A recent article in the Globe and Mail titled Hundreds of Young Girls Work Winnepeg's Sex Trade reported that girls as young as eight years old work in Winnepeg's sex trade, either as prostitutes or by engaging in "survival sex"--sexual acts performed to obtain food, shelter or other necessities, and in some cases, drugs.
As disturbing as this fact is, perhaps equally disquieting is the fact that seventy percent of the victims are poor Aboriginal girls. At least one person faults class bias and racism for the over representation of Aboriginal girls in the sex industry, and for the relatively muted social outcry in response to this tragedy. Jane Runner, head of New Directions, an agency that helps girls get off the street, suggests, for example, that Internet luring, a more middle class phenomenon wherein adult predators attempt to arrange sexual trysts with minors via the Internet, has caused more widespread outrage because of the identity of the victims.
Youth prostitution is a scourge in Toronto, Vancouver and Alberta as well. Although the most common response is to adopt social service measures or public education schemes, perhaps most controversial is Alberta's approach. In 1999 Alberta adopted the Protection of Children Involved in Prostitution Act, (PChIP), thereby becoming the first jurisdiction in Canada to allow officials to take young prostitutes off the street and place them in safe houses. This legislation also introduced legal penalties for those who procure clients (pimps) or act as clients (johns). It is not clear, however, that the PChIP can be unequivocally declared a success, as there are few objective ways of measuring its full effect.
The problem of child prostitution is certainly not unique to Canada. It is, by many accounts, a global problem in danger of reaching epidemic proportions. As is true in the case of Winnepeg, however, racial and social discrimination figure prominently in the commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls. Research indicates that where societies are historically stratified along racial, ethnic, or caste lines and/or are deeply xenophobic, a large number of clients seek prostitutes who represent the Other: the racial, ethnic, caste or national identities of the prostitutes are often different from the clients. In addition, because of the additional stigma of abusing children, clients' selection of child prostitutes whose social identities differ from the clients allows clients to retain their views of themselves as moral and good.
In view of the way the race and class impact child prostitution in Canada and elsewhere, what is the role of law in ending child prostitution?
