'I've answered phones in enough brothels to know the most common question is always, 'What age is the youngest girl you have?' writes Rachel Moran, a survivor of the sex trade and author of must-read memoir Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution. Moran documents her lived experience of johns' (men who pay for 'sex') demand for children in her blog post, Prostitution and the Commercial Value of Youth. She was 15 when she became homeless and prostituted. When I went to hear Moran and other survivors from Space International speak at the event, Prostitution: Behind the Scenes, one thread stood out: the demand for school age girls. One survivor tells us of one the world's most popular pornography sites, Pornhub, offering a $25,000 college scholarship. Another tells of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Nevada auctioning off a girl's virginity. Johns get off on having the power of being the first to deprave female innocence and the 'unmarked', as America'sNext TopBunnyRanchVirgin.com puts it. 'Demand for younger and younger girls is not only for sex,' says Moran. 'It's about despoilment.'
At the event, Moran also remarked on how it is the younger girls and women in society who are more accepting of prostitution, a mark of the success of popular culture and the pro-prostitution lobby to normalise the inextricably linked porn and sex industries - to sell them as a career choice. Celebrities from Kate Moss, Daisy Lowe, Kylie, Katy Perry and Billie Piper have made stripper routines the norm in music videos, posed for Playboy and glamourised prostitution in Belle du Jour. Stripper stories featuring tween idols Harry Styles, Justin Bieber and professional footballers tells girls how they can get noticed. Britney just keeps it coming with her ad for new fragrance, named Private Show. Boys and young men are told that being a john is part of being 'the man' with rap videos from Candy Shop to Ayo Technology. Teen channel BBC3 did a stellar job for the pro-prostitution lobby with the programme Prostitution: What's the harm? Young viewers found out how to run a brothel in a rented apartment, referred to by the presenter as 'where the magic is about to happen.' They learnt they should prepare a nice bath for the john and leave a tray of tea and ginger nuts for him while he's having a soak. The lad mag era of the nineties helped to normalise 'sex work' with features on sex tourism and jokes about prostitution- seeing the number of British men paying for sex rise to one in ten. Yet countries that adopt the Nordic Model, which sends the message that prostitution is not inevitable, not a right, have seen demand decrease, allowing gender equality to improve where it was undermined. The Nordic Model criminalises the buyers, decriminalises the sellers and supports them to exit with viable alternatives - seeing prostitution reduced. France adopted the Nordic Model, recognising prostitution as exploitation, earlier this year. In contrast, countries such as Germany that legalise prostitution have seen it balloon.
This month, campaigning organisation Not Buying It and the ASA will meet to discuss an end to porn and sex ads in the press, most notably in The Sport, which is almost all page 3 style pictures of women. In a recent issue of The Sport, which sits on the bottom shelf next to the novelty American sweets in my local Budgens, one entire page is devoted to advertising 32 porn films of 'babes in uniform'. School uniform.
In the teen section on Pornhub, 'broken teens' 'get used', gangbanged and tied up while masked men force ass to mouth (inserting something beyond the limit into the anus, then forcing the female to take it in her mouth) torture on them, whilst they are restrained, saying no, and making pained sounds. A generation of boys have grown up with 'gonzo porn' - gagging, strangling, urinating on, getting off on women's debasement as their Sex and Relationships Education. Male violence against girls and women in England and Wales has reached a record high with child sex abuse prosecutions rising by 15.4%. Police find perpetrators in possession of extreme pornography including the torture and rape of children. The Everyday Sexism Project is awash with school girls recounting the sexual harassment they experience on the way to school.
End Demand UK has collated Home Office statistics including this: 50% of women in prostitution in the UK started being paid for sex acts before they were 18 years old. Child prostitution is a global epidemic, with demand rocketing during any big sporting event. Articles like this on the Rio Olympics offer a tiny window into the alternate reality. In prostitution, as in in porn, the despoilment of the young female is all. This is not fantasy. The damaged, traumatised, tortured and dead girls and women are the used bodies and broken minds of this billion dollar trade we call 'sex'.