Abstract
Margaret Melrose and Jenny Pearce (eds.) Critical Perspectives on Child Sexual Exploitation and Related Trafficking, Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2013. 198. pp. ISBN 978–1–137–29409–8 hbk ISBN 978–1–137–29408–1 pbk Price: £22.99
‘Child Sexual Exploitation’ as a determinate, recognized social problem was launched by Whose Daughter Next?, a Banardo’s report published in 1998. The success of this report in galvanizing political and public attention led to the introduction of new Government guidance a few years later. According to the Government’s definition: ‘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’. Young people can seem to be placing themselves at risk, going to meet individuals they know are likely to rape and harm them, yet actively arranging the meeting. The guidance and definition came to classify these relationships as nonetheless always exploitative, and a matter for child protection. However, in a society in which giving sexual activity in exchange for affection and gifts might otherwise be seen as normative teenage behaviour, the wide definition given to ‘child sexual exploitation’ intensifies questions about what specifically warrants child protection scrutiny. Critical Perspectives on Child Sexual Exploitation and Related Trafficking is a valuable intervention into this discursive terrain. It aims to take stock of the possibilities and limitations of the way the concept of child sexual exploitation has been deployed, in part through comparison with discourses on sex trafficking. The text is edited by Margaret Melrose and Jenny Pearce, two leading scholars whose empirical work over the last decade has established child sexual exploitation as a research programme. The chapters are written by colleagues of the editors who are affiliated with The International Centre for the Study of Sexually Exploited and Trafficked Young People at the University of Bedfordshire.
The text begins with a chapter by Melrose which critically addresses the emergence of child sexual exploitation as a recognized social problem, arguing that the way the topic has been problematized has inaccurately and unhelpfully separated young people into either passive victims or savage abusers. From this starting point, subsequent chapters vary in the degree to which they work from or critique the premises offered by contemporary discourse on child sexual exploitation. For example, in a chapter critical of such discourses but willing to use them, Carlene Firmin draws on Bourdieu to argue that exploitation may be best regarded, not as a quality of what an older male does to a younger female, but as a generative property of the social and economic contexts in which young people are interacting. Child sexual exploitation, she argues, cannot be extracted from such contexts, and this becomes especially apparent in considering peer-on-peer sexual exploitation and the gender dynamics of such relationships. By contrast, the chapter by John Pitts works from the premises of existing discourses of child sexual exploitation, arguing that the role of gangs in causing such exploitation has been missed. Or again, Lucie Shuker’s chapter reports on her empirical research on the sexual exploitation of young people in care. She interrogates the relational and psychological dynamics behind findings that between 21–35% of young people affected by sexual exploitation are in local authority care. As the differences between these chapters illustrates, the text is subject to tension between advocacy and welfare concerns on the one hand and sociological analysis on the other. Indeed, the book weighs up the very policy problematizations which have provided support for the empirical research on which the book draws, such as recent funding by the Office of the Children's Commissioner for England for a two-year national study.
However, such tensions are held by the editors in a highly productive way, and make for a very thought-provoking collection. Perhaps the most significant deployment of these tensions is the elaboration across the volume of an alternate model of child sexual exploitation, grounded in a more acute account of the sexual agency of young people. By considering the agency of exploited children and young people, Melrose argues that ‘there is evidence to suggest that some of these young people may be making constrained, but rational, choices within the context of highly diminished circumstances and opportunities… where only their bodily capital has any value’. Child sexual exploitation, as Jenny Pearce emphasizes in her chapter, must be understood in the context of how our society allocates feelings of having or lacking personal worth. As such, one particular contribution of the volume is to critically interrogate the role of societal assumptions about gender in shaping the context for exploitative sexual relationships. This point builds upon a pre-existing literature, particularly from within feminist sociology. Future editions could build on this, scrutinizing the subjectivation of perpetrators of child sexual exploitation: as Firmin states in this volume, young people may be ‘being exploited to exploit’. A novel contribution of the volume is the attempt to see sexual exploitation from the perspective of a young person’s agency. Particularly striking in this regard is Pearce’s new concept of ‘survival consent’, where poverty serves as a push factor for young people consenting to sex. The other contributions to the volume imply that this concept could be productively applied not just to a lack of material resources, but also emotional and affective resources.