampling for selecting interviewees was considered most
appropriate. Interviews focused on local history vis-a`-vis dealing with young people in
prostitution and institutional, organisational and structural processes that either
facilitated or inhibited policy and practice innovation. Follow-up interviews were
conducted 9 months after original interviews. The number of interviewees from each
local authority varied, although the total number of personnel interviewed was 43. Both
sets of interview transcripts were supplemented by other documentary data, including
minutes of key meetings, practice protocols, service level agreements, policy documents
and any other relevant information that became available.
The second research project’s primary aim was to compile a searchable, updatable,
publicly accessible database of all services, provision and people working with young
people in prostitution in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
3
A tiered
interviewing methodology was adopted that relied on gatekeepers and snowball
sampling. No geographical sampling was used, as the purpose of the research was to
collect data from every local authority area in the UK. Initial contact was made with
at least three organisations or committees in each local authority that had responsibility
for crime reduction, child protection, sexual health or youth work, and a respondent
was identified to interview regarding services and provision within that authority. The
second tier involved contacting and interviewing all those agencies, projects or
individuals that the first tier informant identified, to obtain detailed information about
provision of services and delivery. If further projects, agencies or individuals were
identified in the course of second tier interviews, then a third tier was introduced and
so on. Information was collected about what specific projects do, which client groups
they work with, whether they provide generic services or focus on specific aspects of
young people’s lives (for example providing drugs advice or housing services).
Alongside this data was also gathered with regard to methods of work or approaches
which were perceived as ‘good practice’, the local difficulties encountered by specific
organisations in their efforts to work with young people in prostitution and other
agencies, and current issues of practice and policy development. For the purpose of
2
This project was entitled ‘Youth Prostitution Policy Innovation in England and Wales’and was funded by the Nuffield
Foundation (SGS/0049/a).
3
This project, entitled ‘Youth Prostitution: A Database’was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (R000223916).
The Final Report for this project is publicly available via the Internet on www.regard.ac.uk
Youth Justice Vol. 3 No. 3 153
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