Introduction

The protection of children under the age of 18 by the state has been so firmly embedded within United States law, practice, and policy that it regulates nearly every aspect of childhood. Collectively, these laws and practices create a shared expectation of children’s experiences and development that, in their ideal form, should produce adult citizens in service of the state in terms of their health, intellect, morality, and abilities. Certain deviations from the norms of childhood – sexual exploitation, abuse, and even some forms of juvenile sexual activity – have historically been addressed with new policy, law, education, and adjudication. In some cases, however, a disconnect exists between the expectations of childhood and the actual lived experiences of diverse groups of children, leading to pathologies of child governance, defined here as unintended consequences or outcomes from laws and policies that exacerbate the abuse, delinquency, criminalization, and exploitation of children. While this chapter examines the US case, pathologies of child governance can be found throughout the international system, including within key institutions of the children’s rights regime (see Chapters 1, 4, and 9 in this volume).

I examine here one such pathology – the exclusion of a cohort of children, a significant percentage of children involved in the sex trade, from treatment as victims under the law and the subsequent protections afforded other children involved in the sex trade in the United States. Precise numbers of children involved in the sex trade in the United States are difficult to come by, unsurprisingly, but studies have put the number between 5,000 and 21,000 (NCSL, 2017; Hounmenou and O’Grady, 2019). The protections studied here are Safe Harbor laws, a patchwork of US laws that seek to protect some children from criminal penalties associated with involvement in the sex trade. Boys, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQIA+) children, and those children with LGBTQIA+ clients make up the majority of children excluded from Safe Harbor protections. Of these groups, Black and Latino children are overrepresented. The common connection among these excluded children is twofold. First, children in this cohort tend to deviate from the expectation of what a ‘victim’ should be, usually a white, cisgender female child naively derailed from her prescribed path to adulthood (Baker, 2013; Austin and Farrell, 2017).