Joining the dots on sexual exploitation of children and women: A way forward for UK policy responses

Introduction

In England and Wales, policy on sexual exploitation of children (CSE) has developed significantly over the last decade. A national action plan (Department for Education, 2011) builds on 2009 statutory guidance (DCSF, 2009). A high profile inquiry into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England, which ran from 2011 to 2013 (Berelowitz et al., 2013), tirelessly pushed CSE into policy arenas, producing data on extrapolated numbers of victim-survivors and systemic poor practices by statutory agencies. Knowledge and awareness have also been deepened by reports unravelling the extent of sexual exploitation in specific towns and cities (e.g. Jay, 2014), which have identified painful lessons for services about their inability to prevent and disrupt the targeting of young women by abusers. Research has documented the experiences of sexually exploited young people and the need for specialist support (e.g. Beckett et al., 2013; Firmin, 2011; Melrose and Pearce, 2013; Pearce, 2009). Alongside this, convictions of groups of men for exploiting and abusing young women have kept CSE at the forefront of public awareness and spurred policymakers into sometimes knee-jerk, sometimes more thoughtful, responses.

These initiatives have undoubtedly created a more receptive climate for addressing CSE and have the potential to hold agencies accountable for their (in)action. In policy terms, the impact was perhaps best witnessed in March 2015, when the Coalition government designated CSE a ‘national threat’, accompanied by a series of proposals to strengthen sanctions for professionals who fail to respond appropriately. Inadequate and incoherent approaches have long been noted, from agencies viewing sexual exploitation as a ‘new concept’ (Jago and Pearce, 2008), to significant gaps in implementation of guidance frameworks. In 2011, less than one quarter of Safeguarding Boards across England were assessed as taking proactive steps to address CSE (Jago et al., 2011). The Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC) inquiry subsequently concluded that just six per cent of Local Safeguarding Children Boards were fully meeting government guidance on safeguarding children from CSE (Berelowitz et al., 2013).

Here I suggest that attempts to eliminate CSE will be strengthened by taking a wider, and gendered, view on sexual exploitation. Building on feminist research and activism, the article argues that those concerned with stopping CSE should support calls for policymakers to address those who pay for sex. This would strengthen current approaches to sexually exploited young people, and offer a route to primary prevention. The first section of the article sketches out how sexual exploitation of children is connected to the wider sex industry. The following two sections explore how current understandings of sexual exploitation can be analytically extended to the experiences of adult women. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the ways in which gender is an integral dimension of sexual exploitation of both young people and adults, and how policy can address this.

Locating sexual exploitation of children in the wider sex industry

The plainest evidence of links between sexual exploitation of children and of adults is that significant proportions of women were under the age of 18 when they first became embroiled in the sex industry. The largest global study to date (Farley et al., 2003) found 47% of the 854 participants were minors when they were first paid for sex. UK data mirrors this finding: almost two thirds (64%) of 50 women in one study were under 16 (Melrose et al., 1999); just over half (52%) of 122 women were 18 or under in later research (Hester and Westmarland, 2004); and a third (32%) were under 18 in a recent study involving 114 women (Bindel et al., 2013).

Thus, the differentiation of exploitation of children from adult women in the sex industry has long been regarded as a ‘false distinction’ (Jeffreys, 2000). Deriving from the definition of a child in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as under 18 years, throughout the 1990s this threshold was cemented as a marker for action on sexual exploitation (Jeffreys, 2000). In England and Wales, policy guidance first introduced in 1999 and refreshed in 2009, defines the exchange of sex for material gain as abuse where it involves minors (Department of Health et al., 2000; DCSF, 2009). Among a raft of new offences introduced in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 was the criminalisation of the purchase of sex from those under 18. This marks a shift from previous legal frameworks which did not distinguish between children and adults selling sex, leading to the absurd circumstances where children over the age of criminal responsibility (10 years) could be criminalised for selling sexual acts to which they could not legally consent for another six years (Pearce, 2009). Up to this point, similar explanations were drawn on for young people’s involvement in prostitution as for adult women’s: either as an economic survival strategy or as a result of introduction through peer networks (Melrose, 2013). The paradigm shift of the 2000s brought a focus on ‘abuse through prostitution’, with processes of grooming by predatory adults defined and identified and, in formal guidance at least, a problematising of the notion of ‘choice’ to sell sex when applied to young people under the age of 18.

What this has led to is a curious position where a young woman of 17 years and 364 days old is regarded as a victim of abuse, but the following day as voluntarily selling sex. The same argument can be applied to all legal frameworks where age delineates an offence: the age of criminal responsibility for example, and thresholds of sexual consent. However, given that themes of agency and victimhood dominate discussions about the exchange of sex for money or ‘something’ (Dodsworth, 2014; Jeffreys, 2000), a critical engagement with what constitutes consent to sell access to the body is required. As Kelly and Regan (2000: 18) ask, ‘what process can occur in 24 hours that transforms something inherently exploitative into an issue of choice and consent?’

Part of this shift in perspective to recognise sexual exploitation as a form of sexual abuse was its decoupling from the word prostitution and the formal sex industry. This is represented by a ‘refashioning of the language through which we have come to apprehend young people’s involvement in commercial sex markets … [away] from “abuse through prostitution”’ (Melrose, 2013: 156). This has not only served to ‘distinguish young people’s involvement from that of adults’, but sharply dissociated ‘children and young people from the terminology of “prostitution”’ (Melrose, 2013: 159). Indeed, children’s charities have successfully lobbied for the language of prostitution to be entirely expunged from legislation on CSE. References to ‘child prostitution’ are argued to diminish recognition of how children are abused and victimised (Barnardo’s, 2014), precisely because of the association with selling sex, choice and agency. That young women are not identified as sexually exploited because their behaviours are read as consensual commercialised sexual activity has long been recognised. Enquiries into murders of young women in local authority care who were known to be selling sex criticised social workers for labelling girls ‘promiscuous’ (Coy, 2009). The recent inquiry by the OCC, and the Serious Case Review into sexual exploitation in Rochdale collated examples of young women described by professionals as ‘prostituting themselves’ and phrases that resonate strongly with judgements made about women who sell sex: ‘asking for it’, ‘sexually available’, ‘liking the glamour’, ‘engaging in risky behaviour’ (Berelowitz et al., 2012). Assumptions that involvement in prostitution is a freely made choice led to inaction by police and other agencies (Rochdale Borough Safeguarding Children Board, 2013); thus severing links with prostitution has been a strategy to define sexual exploitation as abuse.

However, this ‘discursive formation’ of CSE detached from commercial sex markets becomes deeply individualist, focusing on vulnerability, and has been argued to obscure both contextual material realities and the extent to which young people perceive that they are making decisions (Melrose, 2013). The ignition of ‘consent’ as a feature of discussions surrounding CSE has been explored elsewhere (e.g. Pearce, 2013), as has the view that selling sex can be a freely chosen means for women to earn money (e.g. Sanders, 2004). Something of a chasm remains, however, between those that identify (some) young people as making decisions in constrained circumstances and responses by policymakers which outright reject this possibility. Pearce (2013), for example, has developed a continuum of how consent can be felt to be given under different pressures and circumstances. Louise Casey’s (2015) reflective report for the Coalition government, in contrast, argues that ‘children … cannot consent to their abuse … There should be no scenarios in which victims are viewed … as making choices’ (p. 3). The suppression of young people’s sense of agency is both cause and consequence of separating CSE from prostitution. It reflects how CSE has become increasingly framed as sexual abuse, losing sight of its ‘additional dynamics and realities’ as a form of sexual abuse (Kelly and Regan, 2000: 15). Switching to sexual abuse from sexual exploitation has underscored the violation and violence involved, but effacing ‘through prostitution’ has enabled a model of sexual exploitation known as grooming – the manipulation and coercion of young people by abusive adults – to dominate policy and practice (Melrose, 2013). If young women can never be actors, only acted on, we have lost the ability to interrogate the circumstances under which young women make decisions, and what needs to change in those contexts to make different decisions possible.

Melrose (2013) argues that we have lost connections with prostitution as an institution that is rooted in historical and contemporary inequalities: if we can no longer talk about ‘young people’s abuse through prostitution’ we are therefore deprived of an understanding of the basis of their exploitation in commercial sex markets. Her insightful analysis offers two key conceptual clues for understanding what is lost when sexual exploitation of children is hived off from that of adults. First, as noted, separating forms of commercial sexual exploitation of children from the institution of prostitution creates a polarisation between those under 18 who, as victims of abuse can never be making a decision to sell sex, however constrained that decision is, and those over 18, where sexual exploitation is not abuse and are therefore discursively always making an empowering choice. While some argue that women can and do make a positive and rewarding choice to sell sex (e.g. Sanders, 2004), what Melrose (2013) leads us to is that this sharp distinction between children and adults reinforces a caricatured binary of forced versus free. Secondly, prostitution is profoundly gendered in that the majority of those selling sex are women and girls, and those buying men, across contexts and settings (Coy, 2012a; Jeffreys, 2000). When this gendered social institution is effaced from framings of sexual exploitation for children, structural analysis is limited to age, and in some more recent discussions, race. Gender dissolves from view. This discussed in more detail later.

A question here is whether the sex industry remains a pertinent context for CSE. Are young people ‘abused through prostitution’, or have new technologies given rise to different modes of exploitation? In Melrose’s research, the concept of CSE had become so stretched that the range of forms of abusive relationships and networks named by practitioners that she interviewed ‘may have little to do with the abuse of children and young people through commercial, sexual, transactions’ (2013: 160). Relationships with older men, for instance, are now included in models of sexual exploitation (see Barnardo’s, 2011). This might indicate that approaches which address the sex industry have increasingly less relevance, since CSE takes forms that are no longer so visibly stitched to commercial sex markets. Yet in recent high profile cases that have acted as the driver for urgent policy action, men were convicted of facilitating or arranging child prostitution (Oxford and Bristol), trafficking for sexual exploitation (Oxford, Bristol and Rochdale) and procuring (Rochdale). That sexual exploitation of children continues to operate in commercial terms is evident.

Joining the dots between exploitation of children and of adult women

As Kelly et al. (2000) suggest, it is revealing to ask questions of how children become targeted by exploiters and entrapped in abusive networks: questions that are rarely asked of adult women where notions of agency and volition dominate. Exploring how CSE is currently defined in policy terms opens a route to understanding how power inequalities, coercion and ‘choiceless choices’ (Langer, 1980) also apply to experiences of adult women in the sex industry.

The current policy definition of sexual exploitation used in England and Wales was devised by the National Working Group in consultation with specialist practitioners. It covers forms of exploitation, contexts and explanations, and is worth quoting in full.

Sexual exploitation of children and young people under 18 involves exploitative situations, contexts and relationships where young people (or a third person or persons) receive ‘something’ (e.g. food, accommodation, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, affection, gifts, money) as a result of them performing, and/or another or others performing on them, sexual activities. Child sexual exploitation can occur through the use of technology without the child’s immediate recognition; for example being persuaded to post sexual images on the Internet/mobile phones without immediate payment or gain. In all cases, those exploiting the child/young person have power over them by virtue of their age, gender, intellect, physical strength and/or economic or other resources. Violence, coercion and intimidation are common, involvement in exploitative relationships being characterised in the main by the child or young person’s limited availability of choice resulting from their social/economic and/or emotional vulnerability. (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2009: 9, emphasis added)

The only way in which this definition is limited to children is the reference to age. Its creativity lies in linking different forms of exploitation – a prescient inclusion of how sexualised images can be shared without consent for the gain or gratification of others – to how coercion can be diffused, not just through abusive individuals (pimps/traffickers) but also through networks. That women who sell sex experience disproportionate levels of violence and abuse preceding their entry into prostitution and within it is well documented (e.g. Bindel et al., 2013; Coy, 2012b; Farley et al., 2003; Hester and Westmarland, 2004; Melrose et al., 1999). Study after study in the UK and across the globe notes the sex industry as a context in which sexual and physical violence, perpetrated by men against women and girls, is pervasive (see Coy, 2012b for an overview). Histories of sexual abuse in childhood underpin many women’s entry into the sex industry, and some women in prostitution speak of a disrupted sense of belonging in the body that is linked to both historic abuse and selling access to their bodies (Coy, 2012b). Recognition that ‘violence, coercion and intimidation are common’ is therefore also applicable to adult women. All too often, however, understandings of coercion are limited to explicit use of force, rather than the subtle and unseen ways in which power operates to narrow possibilities (Kelly, 2003).

The analysis of power in the definition can also be applied to adult women. Prostitution does not exist in a vacuum, but in global and UK social contexts where there are significant structural gender inequalities: the gender pay gap; under-representation of women in decision-making; ongoing violence against women; the sexualisation of female bodies in popular culture (Coy, 2012a). The persistence of these economic and social inequalities around the globe is well documented (Walby, 2011). Together these layers of disadvantage experienced by women mean that so-called free choices are decisions made in conditions of already existing inequality and discrimination. Human rights framings can be interpreted as gender inequality itself comprising coercion, since poverty is recognised to ‘force’ women into prostitution, and the poorest in all social hierarchies are women and girls (EVAW, 2014). While the definition can be – and perhaps often is – interpreted as referring to power disparities between individual exploiters and victim-survivors, the structural factors of gender and economic resources link CSE with that of adult women.

Through this we can make connections with the final clause of the definition: ‘limited availability of choice’. Children and young people have specific needs and disadvantages because of their lack of power and resources, and developmental capacities, relative to those of adults. They are dependent on adults – parents, guardians or those charged with a corporate care responsibility – for shelter, sustenance and emotional protection. These institutionalised inequalities between children and adults are referred to by Melrose (2002) as ‘senarchy’. It is precisely this dependence that can so often be initiation into sexual exploitation: many accounts from young women speak of their being in search of a bed for the night, a meal, transport, and expected or coerced into exchanging sexual acts as payment (Pearce, 2009). Some abusers deliberately target those with limited economic capital, understanding the allure of participating in materialist consumerism. However, women’s decisions to sell sex are also located within contexts where they have fewer economic resources, compared to men, albeit social intersections affect this: women positioned at lower levels of race and class hierarchies are over-represented in the prostitution system (Coy, 2012a). Histories of emotional disadvantage are also documented in many women’s experiences: backgrounds of local authority care; sexual and physical abuse; and disenfranchisement from school and peers (Coy, 2009). Rather than individualist notions of vulnerability, these are systematic inequalities.

Almost all of the elements of this definition, except the reference to age, can be applied to understanding the involvement of adult women in the sex industry. Approaches and initiatives on sexual exploitation of children that do not extend beyond eighteenth birthdays lack this understanding.

Complicating the conflation of sexual abuse and sexual exploitation

The conflation of sexual abuse and sexual exploitation in popular and policy discourse operates at multiple levels. The national action plan (DCSF, 2009: 9) states that ‘sexual exploitation of children and young people is a form of child sexual abuse’, echoing Kelly et al.’s (2000) point that CSE is part of a continuum of childhood abuse. Yet as Brayley et al. (2014) note, the current policy definition cited above is not limited to commercial forms, and what counts as abuse or exploitation becomes open to subjective interpretation. A confused and confusing switch between the two terms is in play. Specialist support services for victim-survivors of rape and sexual abuse report that they are increasingly asked to develop specific initiatives on CSE, and provide monitoring data on just this, while media commentary uses ‘child abuse’ or ‘sexual abuse’ to describe what is perceived by practitioners to be sexual exploitation. There are no lines in the sand here. The policy definition of CSE centres on the receipt of ‘something’, including affection, in exchange for sexual activities. Childhood sexual abuse often revolves around this dynamic, with abusers promising affection, or withholding it, making differentiation based on the definition complex. Yet, as Kelly et al. (2000) argue, sexual exploitation implies additional dynamics, and it is these that are lost when sexual abuse supersedes CSE as a descriptive frame.

In 1997, Cathy Itzin developed a conceptual model of intrafamilial and extrafamilial sexual abuse and exploitation. Placing ‘adult and child pornography’ at the centre, she placed other forms of sexual exploitation as segments in a wheel. By illustrating overlaps between sexual abuse by family members and/or unrelated adults and exploitation through prostitution, pornography, trafficking and sex tourism, she gave a visual frame to Kelly et al.’s (1995: 14) observation that commercial sexual exploitation is ‘not easily separable from other forms of sexual abuse in childhood’. Itzin’s core argument was based on the experiential knowledge of survivors: that as Kelly (1988) identified, forms of abuse shade in and out of each other in a continuum, and approaches that separate violences from each other in neat boxes – often in legal classifications – fail to recognise this. Young women who are sexually abused within the home may also be offered to abusers outside the family; images may be made of the abuse perpetrated against them, which may be traded commercially; they may be literally sold into organised crime networks. In developing a model that sought to capture this, Itzin (1997, 2001) had a further aim: to highlight that abusers in ‘every category’ were ‘normal, ordinary, heterosexual men: fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers and their male friends’ (2001: 39). This makes problematic notions of the ‘paedophile’ as sexually deviant, socially marginalised ‘others’ (see also Kelly, 1996) and instead shifts attention to men, masculinity and men’s abusive practices. Below I update Itzin’s (1997, 2001) model, using language that more closely reflects current policy framings (see Figure 1 below). ‘Child prostitution’ and ‘child pornography’ are replaced with ‘commercial sexual exploitation’ and ‘abusive images and images of abuse’, encompassing technological advances which make it possible to produce images of sexual abuse that do not involve a real child (Gillespie, 2011). The term ‘prostitution tourism’ (Jeffreys, 2000) is used in place of sex tourism to clarify that the majority of what is referred to as the latter is men travelling to engage in commercial sex. Trafficking, perhaps especially with respect to children and young people, is now understood to include domestic or internal movement as well as that which crosses international borders (Melrose and Pearce, 2013).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Reworking Cathy Itzin’s (1997, 2001) overlapping categories of sexual abuse and exploitation.

Identifying the ways in which sexual abuse and exploitation are linked makes it clearer that attempting to draw distinctions between exploitation of children and of adult women is a flawed approach. As Itzin intended, it poses questions about men who abuse and exploit in each and every category, and renders illogical the spectre of socially and sexually deviant men as perpetrators of abuse and exploitation. If each form of abuse is connected in the lives of women and girls, then the men involved must also overlap: ordinary men buy sex from women, girls and boys, including when travelling internationally; ordinary men sexually assault women, men, girls and boys; ordinary men are involved in organised networks that trade in the bodies of women and children (Itzin, 2001; Kelly, 1988).

Thus, taking a wider, deeper view of what it means for bodies to be commodified for instrumental sexual release exposes important parallels between exploitation of girls and women. The idea of buying a (female) body for sexual gratification is core to the notion that young women are commodities or property by which status or revenge within peer groups, rewards or favours and/or specific material gain can be achieved. Power afforded to adult men over adult women and children, and how this inequality shapes the practices of ordinary men, come back into view. Gender and generation matter. The following section turns to the patchy and confused ways in which gender is descriptively acknowledged, yet analytically invisibilised, in responses to CSE.

Now you see it, now you don’t: Hunting gender ¹ in responses to sexual exploitation of children

Young girls – and they are young girls – being abused over and over again on an industrial scale, being raped, being passed from one bunch of perpetrators to another bunch of perpetrators. (Speech by David Cameron, Prime Minister, 3 March 2015)

Acknowledgement of gender disproportionality in CSE occupies a paradoxical space. Study after study notes that the majority of victim-survivors are young women, and perpetrators (often groups of) older men (e.g. Beckett et al., 2013; Kelly et al., 2000). Data collected in the wake of local cases (Casey, 2015; Jay, 2014) and at national level (CEOP, 2013) makes the same observation, with caveats about possible under-reporting of sexual exploitation of young men. The OCC inquiry estimated that at a minimum, 72% of young people identified as sexually exploited in England were girls, and that gender was not even recorded in around a fifth of cases (Berelowitz et al., 2012). Figures on exploitation through technology suggest that 80% of cases involve young women (CEOP, 2013). This asymmetry chimes with global human rights instruments which note that girl children are disproportionately likely to be sexually exploited (e.g. the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography).

However, research reports and policy documents diverge on the extent to which gender is understood analytically. Researchers have, albeit to varying degrees, made connections with stereotypes surrounding masculinity and discourses of slag/drag in young people’s accounts and experiences of sexual exploitation (e.g. Beckett et al., 2013). Yet policy documents, intended to inform practice, increasingly use gender only as a descriptor and in their analysis are at pains to downplay its significance. Jay (2014: 32), for instance, commends the ‘importance of making sure that judgments about child sexual exploitation are consistent and gender neutral’. Safeguarding guidance (DCSF, 2009; DfE, 2011) repeats throughout that any child is at risk, including boys and young men. The national action plan goes further than this in identifying a gender analysis as the top ‘common myth’ about CSE.

Myth: Child sexual exploitation is something that is done to girls and young women. Fact: There are male victims too. Research suggests that they are fewer in number but, as mentioned above, numbers may be under-reported. (DfE, 2011: 6)

This statement – revealingly framing CSE as ‘done to’ girls – misunderstands disproportionality. To make the case that the majority of victim-survivors are girls and women and perpetrators men and boys is not to argue that women are never exploiters, or that boys and men are never exploited. It is instead to note gender asymmetry and thus begin to ask questions about what lies behind it. Integrating this empirical reality into analyses of sexual exploitation would also enable it to be linked to policy on violence against women and girls (VAWG), where the disproportionality argument about victimisation and perpetration is recognised at national and local levels (e.g. Home Office, 2010). Indeed, the case for a gendered analysis of sexual exploitation is underscored by evidence on the sexual exploitation of boys, which suggests that their needs and help-seeking routes may be different to girls’, requiring gender-specific responses (Brayley et al., 2014).

The only context in which gender is explicitly acknowledged in policy documents is gang-associated sexual exploitation, where girls are named as victim-survivors. This may in part be because ‘gangs’ are popularly synonymous with aggression and therefore masculinity; the dynamic of sexual exploitation is from the outset understood as young men exploiting young women. While research supports this, the same evidence base also notes how notions of young women’s bodies as commodities and equations of masculinity with sexual prowess shape sexual exploitation in gang contexts (Beckett et al., 2013; Firmin, 2011). This is accentuated by the sexual double standard which requires men and boys to be sexually knowledgeable and dominant while girls submit; as one young person termed it ‘boys get rated, girls get slated’ (Beckett et al., 2013: 21). The ubiquity of these messages in sexualised popular culture, and the extent to which they might be connected to men’s non-consensual sexual practices, are rarely discussed by policymakers. So even where gendered patterns are named, policy framings remain flatly descriptive rather than also engaging with the meanings of how gender is negotiated in the everyday lives of sexually exploited young women and men, by men (and women) who abuse and exploit, and how discourses surrounding gender shape policy and practice responses. Eva Lundgren (2004) has argued that gender is constituted through violence; that men shore up masculinity by dominance and control, even where this is not a conscious process. Femininity is similarly created through victimisation (Lundgren, 2004).

A critical question, then, is why data on gender asymmetry is shunned in attempts to prevent and address CSE. A first step towards developing a gender analysis is disaggregation of monitoring and prevalence data by gender, followed by an exploration of the meanings of a gender asymmetric pattern. As the quote from UK Prime Minister David Cameron shows, its salience creeps into policy talk, with references to girls and young women, but perpetrators – even those convicted for rape – rarely named as men. Similar arguments have long been made about the ways in which mainstream media report sexual violence, with words such as monster, fiend, beast replacing a simple recognition that most abusers are ordinary men (e.g. Cameron and Frazer, 1987; Kitzinger, 2004). These processes of othering mean that how constructions of masculinity and men’s abusive behaviours might be connected to the sexual commodification and abuse of girls’ bodies is overlooked. Berelowitz et al. (2012) make this connection, but it is not extended to the gendered practice of buying sex. This is a significant weakness in attempts to develop and implement effective policy on CSE.

Gendering analyses of CSE: Problematising men’s practices

Men are the vast majority of perpetrators of sexual exploitation in two ways: those who recruit and control young people, and those who pay for sexual acts. The safeguarding guidance acknowledges that ‘the predominant evidence is of men sexually abusing children and young people’ (DCSF, 2009: 18), but again this is used descriptively rather than analytically. Across policy documents on CSE, far more attention is paid to men who ‘groom’ and control young women. Even this typically fails to engage with the meanings of gender; with how associations between masculinity and sexual conquest might play out in these men’s practices. If policy and popular responses to convictions of groups of Asian men for sexually exploiting young women had been to gender rather than to racialise their practices, a quite different debate would have followed.

The focus of this section, however, is on the second category. Despite the conviction of groups of men for offences relating to ‘child prostitution’, there has been no spotlight on the men on the other side of the equation. If girls are being sold, there are buyers. Just as the currency for young women may not be hard cash, the trading terms on which they are exchanged by exploiters may also be looser, involving status or favours as payment (Kelly et al., 2000). Yet tackling men who pay for sex is the area where CSE policy has been most timid. The national action plan (DfE, 2011) refers to perpetrators in broad terms, and concentrates on prosecution and management of sex offenders as the main ‘disruption techniques’. This makes sense for guidance that sought to ensure that professionals recognise sexual exploitation as a form of abuse, and thus focuses on support mechanisms for sexually exploited young people. Serious Case Review reports consistently note poor professional levels of understanding about impacts of abuse and exploitation (e.g. Oxford Safeguarding Children Board, 2015; Rochdale Borough Safeguarding Children Board, 2013). However, it inevitably means that prevention work is limited to enabling young people to recognise signs of sexual exploitation – for themselves and others – rather than stopping the actions of abusers.

My contention here is that the ‘discursive formation’ (Melrose, 2013) of CSE as sexual abuse, which includes its decoupling from the gendered prostitution system, serves to disappear men who pay for sex with young women. By arguing that CSE is sexual abuse rather than sexual abuse through prostitution, the buyers in the commercial market into which young women were facilitated, arranged and procured become invisible. One Serious Case Review report into sexual exploitation of young women in Oxford notes ‘men coming from a range of cities … to have sex with the girls’ (Oxford Safeguarding Children Board, 2015: 10). This is a rare mention in documents that inform policy framings. The phrasing ‘have sex’ obscures the exchange dimension: silence about wider commercial sex markets and the extent to which selling and buying children for sex might be connected to them. It is also at odds with the Sexual Offences Act 2003, as the men’s actions could be defined as either rape or paying for sexual services of a child, both serious offences. Another Serious Case Review report (Rochdale Borough Safeguarding Children Board, 2013) argues that understanding the motivations of men who exploited the young women was beyond its scope.

As Sheila Jeffreys (2000: 375) suggests, accepting the inevitability of prostitution while tackling CSE rests on an assumption that buying sex is ‘unstoppable, perhaps a biological necessity, which can only be channelled into “harmless” directions’. The limited research on motivations of men who pay for sex with children focuses on those who travel internationally, and tells us that few actively seek children (O’Connell Davidson, 2005). The availability of children in commercial sex markets is used to justify their actions (O’Connell Davidson, 2005). Moreover, men who buy sex from girls are buying female bodies in sex markets where youth is eroticised and prized. In other words, they do not need to actively seek minors, since young women are sexualised as premium commodities. Sexualised popular culture in the UK attaches value to youth; as one sexually exploited young woman recalled, ‘“I was like 15, 15 coming up 16, dead skinny, blond hair, tall. Punters loved it”’ (cited in Coy, 2008: 1419). Yet, as noted earlier, in popular and policy discourse these men are labelled ‘paedophiles’, ‘explained away as the deviant behaviour of a “few” pathological men, rather than as related to dominant expressions of entitled masculine sexuality’ (Farvid and Glass, 2014: 61). Men who buy sex, fuelling demand for sex markets where young women are exploited, escape policy scrutiny, ‘signalling the privileged status they [hold] as unproblematised consumers of the sex industry’ (Farvid and Glass, 2014: 61, emphasis original). Research consistently reveals men’s motivations for buying sex as rooted in a ‘male sexual drive discourse’ (Hollway, 1984): expressed as a need for a variety of sexual partners and emotion-free, regular sex (see Coy et al., 2012 for an overview). This may not be acknowledged by all men who buy sex as a gendered privilege (Garner, 2016), but it nevertheless reflects a biological essentialism about sexual practices associated with masculinity. Some men explicitly identify paying for sex as an activity where they do not have to treat women as equal or think about their feelings (Marttila, 2008). A sense of entitlement to sexual release in/through a female body sits underneath all these accounts; it is an entitlement that those who facilitate or arrange CSE are all too aware of, since their profit derives from knowing there will be men willing to pay or exchange ‘something’ for sex with girls.

Ways forward for policy

A recent government review identifies prevention of sexual exploitation of children as a means of preventing prostitution (Home Office, 2011). There is, however, a stubborn refusal to see the reverse logic – that reducing the size of the sex industry would itself diminish the markets in which children are sexually exploited. The only policy approach that has demonstratively done so is the ‘Nordic model’ (Waltman, 2011), pioneered in countries with high levels of gender equality (Sweden, subsequently adopted in Norway, Iceland, and more recently in Northern Ireland). Here the purchase of sexual acts is criminalised, selling sex is decriminalised and support services are funded to enable women and girls to leave exploitative situations (Waltman, 2011). The basis of this policy is that the institution of prostitution is incompatible with equality between women and men and it aims to challenge the normative assumption that it is a natural or inevitable aspect of masculinity to pay for sex (Waltman, 2011).

Sweden, where this policy approach was developed, also led the way on tackling sexual exploitation of children, hosting the first world congress in 1996. Out of this event emerged the Declaration and Agenda for Action on commercial sexual exploitation of children and a definition upon which many subsequent national policies rest. An international comparative study concluded that Sweden was unique in acknowledging that preventing sexual exploitation of children requires a dual focus on enabling young people to protect themselves, and interventions with perpetrators (Cameron et al., 2014). While no ‘fundamental differences’ in responses to CSE were identified, Sweden is highlighted as innovating policy (Cameron et al., 2014). I would argue that a comprehensive perspective on prevention is a fundamental difference, and it springs from a fundamentally different approach to the commercial commodification of women and children’s bodies. The Nordic model on prostitution has twin pillars of disrupting men’s entitlement to access women’s bodies for sex, and supporting women to exit exploitative relationships/networks. It is precisely both these aspects of prevention work – combining support for victim-survivors with interventions with perpetrators – that render Sweden an exception to the ‘reluctance’ in other national policy frameworks on CSE to address abusers and exploiters (Cameron et al., 2014: 79). This can hardly be a coincidence. Instead it reflects a deeper understanding of how sexual exploitation develops and is experienced as cause and consequence of unequal power and respect between women and men, enacted through the bodies of women and girls. This approach is the clearest way to acknowledge empirical realities: sexual exploitation is not a gender-neutral issue and is not limited to young people.

Finally, it is worth noting the range of international human rights obligations under which the UK is required to reduce demand for commercial sex. These include the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children (The Palermo Protocol). This requires States Parties to ‘adopt or strengthen legislative or other measures, such as educational, social or cultural measures, including through bilateral and multilateral cooperation, to discourage the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation of persons, especially women and children, that leads to trafficking’ (United Nations, 2000: Article 9). The UN Recommended Principles on Human Rights and Human Trafficking (2002) specify that ‘strategies aimed at preventing trafficking shall address demand as a root cause of trafficking’. In 2014, the European Parliament, following a vote overwhelmingly in favour of MEP Mary Honeyball to recognise prostitution and sexual exploitation as cause and consequence of gender inequality, called upon Member States to reduce demand as part of ‘an integrated strategy against trafficking’ (European Parliament, 2014). Resolution 1983 adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in April 2014 echoed this, requiring states to consider criminalising the purchase of sex as a means to address trafficking (Parliamentary Assembly, 2014). For policy on CSE to be inclusive of domestic and international trafficking for sexual exploitation (see Melrose and Pearce, 2013), tackling the actions of men who pay for sex is more than a way to disrupt exploiters and abusers: it is a political and policy imperative.

Conclusion

Policy approaches that presume a distinct market for the purchase of girls’ bodies for sex from that of adult women’s are blinkered to the myriad of connections that span the age of majority. This separation obscures the significance of gender, and has enabled CSE to become framed as a gender-neutral issue despite data showing clear asymmetry and links with gender norms. Detaching CSE from the stigma, shame and criminality associated with prostitution has named the exchange of children’s bodies as abuse, but I argue, building on Jeffreys (2000) and Melrose (2013), that what we have lost is interrogation of prostitution as a social institution that reflects and reproduces inequality between women and men. Men who abuse and exploit girls and women by paying for access to their bodies have become invisible, as have the ways in which their behaviours are linked to deeply entrenched and naturalised gender norms. Such invisibility serves to ensure that approaches to CSE become focused on prevention only in terms of equipping young women to protect themselves, rather than a more transformative approach to challenge attitudes towards the sexualisation of women and girls’ bodies. Policymakers concerned with addressing CSE should make common cause with feminists challenging the sexual exploitation of adult women by focusing on the practices of those who commodify bodies in the act of buying sex.