Although many of the defendants were charged with conspiracy to incite prostitution for gain, there is no suggestion that any of the victims were sex workers.
It’s disgusting. It implies that there is a separate class of underage girls and vulnerable women who are unexploitable, because they are ‘sex workers’. It implies that some women and girls can be complicit in their own exploitation, that if any of those women and girls laid claim to a certain ‘identity’ (or had that ‘identity’ applied to them, as happened in Rochdale), then they wouldn’t have been victims of exploitation.
It is also implying that there is a separate realm of ‘sex work’ which has no connection to paedophilia, grooming, exploitation and forced prostitution.
I will be emailing the editor (guardian.readers@theguardian.com) and the journalist (frances.perraudin@theguardian.com), not that it ever does any good. Frances Perraudin is also on twitter (@fperraudin) if any reader of this blog would like to let her know that she is throwing vulnerable women and girls under the bus.
Anti-Porn Feminists 
Here’s the email I just sent, if anyone wants to use it as a template:
Dear Frances,
I am writing to you about your article that appears in today’s Guardian: ‘Eighteen people found guilty over Newcastle sex grooming network’.
I would like to know how you justify this paragraph:
“Although many of the defendants were charged with conspiracy to incite prostitution for gain, there is no suggestion that any of the victims were sex workers.”
Do you think there is a class of underage girls that can be ‘sex workers’? That ‘sex workers’ are a sub-class of women and girls whom it is impossible to exploit? Are you unaware that in Rochdale many of the victims were originally dismissed as being ‘child prostitutes’ who had made a ‘lifestyle choice’?
You are perpetrating the lie that vulnerable women and girls can ‘choose’ ‘sex work’ and that ‘sex work’ exists separately from the grooming and abuse you were reporting on.
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