ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the importance of basing service responses on an understanding, which relates to the experiences of children and young people themselves, rather than on adult assumptions about the nature of young people's involvement in prostitution and what sort of service is required. The idea of 'child prostitution' causes considerable unease. There is a tension between what people associate with the innocence and simplicity of childhood and what they imagine to be the morally depraved world of prostitution. Traditionally, 'child prostitution' evokes a protectionist response from the welfare agencies, with adults seeking to rescue and protect young people from the 'evil of their ways'. Discussions on child prostitution at Area Child Protection Committees commonly fall under the agenda heading of 'self-harm'. Conventional policy and practice responses to 'child prostitution' focus on the child or young person as the 'problem'. In the main the people who are arrested and end up with a criminal record are the young people themselves.
