Summary
This book documents and analyses the ongoing involvement of children in the commercial sex trade in 20th-century England. The authors argue that child prostitution needs to be understood within a broader context of child abuse, and that this provides one of the clearest manifestations of the ways in which "deviant groups" can be understood as both victims and threats. Evidence shows that the circumstances which led young people into prostitution over the last hundred years amount, at worst, to physical or psychological abuse or neglect. The picture of child prostitution which emerges is one of exclusion from mainstream society and the law, and remoteness from the agencies set up to help young people in trouble.
Contents
1. Introduction: concepts and contents. -- 2. Debating late nineteenth-century child prostitution. -- 3. Edwardian England and the ideal family. -- 4. War and the 1920s. -- 5. Prostitution, child abuse and feminism during the 1920s and 1930s. -- 6. Reconstruction and a new society. -- 7. The rediscovery of child prostitution during the 1960s and 1970s. -- 8. Child prostitution during the 1980s and 1990s.