How Underage Sex Work Really Feels

When I was 17, I started escorting on Seeking Arrangement. The first “sugar daddy” I met there was a serial rapist, choosing “sugar babies” on the site who were inexperienced and that he thought were underage, even though we had to pretend to be over 18. At the time, reading the claims on his profile that he did not expect sex but did want to meet someone he was attracted to, I saw John (what we’ll call the sugar daddy) as a way to make money without needing to “become a prostitute”. I had negative views about sex work because of all the stigma out there but I knew I needed money. He paid me £70 for three naked pictures of myself and claimed he would not expect sex from me when we met. During all of this, I never spoke about my age. My profile said “18” and the site was 18+ but included no verification requirements.

John assaulted me during our first “date” meeting from the site. I told him on our second date that I was 17. I remember that I felt guilty for having lied, because I was underage to sell sex. I couldn’t admit that what I was doing would be prostitution if it had been consensual, or that the assaults were anything but “misunderstandings”. I kept telling myself that I hadn’t said no clearly enough, that he’d assumed something from my body language that made him think that I’d changed my mind. I’d ask myself what I expected, when I’d sent him nude pictures, and told myself that given that background I needed to be direct and clear. As if having previously said no and crying when he touched me wasn’t a clear enough signal.

Like many people in abusive situations, I didn’t see a way out, and I needed his money. I think my mind tried to protect me to some degree. In between assaults, sometimes I’d block out that they’d even occurred until he was taking me back to a hotel room and I started shaking violently in the taxi on the way there. Once when that happened, John assured me over and over that we were just going to sleep and he wasn’t expecting sex that night. The next morning he sexually assaulted me as soon as I woke up and I remember thinking that it was my fault, I should have known, because he’d never said he didn’t expect sex the next morning. Through all of this I was homeless and 17 and he knew it.

My allowance was £1000 a month, then he would buy me things on dates. So little money even if it was consensual, but I didn’t know better. I kept going back telling myself I just wasn’t firm enough about my “no” the last time. Part of me was blocking out the severity of what was occurring because I didn’t know how I’d cope without that money, I’m sure. I didn’t have perspective.

After 6 months of this, I still wasn’t willing to admit that what I was doing was sex work. He took me out often, between the times he would assault me, and we would go to a museum or shopping and he would show me off. He’d buy me things I needed. After these many months of escalating assaults between these periods of love-bombing and buying me things, I started to accept that I was being abused. The realization didn’t come from introspection, it came when I heard from a friend that he’d met another teenager from the site and kissed her against her will at the end of the date.

I confronted John about this. He told me he’d been wanting to “surprise” me with someone to have sex with, since I’d told him I was attracted to women. He told me he’d intentionally picked someone who he thought was underage based on her profile. I had a sinking feeling and realized he’d done the same with me. I told him to leave that girl alone, making the excuse that it was uncomfortable because we had a mutual friend. He showed me profiles of many girls, showing me that he was texting them and all about them. They ranged from 15 to 17.

I still needed money from him, but now I saw him as a monster. I recognized finally that he’d raped me. I’d met other sugar daddies from the site by then, avoiding sex with all of them but tolerating kissing to earn money, which I actively decided I would do before I went on dates. I was trying to earn enough from those men that I could get rid of John from my life, and now that I understood I was being assaulted I couldn’t have tolerated him touching me sexually and would make excuses about being ill or needing to get back to my friend who I was staying with so I was never in private with him. He tried to reel me back in, contacting a girl and putting us in a “group chat” where he talked about wanting to watch us together sexually. He had started paying her a small allowance. I called her, told her everything – the first time I’d ever confessed I’d been raped. Told her he was unsafe. She relayed everything I’d said back to him. I told John that I’d never said that and avoided seeing him at all over the next week to get my last allowance, then told him never to contact me again and expressed my disgust over his assault of me and the many underage girls I was sure he’d assaulted too.

After that ordeal I saw a few more clients in the interim to when I turned 18, two of whom I sold sex to. I admitted to myself that it was prostitution. I could only use Seeking Arrangement, because every other site made you prove that you were over 18. I was scared because John would sometimes message from other profiles, taunting me about how if I really “felt like” he’d raped me then I wouldn’t still be there. I finally knew I was a sex worker (though I didn’t know that term, I called myself an escort), and I used my age to my advantage to ask for more money for the short few months I was still 17.

It was scary to be underage and doing sex work. I was afraid of the police, who I couldn’t go to about John assaulting me without revealing that I was selling sex and potentially getting in trouble. At one point, a friend of mine told her mother about what I was doing and I was threatened with social services being called, or the supported housing group that had finally given me somewhere to live after many months of homelessness. The months before I turned 18 were terrifying and not once did I have the option to quit sex work because I still needed the money!

Then I turned 18 and could move to safer sites with more directly transactional sex, paid by the hour instead of allowances that work out as far less money for far more work. I was in so much danger doing sex work at 17, with so fewer resources at my disposal. Yes, teenagers doing sex work is something we want to stop, but the way to do that is not to age restrict platforms to even higher ages than 18 or to blame them. We need to make it so that no 17 year old is left without a safety net. No teenager should be so desperate for money that they sell sex to eat or house themselves. No person of any age should be.

It’s important to craft spaces online that are 18+. Discussion of sex work, however, is not something we can limit to only adults. There are a lot of teenagers involved in sex work who are going to talk about their experiences and should not be silenced. I’m 22 now and have only recently become able to fully articulate what I went through. When I spoke about sex work at 17, I did talk about it in a somewhat glamorizing way to distract from my trauma. That means we have to be prepared for people to be messy in the way they talk about their experiences, or else you’re silencing the exact people you claim to want to protect.

P.S. For those who I’m sure will be compelled to suggest I go to the police about John now after reading this: I did. I went about a year after it ended, when I had processed things more. I was desperate to stop him because I was sure he was still assaulting teenagers. A police sexual assault liaison said “stop working yourself up into a tizzy” when I cried while recounting being raped. The officer taking my statement told me that people reporting rapes leave out that they flirted with their assailant all the time and that I should be upfront if I led him on so they don’t waste their time. In the end, they taped 2 hours of me recounting various assaults into a camera, and made me recount it again for many hours more so they could create a written statement.

The police called him in for a voluntary interview, he denied it, and they closed the case. He spent less hours under police scrutiny than I did.