Last week, Florida celebrated International Women’s Day by treating the state’s young women like children. On Friday, state lawmakers passed a bill banning 18- to 20-year-olds from being strippers or working in any other capacity at adult entertainment venues.
Like a similar bill passed in Texas in 2021, Florida’s bill claims to be a major blow against human trafficking. Like so many other attempts to “protect” people from sex work, this one has the great potential to backfire and worsen abuse and exploitation.
It’s also part of a growing movement in the United States to push the boundaries of childhood, making all sorts of things once legal for 18- to 20-year-olds now off-limits.
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Crime of failing to identify a false identification document
Under the new measure, Florida adults under 21 will be prohibited from working in strip clubs, burlesque establishments, adult bookstores or any other business that falls under Florida’s definition of adult entertainment. Currently, people can legally do so once they turn 18.
On March 5, the Florida Senate voted nearly unanimously to raise the minimum age to 21. Only three senators voted no. A few days later, only three members of the Florida House voted against it.
The measure is now in the hands of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. If he signs it, the law will go into effect on July 1.
Young adult strippers and adult club staff would not be subject to fines. Rather, the bill would make it a crime to knowingly hire, contract, or otherwise permit someone under the age of 21 to work in these businesses.
Doing so would be a second-degree crime, punishable up to 15 years to prison and/or a fine of up to $10,000 if the youth displays any part of the buttocks, (female) breasts, pubic area, or genitals “with less than completely opaque coverage” or displays “covered male genitals in an evidently turgid state.” This would be a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in prison and/or a fine of up to $1,000 if the youth remains fully clothed.
And it doesn’t matter if an institution is fooled by a fake ID.
“For the purposes of this section, ignorance by a person of the age of another person or misrepresentation by a person of his or her age shall not be raised as a defense in a prosecution for a breach of this section,” the bill states. (It also says that the work must be done “consciously,” so it’s unclear exactly how these two standards can coexist, unless you take consciously simply means “you knew the person worked there” but not necessarily “you knew he or she was under 21”).
A person who uses a fake ID to get a job would not be punished at all, let’s be clear; only people who fail to catch this deception are in trouble. It’s a topsy-turvy view of criminal responsibility, in which someone who intends to break the law is innocent and someone who tries to uphold it is guilty.
Basically, the only way for an adult business to avoid liability under this law is to run background checks on all workers or contractors or to avoid allowing anyone who looks even remotely young to work.
Worse, the liability doesn’t stop with the person who hires or runs the business: It extends to “an owner, manager, employee, or contractor” who lets the young adult work. In theory, this means whoever employee at a strip club where a worker under the age of 21 managed to sneak in could be held liable for not reporting the incident.
“Sexual slavery” panic, again
Florida lawmakers say the measure is intended to stop sex trafficking. (Sex trafficking is legally defined as prostitution involving force, fraud, coercion or minors.) Young adults who work in strip clubs “are likely to be trafficked and sold into prostitution and sexual slavery,” said Rep. David Borrero (R-Doral). during the legislative debate. “We should side with girls who are barely legal.”
But neither Doral nor anyone else has provided evidence that strip clubs are places of “sexual slavery,” nor that requiring strippers to be 21 or older would make a dent in this alleged plague.
Even if it’s sex trafficking AND a problem in strip clubs, it’s unclear what mechanism preventing young adults from undressing would stop it. All with criminals it’s that they tend not to care what the law says. Are we really supposed to believe that someone willing to force someone else into prostitution would suddenly stop because their victim couldn’t legally work in a strip club?
If a young woman AND being forced into sex work, she will almost certainly still be a victim after this law goes into effect. But now this will happen in a more private place, with fewer people around who could help the victim.
Likewise, if a young woman is independently determined to engage in sexual activity, this probably won’t stop her. But instead of working in a relatively safe environment like an official strip club, she might choose to work in an underground location and instead engage in full-service sex work (which is illegal). That is, she will turn to black market options that increase the likelihood of exploitation or abuse.
I’ve heard people argue that this is actually the problem underage people who work in strip clubs and that raising the minimum age will make it easier to stop this. But again, no one provides evidence that underage strippers are actually a problem.
In any case, cops will still have to investigate people’s actual ages to verify the validity of any reports that a stripper looks too young. Except now “too young” will become an expanded category, giving authorities more impetus to submit to age checks.
Infantilize young adults
In short: Laws like these do nothing to “plausibly stop human trafficking” and could make things worse. In the meantime they give authorities more power over policing strip clubs and the people who work there. Even when a business isn’t doing anything wrong, the cops can always demand a “tip” that someone looked young to come in and verify the identity of the people who work there.
And there’s an even simpler reason why these laws aren’t good: They impact the freedom of young adults for no good reason. Just because some people would prefer a society in which no 19-year-old tries to dance sexy for money, it doesn’t follow that no 19-year-old should have the right to do so.
“This is just another way to control women,” Rep. Michele Rayner (D-St. Petersburg) said during debate on the bill last week.
It is also another way to continue to define adulthood, so that people who were previously afforded most of the rights and responsibilities of adulthood are increasingly defined as legally and morally equivalent to children. Nowadays, 18- to 20-year-olds are often prevented not only from legally drinking, but also from smoking, stripping and vaping.
These bans should succeed, considering how the minimum drinking age has prevented young people from consuming alcohol…right? AHAHAHAHA. If anything, setting a minimum age of 21 to legally purchase or drink alcohol has made alcohol consumption among youth riskier. But like people who look at the failure of the drug war and think we just need a tougher drug war, some people see the disaster that is banning college students and other young adults from drinking and think: Yes, let’s try it with more things.
It is madness. But infantilizing young adults is all the rage these days. And then we wonder why so many of them are depressed, anxious, or convinced that it’s everyone else’s job to make them feel “safe.”
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