Human Rights versus the Oldest Form of Work in Decriminalizing Commercially-sexually Exploited Minors

• In Event: 1258 - Law and Sex

Abstract

This paper focuses on the construction of the child in and through American laws related to child sex trafficking. It examines the issue through key contemporary legal texts in the state Illinois, which is considered a leading state in the effort to decriminalize children who are commercially-sexually exploited in the US. Through an examination of statutes, cases and legislative debates, it discusses the ways in which legal discourse has vacillated between viewing impacted minors as subjects of human rights violations versus condemning them as criminal sex offenders (prostitutes), and, as a result, has not fully adopted a child protective stance. It considers how contemporary legal texts contribute to rendering childhood provisional in legal discourse related to child sex trafficking. While early efforts against child prostitution seemed motivated by child protection against commercial-sexual exploitation, these efforts have consistently been compromised through racialization, classing and gendering children in ways that adultify those who do not conform to normative childhood. The “women and girls” conflation that has been a hallmark of prostitution and sex trafficking law is not merely a problem of infantilizing adult women, under the pretext of expanding the scope of its “protection,” which has been the focus of many feminist theorists, but in many ways a function of adultifying girls, which diminishes or denies their victimization by narrowing the class of victims. Yet, by incorporating them, the law has historically brought girls and children generally under the same moralistic scrutiny of the state, without offering them any unique or heightened protections. This is important to highlight since many feminist analyses of sex trafficking take for granted or at face value that the law provides greater (if not its greatest) protection to girls, and that society idealizes children.

Author

• Pantea Javidan, London School of Economics and Political Science