Teen Prostitution–Criminal Behavior?

By: Madeline Levitt, CfJJ Intern

The number of children who become victims of sexual exploitation in the country is truly shocking. The Children’s Defense Fund estimates that about 100,000 American children between the ages of 11 and 14 enter into prostitution each year. Sadly, the average age of these girls has been declining, the number of girls involved is increasing, and the problem is spreading to more towns and cities annually.

Society’s response has traditionally been to prosecute both these girls and the men who take advantage of them. But in the last decade, new attention has been drawn to the issue and multiple states have begun to consider teen prostitution as a child welfare issue: Why are these girls living on the street rather than with a loving family in a safe home?  Furthermore, will criminal prosecution help or will it simply traumatize them further and hamper their reintegration into society? Just recently, Connecticut, Washington, Illinois, New York, California, and Texas have passed legislation to decriminalize teen prostitution.

Debunking the Myth of More Violent Girls

We recently explored the misconception that girls are more violent than ever before. Initial findings from the Girls Study Group, a team of multidisciplinary experts convened by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, further dispel this myth and “suggest that girls are not more violent than before and confirm that girls engage in far less crime and delinquency than boys for nearly every offense.” The group also observed that changes in arrest and other juvenile justice policies have contributed to an increased number of girls entering the juvenile justice system. How do we reconcile the media’s frequent portrayal of a new breed of violent girls with these research findings? Is the myth of a big new wave of violent girls changing how we view and respond to girls’ behavior?

Myth of Mean Girls

On April 2 the New York Times published an Op Ed arguing that the media depiction of a modern epidemic of increasingly violent girls is a hoax. The Myth of Mean Girls points out that “every reliable measure shows that violence by girls has been plummeting for years”. (That’s certainly the case here in Massachusetts where, for example, the number of girls formally charged with crimes has been declining for at least a decade and where the number of girls adjudicated delinquent and sentenced to the custody of the Department of Youth Services — the most serious disposition imposed on a child adjudicated a delinquent — has declined by 45% since 2000.)  It also argues that the mythical wave of girls’ violence and meanness has the unfortunate result of spurring “more punitive treatment of girls, including arrests and incarceration for lesser offenses like minor assaults that were treated informally in the past, as well as alarmist calls for restrictions on their Internet use”.  What’s the source of this disconnect between image and reality?

The Myth of Mean Girls

By MIKE MALES and MEDA-CHESNEY LIN
NY Times OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS

If nine South Hadley, Mass., high school students — seven of them girls — are proved to have criminally bullied another girl who then committed suicide, as prosecutors have charged, they deserve serious legal and community condemnation.

However, many of the news reports and inflamed commentaries have gone beyond expressing outrage at the teenagers involved and instead invoked such cases as evidence of a modern epidemic of “mean girls” that adults simply fail to comprehend. Elizabeth Scheibel, the district attorney in the South Hadley case, declined to charge school officials who she said were aware of the bullying because of their “lack of understanding of harassment associated with teen dating relationships.” A People magazine article headlined “Mean Girls” suggested that a similar case two years ago raised “troubling questions” about “teen violence” and “cyberspace wars.” Again and again, we hear of girls hitting, brawling and harassing.

But this panic is a hoax. We have examined every major index of crime on which the authorities rely. None show a recent increase in girls’ violence; in fact, every reliable measure shows that violence by girls has been plummeting for years. Major offenses like murder and robbery by girls are at their lowest levels in four decades. Fights, weapons possession, assaults and violent injuries by and toward girls have been plunging for at least a decade.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports