Children and Prostitution

Work all day? What for, when someone like me can wear a hat and beautiful dress, and have white hands just like a lady?
Child prostitute in Kiev

Too young to register, child prostitutes could easily be found amid the ranks of Russia's clandestines. Urban neighborhoods such as Dumskaia Square in Kiev and Znamenskaia Square in St. Petersburg had reputations as centers of child prostitution.^[1] Entire hotels reportedly catered to pedophiles, with prepubescent girls openly soliciting customers and sometimes supplying their parents with the money they earned from prostitution. Whereas child prostitution had once attracted only a limited clientele, Boris Bentovin, a physician who worked at Kalinkin Hospital, claimed that after the turn of the century the trade in children had soared and was no longer considered perverse or unusual.^[2]

The onset of World War I apparently drove many more children to the streets. Social dislocation caused by war meant an increase in homelessness and a concomitant rise in children who were growing up in doorways and sleeping in boxes and on cemetery grounds. To support themselves, they engaged in prostitution. An official from the Kiev juvenile court attributed the child prostitution he encountered during the war years to "poverty and defenselessness," rather than simple hunger. Only two of the hundreds of young prostitutes he encountered between 1914 and 1917 traded in sex because they were on the verge of starvation.^[3]

There are too many accounts of child prostitution in the sources to attribute its descriptions to adult paranoia and fantasy alone. The charitable organization known as the Russian Society for the Protection of Women (Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin, hereafter ROZZh), for example, wrote in its annual report of a nine-year-old prostitute who reportedly lost her virginity to an "urchin" at the age of

[1] M. K. Mukalov, Deti ulitsy (St. Petersburg, 1906), pp. 8, 18 (quotation from child prostitute); Lincoln, In War's Dark Shadow, pp. 3–4, 124–26.

[2] Boris Bentovin, Deti-prostitutki (St. Petersburg, 1910), p. 4. See also Russkii vrach, no.18 (1909): 631. Laura Engelstein argues, "By 1910, . . . so-called child prostitutes came to symbolize the entire social problem in its most acute and menacing form." Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 284.

[3] Valerii Levitskii, "Deti-prostitutki v dni voiny," Vestnik vospitaniia, no. 2 (February 1917): 168–71. See also A. I. Zak, "Tipy detskoi besprizornosti, prestupnosti, i prostitutsii," Vestnik vospitaniia, no. 7 (October 1914): 70–101; no.8 (November 1914): 81–110.

seven and was then repeatedly molested by her father. When a policeman brought her to the local halfway house for prostitutes, she was smoking and apparently drunk. In response to a question about why she smoked and drank, she said, "It pleases men."^[4] In 1913, a Petersburg feminist journal described how a male ROZZh member followed a soldier and two 11-year-old girls. When he caught up with this trio, he found one girl standing guard and another alone with the soldier. The soldier went free, but the girls were whisked off for examinations at a medical-police committee clinic.^[5]

A colonel stationed near the Persian border at the turn of the century reported how his riflemen sought "diversions," which sometimes meant buying sex from the native women. He saw "one of these beauties" sleeping curled up on a fox coat. When the girl's mother kicked her awake, the colonel realized that she was a "real girl-child" (devochkasushchii rebenok ). In answer to his queries about her age, "with pride" the mother replied, "Twelve, but she has been acquainted with men since she was nine." Thus inspired, the colonel proposed that civilian authorities in the nearby city of Samarkand might ease the troops' burdens by bringing half a dozen such young women to live near the soldiers in remote outposts. To strengthen his case, he pointed out that the British had been doing something similar for their troops in India for years.^[6]

On one hand, observers were outraged and disgusted by the idea of young girls catering to the sexual fancies of adult men. At the same time though, privileged society found something exciting and prurient about child prostitution. Surely Boris Bentovin gave his 1910 book on juvenile prostitution a distinctly erotic flavor when he described a 12-year-old girl—a "little female onanist" (devochka-onanistka )—who masturbated by leaning against sewing machines. He wrote about how, in order to satisfy the huge demand for virgins, some St. Petersburg midwives specialized in sewing on "hymens" fashioned from scraps of cow bladder or very thin pieces of rubber. A capsule of blood or a red-colored liquid would be attached, ready to provide a client with "the illusion of a 'first night.'" Bentovin's vision of St. Petersburg included girls as young as 10

[4] Rossiiskoe obshchestvo zashchity zhenshchin v 1909 g . (St. Petersburg, 1910), p. 70.

[5] "K voprosu o detskoi prostitutsii," Zhenskii vestnik, no. 9 (1913): 195.

[6] Polkovnik Lossovskii, "Kavkazskie strelki za Kaspiem," Razvedchik, no. 521 (October 10, 1900): 914. Indignant comments on his proposal can be found in Vrach, no. 42 (1900): 1295. For a report on a 14-year-old prostitute in Moscow, see "Maloletnaia prostitutka," Stolichnoe utro, no. 47 (July 24, 1907): 4.

or 11 who would "look you in the eye, promise you astonishing pleasures, and spew nasty language."^[7]

Child prostitution existed for two reasons: first, there was a market for young bodies and, second, children of the urban poor faced the choice of earning negligible "honest" wages or making good money on the streets. The latter must have been a great temptation.^[8] In 1909, a Petersburg newspaper wrote of two girls aged 9 and 11 who had been taken in by the House of Mercy, the private charitable institution dedicated to "reforming" prostitutes. On the street, these children earned 60 and 90 rubles a month respectively, that is, more than four and six times what an adult female worker might average.^[9] When Bentovin asked a girl around 11 or 12 years old whether she was bothered by the "vileness and immorality" of her life, she reportedly answered, "Not in the least. . . . There's nothing so bad here. . . . It's much better than a brothel. . . . I get sweet and delicious things. . . . The little uncles [diad'ki ] are all really funny and kind. . . . If they come up with something bad, I don't do it."^[10] Christine Stansell has shown that girls in the urban lower classes of nineteenth-century New York City faced sexual aggression from men at many turns; the "innocence" of childhood was in essence a bourgeois myth. Realistically, then, child prostitution could be viewed as a "way of turning a unilateral relationship into a reciprocal one."^[11]

Medical-police committees struggled against juvenile prostitution by various means, but at least in St. Petersburg, police raids remained the weapon of choice. In 1889, the Petersburg committee picked up twenty-two girls between the ages of 11 and 15 for soliciting. According to Aleksandr Fedorov, they were from poor, morally corrupt families who would dispatch their daughters straight to the streets. The committee sent ten of the girls to the House of Mercy for correction and rehabilitation, but the remaining twelve, much to Fedorov's regret, were returned to their parents' care. In 1890, when seventeen minors were arrested, all wound up back with their families because the House of Mercy was

[7] Bentovin, Deti-prostitutki, pp. 4, 10–12, 33–34.

[8] On children living on Russia's urban streets, see Joan Neuberger, Hoolganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 158–215.

[9] "Bor'ba s prostitutsiei," Rech ', no. 111 (April 25, 1909): 4.

[10] Bentovin, Deti-prostitutki, p. 15.

[11] Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 185.

full.^[12] Minors, naturally, presented a dilemma to authorities. A physician from the Stavropol' provincial administration pinpointed part of the problem in a letter to the MVD branch that handled regulation after 1904, the Office of the Chief Medical Inspector (Upravlenie glavnago vrachebnago inspektora, hereafter UGVI): ministry rules directed the medical police to send underage girls and women to their parents or to the proper philanthropic institutions, but Stavropol' (like most Russian cities) had no such agencies and many children were orphaned.^[13]

But the central issue was registration. State policies for this category of young women reflected some of the lingering ambivalence toward nadzor. As the author of a 1914 study of European prostitution put it, it was "the very acme of unwisdom and inhumanity" to brand 11-, 12-, and 13-year-old girls with the label of "prostitute."^[14] Though the MVD considered itself in the business of controlling venereal disease by controlling prostitutes, it retreated from the aggressive surveillance of juveniles. In 1903, the ministry raised the minimum age of registration from 16 to 18, essentially lumping 16- and 17-year-old young women into the same category as children and giving them the automatic status of clandestine prostitutes.^[15] Medical-police committees were expected to act accordingly, but local regulators, as usual, often did as they pleased. In Petersburg, for example, the existence of an "army" of juvenile prostitutes spurred authorities to lower the age of registration in 1909.^[16] Among 379 prostitutes who were registered in the northern capital in 1914, 40 were under the age of 18, and 9 were 14 or 15 years old.^[17]

Authorities were understandably loath to condone and, in effect, institutionalize the sexual trade in children by issuing them yellow tickets, Yet the failure to subject young prostitutes to identification, inspection, and incarceration defeated regulation's very purpose, since children and young women with contagious diseases stood by definition outside medical-police surveillance. Petr Gratsianov recognized this dilemma when a European colleague at a Brussels conference proposed establish-

[12] Fedorov, Ocherk vrachebno-politseiskago nadzora, pp. 52, 54–55.

[13] TsGIA, UGVI, f. 1298, op. 1, d. 1730, letter of May 8, 1911.

[14] Flexner, Prostitution in Europe, pp. 152–53.

[15] A Tomsk physician blamed the revised age limit for the "almost boundless" spread of clandestine prostitution. V. M. Timofeev, "Otchet po nadzoru za prostitutsiei v gorode Tomske za 1911 god," Vrachebno-sanitarnaia khronika goroda Tomska, nos. 7–8 (July–August 1912): 369.

[16] Bentovin, Deti-prostitutki, p. 37.

[17] Otchet o deiatel'nosti Petrograndskago doma miloserdiia za 1914 g . (Petrograd, 1915), p. 18.

ing 21 as the minimum age for registration. To Gratsianov, age was irrelevant. "Regulation," he pointed out, "does not strive to punish the prostitute [who is suffering from a venereal disease], but only to render her harmless [obezvredit '] and completely isolate her."^[18]

The reluctance of the state to move young women into a life ruled by the yellow ticket—despite the ostensible reasons for taking this step—shows how state authorities as well as women could be trapped in a tangled web of gender, morals, and ideology. From the vantage point of the regulationists, Gratsianov was right; logic demanded that all prostitutes fall under the state's purview. Nadzor, however, did not simply render the prostitute harmless and isolate her; it labeled her a "public woman," putting her movements and her body into public hands. The MVD bowed to this verity by raising the age limit and thereby undermining its own policies. Having refrained from putting girls into the social category of women who sold sex, the regulators tacitly acknowledged their system's injustice. They also bolstered the ranks of so-called "clandestine" prostitutes, the outlaw group that regulation paradoxically created.