"Who Does What to Whom and How": "Knowing Children" and Depictions of Prostitution in Anglophone Young Adult Literature

Although depictions of sexually active adolescents have been de rigueur in fiction for teenage readers from the early 1970s, Kimberley Reynolds has argued that since the mid-1990s "attitudes to and writing about sex, sexuality and relationships between the sexes [are] one of the most radically changed areas in contemporary children's literature" (114-15). The "radical" change outlined by Reynolds is a dramatic transition from coercive didacticism to "in-your-face prose" (122). As a result, she claims, twenty-first-century fiction for teens sides with the adolescent in order to communicate the view that behavior previously deemed taboo will be tolerated, if not celebrated. This is partly because Reynolds, like us, primarily discusses Anglophone texts. In Sweden and Swedish-speaking Finland, for instance, the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s found its way into teenage fiction more forcefully in the '70s and '80s than it did in the more puritanical Anglophone world. As a result, the changes Reynolds identifies as taking place in the third millennium in Anglophone fiction for teens happened earlier in Sweden, and contemporary Swedish teenage fiction assumes readers are more liberated, even though it still expects children and teenagers to be heterosexual.¹ Somewhat curiously, Reynolds also observes that those seeking to find out "who does what to whom and how" (117) will receive less explicit information than did their counterparts in the 1970s—a finding also supported by the larger study from which this article is drawn (see Kokkola, Fictions).²

This lack of detail is no doubt partly due to still-existing taboos against producing overtly erotic fiction for the young. We propose that this lack of detail signals that the contemporary authors we discuss do expect that their presumed mid-teen readers know about the mechanics of sexual acts—"who does what to whom and how" (Reynolds 117). They are what Anne Higonnet terms "Knowing children" (12), who are perceived as knowing about sexual desire. Piecing Reynolds's and Higonnet's ideas together, we claim that treating teenagers as knowing children has resulted in adolescent readers who think that they know a great deal about sex. In the four Anglophone narratives we discuss below, the sex industry is used as a topic to confront such "knowing" readers with information that challenges them to reassess what they really do know about sex, and perhaps recognize that they know less than they think they do.³ Furthermore, these texts' positioning of the reader as a knowing child results in a didactic slant, which we shall uncover. All four narratives invite their readers to draw connections between sexuality and violence, and the potential for sex to rob an individual of her autonomy. Although these connections are drawn within the context of the prostitution, we argue that the narratives' focus on combining sex with violence is part of a larger discourse of discouraging adolescents from becoming sexually active, as the focus is more on the sexual aspects of prostitution than the financial ones. For all the shock value of their surface story lines, these narratives ultimately express fairly conservative attitudes.

The sex industry has made its presence felt in children's literature before. In her discussion of "Street Arabs" in Victorian stories for children, Elizabeth Thiel identifies numerous hints that the poor may be forced to turn to prostitution in stories for children published in the late nineteenth century (43-71); however, none of the books she discusses depicts the everyday life of such prostitutes. The twentieth century saw significant improvements in the living standards of the general population, and changes in the legality of the sex industry certainly reduced the visibility of prostitution, and quite probably the actual numbers (Ringdal). The teenage prostitute, a common enough figure on the late nineteenth-century streets, would not appear as a character in her own right in books for readers of her own age until the start of the twenty-first century. The number of works on this topic is, unsurprisingly, low. Some, like Paige...