If you want to know how damaging the discourse around “child sex workers” having “agency in their relationships with their pimps” is, look at how many of the victims (all or mostly teenage girls) of some of the recent child sexual abuse gangs in various parts of the UK were initially treated by social services, the police, and other agencies.

Girls who had been groomed, threatened, beaten, raped, and prostituted at house parties, were described as making “lifestyle choices” when their parents and carers asked for help. The authorities concentrated on the girls’ drinking and behaviour, not on what was being done to them by adult men.

When the police eventually acted and the men were brought to court the girls spent days and even weeks being cross-examined, as each accused man had his own lawyer who questioned each girl separately - and were accused of lying and asked to repeat distressing details over and over. If the police and the CPS had charged the men of trafficking (which there was evidence for) rather than rape and other crimes, the young women would not have had to take the stand.

I’m not opposed to research into how children and teenagers are prostituted and what can be done to help prostituted children and teenagers and prevent the prostitution of children - but explaining this in terms of children’s agency when CHILDREN CANNOT CONSENT TO SEX and grooming is a thing, is disgusting and shows these academics are on the side of the men who rape children, not the young people they are researching.