One of the first things to jump out at me about this story in the NY Times about child prostitution was that we have even more evidence of the harmful effects of the War on Drugs.
But many child welfare advocates and officials in government and law enforcement say that while the data is scarce, they believe that the problem of prostituted children has grown, especially as the Internet has made finding clients easier.
“It’s definitely worsening,” said Sgt. Kelley O’Connell, a detective who until this year ran the Boston Police Department’s human-trafficking unit, echoing a sentiment conveyed in interviews with law enforcement officials from more than two dozen cities. “Gangs used to sell drugs,” she said. “Now many of them have shifted to selling girls because it’s just as lucrative but far less risky.”
This article is one of the best I’ve read on the subject in a long time, and it even ends with a note of optimism, detailing how the Dallas police have initiated a program that allows them to get 3/4 of the prostitutes that enter the program out of prostitution. The hardest part, unsurprisingly, is getting the women to flip on their pimps. The prostitute/pimp relationship seems like it’s best understood as a rather extreme version of the domestic violence situation. Pimps control their prey using the same combination of rewards and punishment, often doled out arbitrarily, that wife beaters do. They just tend to be more literal about it, and aim for women who are in a really bad spot in life. Just as a garden variety wife beater will look for women that seem eager to please or have low self-esteem, the pimp looks for women who are in economic dire straits and have excruciatingly low self-esteem. As the article chronicles, interviews with pimps where they’re encouraged to brag about how they trapped women was the source of this information.
It’s a nice cure for the cutesy “isn’t hooking great!” excerpt by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner from their new book that Sady Doyle ripped to shreds in the Guardian. As Sady notes, they basically try to argue that streetwalkers invite their own degradation by charging too little and hating men and their work too much, and if they put a smiley face on it and learned to love subjugating themselves before men and being debased by men out to get off on owning a woman (if only for an hour), they’d make more money. Pimping is only mentioned in passing—-Dubner and Levitt seem to believe that pimps are mainly protection and management for prostitutes. Much like you’d hire a bouncer for your club, they seem to think, prostitutes hire pimps.
What pimps are in reality is more likely to be owners of prostitutes, the actual owners who merely rent out their slaves to other men for cash. From the NY Times article, which details how the Dallas police started getting real results by not treating prostitutes as criminals, but seeing them as trapped by pimps, the real criminals:
While Roxanne had all the signs of being controlled by a pimp — a tattoo with initials on her neck, a rehearsed script about how she was new to the work — she adamantly denied working for anyone…..
“My job is to make sure she has what she needs, personal hygiene, get her nails done, take her to buy an outfit, take her out to eat, make her feel wanted,” said another pimp, Antoin Thurman, who was sentenced in 2006 to three years for pandering and related charges in Buckeye, Ariz. “But I keep the money.”