The people who made this film have the temerity to call it a documentary; in reality it is nothing more than a thinly veiled piece of propaganda. Rape and prostitution are not two sides of the same coin anymore than paid work and slavery; one is a voluntary transaction, the other is a crime.
As Chris Tame used to say, when they talk about protecting children, what they really mean is destroying your rights. That is the case with those who wilfully conflate "pornography" with "child pornography" and it is the same here with those who conflate " (street) prostitution" - a voluntary if sordid transaction, with child prostitution - a criminal act regardless of the state of mind of the minor who is selling sex.
The semantic sleight-of-hand doesn't stop there, rather than calling prostitutes prostitutes, whores, harlots or even hookers they are "prostituted women" and for those who don't have pimps, the "johns" are the bad guys.
This is not the first documentary to be made about the underbelly of Seattle; "Streetwise" dates to 1984, and it is disgraceful that these very real problems, including young girls being lured, coerced or otherwise entering into street prostitution, are only now being addressed, but they need to be addressed honestly. It remains to be seen if the damaged women interviewed here are being honest, it is far from novel for a prostitute to claim she took up her trade after being raped. One woman claims her first "john" as a child prostitute was a lawyer, then came a police officer, a judge and a pastor - all supplied by her madam. Does this really sound credible?
The law enforcement officers in this film also go after on-line prostitution; if the prostitute concerned is, or appears to be, underage, fair enough, but the stench of righteous indignation throughout is unreal. Unbelievably, they even drag in the Green River Killer. How dishonest can anyone get?
They attempt also to tie in pornography - which is of course an extremely broad term - with the overt claim that this is another pathway to "prostituted women", indeed they have the audacity to claim that "pornography" is itself a form of sex trafficking, with the unspoken corollary that we need these same sanctimonious creeps policing the Web. Hey, perhaps all cameras should be registered and before any photograph is published on-line it should be submitted to some sort of moral watchdog?
Then there is all the usual garbage about the trafficking of women and girls. One "john" is asked how old he was when he "bought" his first woman. Not once in this propaganda piece is there any attempt to see the point of view of any of these so-called johns, some of whom are clearly physically undesirable individuals for whom buying sex is the only option bar celibacy or perhaps rape.
Indeed, the start of the First World War saw young men - in reality boys - queueing up to lose their virginity to whores so that they would die "real men". How sad is that? No mention of such sad cases, social inadequates, the disabled or just plain ugly men here. In short, this film is a total crock, whatever the good intentions of the police concerned in taking teenage prostitutes off the streets.
