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3 The Sexual Exploitation of Children O ne of the most disturbing aspects of the sex trade in New Orleans during the antebellum period was the number of children who became prostitutes or were otherwise sexually exploited at an early age. This phenomenon was hardly unique to New Orleans. One historian states that child prostitution was so widespread that it constituted a major concern in antebellum New York. Some Manhattan brothels actually specialized in prostitutes between the ages of ten and fourteen years. One source of evidence that reveals children selling themselves, being sexually abused, or being forced into prostitution in pre–Civil War New Orleans is the newspaper reports of the daily workings of the recorder’s courts. The recorders heard dozens of complaints from frantic parents and other relatives who stated that their daughters or, less commonly, sons had fallen under the influence of people of suspicious and malevolent reputations. As another historian has pointed out, relations in working-class families were often troubled, and parents of poor children expected them to work and turn over their earnings to help support the family. Boys had more freedom, but prostitution was one of the only ways girls could get away from home, keep their wages, and escape parental discipline. Girls’ wages for respectable work were even lower than adult women’s wages, leaving prostitution as an avenue for a young girl to escape parental discipline, leave home, and support herself. For some children, as with many women, it was an issue of economic survival.1 The Louisiana Civil Code stipulated that the age of “full majority” was twenty-one. Minors in Louisiana—children under twenty-one years of age—could marry only with the consent of both their mother and father. R 48 Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women However, the law set the age of consent at twelve years old. Under Louisiana law, a person who had sex with a child under that age was considered to have raped the child, whether the child consented or not. In State v. David, slave of Drake, the Louisiana Supreme Court heard an appeal of a case in which the slave David stood accused of assault with intent to commit a rape of a white girl under ten years of age. The slave’s attorney implied that, although the child had resisted at first, she had ultimately consented to the act and that resistance was an essential element in finding the slave guilty. The presiding judge held that under Louisiana law a child under the age of ten could not consent to such an act, and the slave tribunal found David guilty. The Louisiana Supreme Court agreed and affirmed the judgment. Although Louisiana law set twelve years as the age at which a young woman could choose to be sexually active, judges and recorders in New Orleans usually set the age of consent closer to sixteen years. As we will see, judges and recorders usually did not require girls who were around sixteen to go to the workhouse or return home if they were already working in a brothel.2 Numerous incidents of girls and young women becoming prostitutes appear in the New Orleans newspapers. For example, in 1854, a distraught father made an affidavit stating that his daughter Josephine, age fifteen, had left his house and “is at present consorting with abandoned prostitutes.” He requested that she be arrested and sent to the house of refuge (a reformatory, usually for younger people and not requiring work, as did the workhouse). The same year, a father took his young daughter to the police station. He told the presiding officer that the young girl “is becoming very depraved, and he is fearful that she will become lewd and abandoned.” In 1853 Mrs. Catherine Oldenburger swore an affidavit that her daughter, age sixteen, had left her home and “is concealed in a house of prostitution in Gallatin street.” She asked for the brothel to be searched and her daughter returned to her if found there. The same year another young girl, age fourteen, ran away from her mother for eight days. Her mother found her “concealed in a house of ill repute.” Mary Jennings, a thirteen-year-old, went to the house of refuge at the request of her mother, who claimed her daughter was “an abandoned woman.”3 Sometimes these scenes in the recorder’s courts could be quite poignant. In 1852 the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported that a “fair girl with...

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