Teenagers in the United States are increasingly turning to sex work in order to be able to acquire enough food to eat, according to a new study from Washington D.C.’s Urban Institute, the Guardian reported today. (Yes, this is true.)
Teenagers in America are resorting to sex work because they cannot afford food, according to a study that suggests widespread hunger in the world’s wealthiest country.
Focus groups in all 10 communities analysed by the Urban Institute, a Washington-based thinktank, described girls “selling their body” or “sex for money” as a strategy to make ends meet. Boys desperate for food were said to go to extremes such as shoplifting and selling drugs.
Welcome to the United States, 2016.
According to the author’s lead report, food insecurity is getting worse in the United States, despite the “economic recovery.”
“Even for me, who has been paying attention to this and has heard women tell their stories for a long time, the extent to which we were hearing about food being related to this vulnerability was new and shocking to me, and the level of desperation that it implies was really shocking to me. It’s a situation I think is just getting worse over time.”
The reason for this is pretty simple: teenagers are living in homes lacking adequate income to buy food. Poverty, of course, despite attempts by many scholars to argue otherwise, is ultimately about not having enough money.
Study authors believe that 1990s welfare reform policy — supported by the GOP Congress and President Bill Clinton — may be partly responsible for this appalling state of affairs, in addition to anti-poor U.S. social policy and slow wage growth for workers.
The findings raise questions over the legacy of Bill Clinton’s landmark welfare-reform legislation 20 years ago as well as the spending priorities of Congress and the impact of slow wage growth. Evidence of teenage girls turning to “transactional dating” with older men is likely to cause particular alarm.
Again, let me be clear. Children — and, yes, teenagers are children — are quite literally selling their bodies for food in the United States of America. in 2016.
Many prefer to rationalise what they are doing as dating of sorts. A boy in rural North Carolina said: “When you’re selling your body, it’s more in disguise. Like if I had sex with you, you have to buy me dinner tonight … that’s how girls deal with the struggle … That’s better than taking money because if they take money, they will be labeled a prostitute.”
Many children are even quitting school, as a result of the poverty in their homes.
In seven of the 10 communities, teenagers told stories of girls exchanging sexual favours with strangers or stripping for money in abandoned houses, at flea markets and on the street. A girl in San Diego, California, said: “Someone I knew dropped out of high school to make money for the family. She felt the need to step up. She started selling herself.”
Another girl in Chicago told researchers of an 11-year-old girl who dropped out of sixth grade to work in the sex trade, while boys in Los Angeles described how middle school girls put up flyers in public places to advertise their services.
In the communities with the highest poverty rates, both girls and boys steal food and other basics from local stores for themselves or their families. A male teenager in Chicago said: “I ain’t talking about robbing nobody. I’m just talking like going there and get what you need, just hurry up and walk out, which I do … They didn’t even know. If you need to do that, that’s what you got to do, that’s what you got to do.”
Of course, engaging in sex work and theft to acquire food — illegal acts — leads to kids facing the prison-industrial complex, because unlike in Italy, stealing food to meet basic nutritional needs is a crime in the United States.
Shameful.