Professor suggests ‘mass movement’ might persuade society to ‘liberate’ children for sex work

By Nancy Flanders – Live Action

Undercover journalist Karlyn Borysenko was present at the recent Socialism 2023 Conference, where she recorded a Q&A session from a talk on The Politics of Childhood. One question from an audience member revealed a desire on the part of the adults present for children to participate in the “sex industry as part of children’s liberation…”

After the panel had spent an hour discussing liberating children from their parents, a self-described sex work activist named Chanel addressed the panel, which included Johns Hopkins University history professor Jules Gill-Peterson, who has previously received a fellowship from the Kinsey Institute (read Live Action’s four-part series on sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s research, which affects child sexual education today, starting here). Chanel asked (emphases added):

[W]e’ve been dealing with the child sex panic, you know, the child sex trafficking conspiracy theories since the late 90s. And I had never until this panel been like, huh, what about young people in the sex industry as part of a children’s liberation vision? Like, there’s just like a utopia I had never really thought of before because the world feels so separated and the issue of youth and sex work is so incredibly loaded. I don’t even know if I’d ask this question if it was being live-streamed. You are rolling into a lot of trouble when you start talking about the rights of young people in the sex industry. But young people in the sex industry deserve and need rights, at minimum actually, liberation and justice.

The audience seems to largely approve of this notion as it applauded Chanel — not for saying children have the right to not be used as sexual objects, but for saying children are not liberated unless they are able to participate in sex work. Child sexual abuse is defined as sexual activity with a child by an adult, adolescent, or older child.

Chanel continued, “So I just was like, I want to hear folks who are thinking about the liberation of children and about movement for the liberation of children and how you understand just like to what extent you’re thinking through. Because when that includes highly marginalized kids on the street, that for sure includes people selling sex, right? That includes people selling sex to survive your foster care systems and on the streets.”

In other words, “the liberation for children” from their parents, in Chanel’s opinion, includes minors “selling sex.”

Chanel specifically mentions child trafficking as if it is nothing more than a myth, but child sex trafficking is not a conspiracy theory. According to the United States Department of Justice, child sex trafficking arrests have been made in nearly every U.S. state. Federal prosecutions of child-only sex trafficking cases increased 17% from 2019 to 2020 and children made up 69% of the victims in newly charged sex trafficking cases in 2020. Their ages ranged from four to 17.

Second, Chanel mentions the idea of sex work as something children in foster care need to do in order to survive. This doesn’t point to the need for a “right” for children to participate in sex work, but to a major failure on the part of the government and the foster care system, which are failing to place children in safe homes. Children are not able to consent to sex or to selling sex in order to “survive.”

Professor Gill-Peterson responds to Chanel’s comment by saying, “If you’re part of a project trying to think about the young people’s role in the sex industry … one of the ways you might feel like you’re going to be able to lend time and energy to that effort is if it doesn’t feel like you could be hung up to dry alone for it. Right?” Therefore, in order to avoid being “hung up to dry alone” for promoting the sexual abuse of children, Gill-Peterson suggests that Chanel might start a “mass movement” in order to persuade others to see the “value” of children as sex workers.

Borysenko told Campus Reform that the audience seemed to agree with the notion that children should be allowed the “right” to be sex workers. “Socialists do not believe that children are the ‘private property’ of their parents. They believe children are little adults that can make all their own decisions,” she said.

This is an ongoing problem. A 2023 report from the International Committee of Jurists (ICJ), UNAIDS, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) called for all forms of drug use and sexual activity to be decriminalized globally. As previously noted by Live Action News, the report calls for offenses related to “sex, drug use, HIV, sexual and reproductive health, homelessness and poverty” to be decriminalized because to criminalize any of them — regardless of the person’s age — would be an attack on human rights. The report states:

With respect to the enforcement of criminal law, any prescribed minimum age of consent to sex must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner. Enforcement may not be linked to the sex/gender of participants or age of consent to marriage. Moreover, sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual, in fact, if not in law. In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them.

With respect to the enforcement of criminal law, any prescribed minimum age of consent to sex must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner. Enforcement may not be linked to the sex/gender of participants or age of consent to marriage. Moreover, sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual, in fact, if not in law. In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them.

Minors cannot truly consent to sex with an adult.

Another example comes from the current fight in California to criminalize child marriage. California still allows child marriage and while some legislators are working to end what they call the “shocking” and “horrifying” practice, groups including Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are actually working to keep child marriage legal. As reported by Live Action News, this effort to protect child marriage represents a larger push to eliminate parental oversight and advocate for the so-called sexual “rights” of children — which sounds strikingly like what Borysenko’s undercover recordings portray.

As Katherine Fung explained for Newsweek, the opposition “comes out of concerns that imposing an age requirement could set the stage for a slippery slope when it comes to constitutional rights or reproductive choices, specifically that an age requirement could impede a minor’s ability to seek an abortion” (emphasis added).

It appears the cat is out of the bag. There are adults actively working to ‘liberate’ children from their parents and persuade society to see children as sexual beings from whom they can even buy sex.