Vulnerability and involvement in drug use and ... - Sex Work Europe

1 Introduction
Youth prostitution prevalence
Vulnerable and socially excluded young people involved in prostitution are likely to be a
hidden population. Research and official figures used to estimate prevalence must be seen
in this light. Despite this lack of hard data on the numbers of young people involved in
prostitution however, we can be confident that youth prostitution does occur in Britain. Home
Office figures show that between 1989 and 1995 a total of 2,380 cautions were issued
and 1,730 convictions secured against under 18s involved in prostitution in England and
Wales. This re p resents approximately ten per cent of females arrested for soliciting in
England and Wales during this period (Duffin and Beech, 2000). Of 369 females arrested
for sex work related offences in 1992, 13 per cent (n=47) were under 18 (Boyle, 1994).
As Moore and Rosenthal (1993) point out however, arrest and court statistics are also
notoriously unreliable as indicators of the incidence of youth prostitution. With the
i n t roduction of Safeguarding Children Involved in Prostitution (Dept. of Health, 2000),
police statistics will be even less useful for measuring youth prostitution. This document
directs the police to treat children involved in prostitution as victims and as such they will not
be counted in offender statistics.
Bluett and colleagues (2000) estimate that in any one year there are 2000 young people
involved in prostitution in the UK, with one third of them aged under 16 and 200 to 300
of them in London. London Streetwork Project re p o rt that of 171 young people under 18
taken into police protection from 1st January 1999 to 31st June 1999 in the West End
Central police area, 36 were ‘known prostitutes’ and three others were ‘found in red light
a reas’. In a private communication, these service providers re p o rt that West End voluntary
agencies estimate 20 to 30 young men and women aged under 16 are involved in
p rostitution at any one time.
R e s e a rch amongst adult sex workers consistently shows a majority were under the age of
consent when they first prostituted. Skidmore (2000) found the most common age of first
s t reet prostituting to be between 12 and 15 years old. This survey also found that half of
these young people had had no sexual experiences prior to prostitution. Pearce and
Roach (1997) interviewed 46 female sex workers. Twenty-seven per cent of them said
they were between 13 and 16 years of age when they started work and 75 per cent of
them said they started working before the age of 20. In re s e a rch with The Childre n ’s
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