Little boys with an awful secret

Now, the world of boys and young men in prostitution is about to be exposed. Nick Morrison reports.

"AT this minute, there is a young man waiting for an adult to be brought in to have sex with him. Because that is all they have known, they don't know it is wrong."

Ady Davis is making it his job to put that right, to tell boys and young men who are being abused through prostitution that they do have a choice, that they can get out if they want to. And if they don't want to, that there are things they can do to protect themselves.

But first he has to find them, and that won't be easy.

Prostitution has always been a twilight profession, hidden away in the back streets, out of sight of polite society. But male prostitution carries an additional stigma, ensuring it has largely remained hidden even from the agencies who work with the excluded and the vulnerable.

"Part of the women's scene in terms of prostitution is very visible, and there are areas where young women can be seen on the streets," says Ady. "It is very rare to see young men on the streets."

Ady has been appointed by children's charity Barnardo's to shed a little light on the world of male prostitution, in the hope that by exposing the scale of the problem, it can be brought to public attention at the same time as its victims are given an escape route.

For the past four years, Barnardo's has run a project working with girls and young women abused through prostitution in Middlesbrough. SECOS (Sexually Exploited Children On the Streets) has worked with around 70 girls in the town, enabling them to get out of prostitution, helping them with safer sex advice, or putting them in touch with housing or drug agencies.

But alongside these women, SECOS has also come into contact with a small number of young men - aged from 13 to 18 - who have been involved in prostitution. This, in turn, has created the suspicion that these young men are just a small part of what is a sizeable - and very well hidden - male prostitution scene.

The Middlesbrough project is believed to be the first in the country outside London to focus specifically on boys and young men in prostitution.

"We're hearing from the women that we work with that there are young men out there, and the few men we're in contact with talk about other young men involved," says Ady. "We have no idea of the scale of it, but I suspect it will be quite significant.

'From the young men we are currently involved with, the way they have been exploited is similar to that of young women. There is a history of sexual abuse and violence in the home, there is a level of drug use and there is a coercive adult who makes that young person feel good about themselves, gains their trust, and then starts exploiting them."

Often it is the same people who are exploiting both boys and girls, their relationship more to do with power than sex, he says.

And if the young men are confused over their sexual identity, this may lead them to them put themselves in situations where they can be exploited by an adult.

A key difference between young women and men involved in prostitution is the way they are introduced to their clients. Young men are rarely picked up on the street.

"Quite often they are taken to people's homes, or they may be living with a coercive adult and other men are brought to them," Ady says. "And I will be investigating how these liaisons are established.

"It could be through text messages, or if there is an abusive adult, they may have a network that they could utilise; there may be sites on the Internet where young men are advertised, or there may be adverts in newspapers that could use code.

"There will be networks of adults, I have no doubt about that at all. We have seen how child pornography rings operate, and I think it will essentially be similar."

And it is through these same means of the Internet and adverts that Ady hopes to establish contact with the young men who are being exploited, using the knowledge SECOS has already gained to point him in the right direction and decipher the codes.

But he stresses the objective is not necessarily to persuade the young men to leave prostitution.

"It is about giving these young people choices about what they want to do. The aim is to enable them to look at their lifestyles and reduce the risks they're taking.

"It might be that they exit prostitution, it might be that they don't but they do it in a safer way, and hopefully it will enable them to recover from the abuse and exploitation they have experienced," he says.

But he faces an additional hurdle to working with male prostitutes to those faced by the project aimed at young women.

"There is often an assumption that all young men being exploited through prostitution are gay, and that is not the case," he says. "There are young men who identify as gay, bisexual or heterosexual.

"Although we're moving in the right direction, there is still a stigma around having sex with men. These young men have not only got to overcome telling somebody that they're being exploited, it is also that they're being exploited by another man. That generates a strong sense of guilt and shame."

For Ady, the project's very existence is a step forward in raising the issue of male prostitution. In the same way that child abuse was an unspoken truth, so exploiting boys and young men for sex is something we would rather went unacknowledged.

As well as his work in Middlesbrough, Ady will also be carrying out research in Newcastle, trying to discover if it has a similar problem. Although Middlesbrough was chosen because of its established prostitution scene, and the groundwork already carried out by SECOS, the suspicion is that male prostitution is widespread.

"It exists. People might find it hard to comprehend, but I have no doubt at all that it is happening all over the place," Ady says. "Simply by putting it on the agenda, it will enable people to say that they are being exploited and it is wrong.

"You might have young men who are hinting to people that there is something going on, that they have been prostituted, and adults around them aren't picking it up, it has not occurred to them that something is happening. Some of what we're doing is raising awareness, and getting people to think about what might be going on.

"There might be a young man out there now, who is sitting in a home right now and expecting an adult to be brought in to them, and it might be that now they will realise there are other young boys out there in the same position."