How to Talk About Minors Selling Sex

Minors selling sex: those under the age of 18, who offer sex in exchange for money, either independently or under the control or management of a third party.

Even referring to minors as being capable of “selling sex” is going to be controversial to a lot of people. It is often viewed as minimizing the sexual abuse of children and teens, in the same way that someone framing an adult grooming a child and raping them as an adult “having sex with” a child is rightfully criticized.

When we are talking about selling sex, a person selling sexual services and being raped or abused are not mutually exclusive. To say that a child can sell their own rape is ludicrous, because it frames the child as asking for being sexually assaulted. To say that some children sell sex does not mean that they are not being raped if a client (a child rapist one, in this case) takes them up on that.

Rape is sex without consent, in the simplest terms. The reason to oppose sexual assault and rape being referred to simply as “sex” is that it leaves out the nature of the force or coercion behind the assault and reduces it to being considered no different to consensual sex. If you are sensitively discussing minors selling sex, this minimization is not occurring, because a minor selling sex is rightfully disturbing. The phrasing is not used to cover up the sexual exploitation or child rape, but to specify the type. We can and should still refer to any client of an underage person who is selling sex as the child rapist they are.

I personally started selling sex at 17. I was a minor, though not a young child. In the UK, the age of consent is 16, but prostitution under 18 years of age is illegal and under-18s selling sex are considered to be victims. I was raped by my first “sugar daddy” client. He paid for my company and I did not want to have sex with him, but he manipulated and eventually forced me into sexual acts with him. After that abuse, I decided to sell sex to make more money on my own terms. I describe what I did as selling sex because that’s very clearly what it was. I sought out men, intending to sell sex to them, and they paid me for intercourse. Whether or not someone wants to consider every single one of those occurrences to be rape because of my age, it’s still accurate to describe what I was doing as selling sex. To say I was selling my own rape would be deeply offensive.

Since getting to know other sex workers, and because I am so vocal about when I started, I’ve met some sex workers who started selling sex younger than I did. It’s not as common as sex work abolitionists would have you believe, for people to start selling sex as children and teens, but it does happen. They, like me, use all sorts of terms to describe their experiences as minors, and “selling sex” features among them.

I personally don’t tend to talk about people I want to help in ways I know they detest. It is particularly important to use language that won’t put off the people you want to help, when offering them advice or resources or support.

At 17 I didn’t consider myself a sex worker, because the stigma was so huge around the idea of being a “prostitute” that I was terrified to think of myself that way. I wouldn’t engage with anything calling me a “child prostitute” or “teen prostitute”. Anything suggesting that I was selling my own rape disgusted me, and I was hurt at being framed that way. Something I did ultimately come to terms with was the fact I was selling sex, and anyone seeking to help me should have referred to me that way; as a teenager selling sex.

Of course, “selling rape” and “selling sex” aren’t the only potential ways to describe minors engaging in prostitution. Instead of using either phrase, many prostitution abolitionists (prohibitionists, really) will call children and teens who sell sex “victims of child sexual exploitation” or use similar terms. This is not wrong or bad. It is, however, not specific.

When a minor is selling sex, they are a victim of child sexual exploitation. The type of sexual exploitation they’re impacted by just isn’t made clear by the label, so those who are/were impacted are less likely to recognize their situation as matching the phrasing. A child who is groomed by a family friend and a teenager under the age of 18 who sells sex through meeting men from sugar daddy websites are both victims of child sexual exploitation with different sets of needs. There is a place for this language, but using this as the exclusively label for services or advice aimed at minors selling sex will be ineffective.

The last term I see objected to most fiercely when it is applied to minors is the term “sex worker”. Criticism is often levelled at me when I say I became a sex worker at 17, or that I began sex work whilst I was still a minor, because they don’t want me to refer to it as either sex or as work.

I see people talk about exploited child workers all the time. I see children working in horrific conditions be referred to as child labour. Discussing the issue of children being exploited in this way is not undercut by acknowledging their actions as work, because it is the very fact they are pushed into this work that is the harm being done to them! When minors engage in sex work, just like when children are exploited working in sweatshops or factories or mines, they are performing a type of labour they should not be made to engage in, or that they’ve taken up because of terrible circumstances which must be resolved.

Sex work is work. Like all forms of work, there are people who are exploited or who are forced into it, and some of those people are minors. Calling it that does not stop us from being able to discuss the harms done to minors or the fact that it is rape for a client to have sex with someone under the age of consent whether there’s money involved or not.