Montgomery’s main argument in this book is that child prostitution cannot be fully understood unless children are considered as social agents capable of making their own choices rather than as objects of compassion and concern. Montgomery wishes to move beyond what she terms “the deviance paradigm” to contribute to an anthropological redefinition of sexuality, culture, and ontology. The recent dramatic transformation of child prostitution from a local concern to an internationally debated issue is closely linked, Montgomery argues in chapter 1, to the lobbying and campaigning of ECPAT (End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism), an offshoot of the Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism. The growing iconic status of child prostitutes has led to much myth and stereotyping, feeding moral outrage and public desire for sensationalism. A deeper understanding of the issue requires that the children concerned and the context in which they live be brought into the analysis. In chapter 2, Montgomery deconstructs the Western-centered model of childhood innocence that informs opinions held in the West on children’s sexuality and argues that childhood in rural Thailand departs from this model. She also discusses issues such as the universality of moral standards and human rights, differences in childrearing between the Thai middle classes and the rural population, and the economic role of children in the countryside. Chapters 3 to 5 contain the body of the anthropological data, gathered from children in Baan Nua, a tiny community of 14 households located near one of Thailand’s tourist resorts. Child prostitution is the community’s main source of income. The figures are appalling: Of the 26 largely self-selected prostitutes whom Montgomery interviewed, 11 were under ten years of age, four of these between four and six. Facing hostility from the community, Montgomery gathered the bulk of her data during interviews with the children while they attended an NGO-run center away from the slum. Additional information on some of the parents, clients, and pimps enabled her to sketch a complex picture of children’s relationships evolving around identity, kinship, status, merit, and religious beliefs. The children testify to their having not merely broken lives, as the media outcry suggests, but also hopes and a vision of their future. Montgomery concludes that “prostitution, for the children themselves, is not an issue of morality versus immorality but of turning a socially unacceptable form of earning into a way of fulfilling their familial obligations” (p. 157).

A book on this topic cannot fail to raise many questions, and this is Montgomery’s major contribution. Why speak of “child prostitutes” when the children do not emphasize this aspect of their lives but see themselves “as dutiful daughters, sisters, or grandchildren, who should be admired rather than pitied or patronised” (p. 11)? The stereotype “child prostitutes” contradicts Montgomery’s intention to put children’s perspectives and self-representations at the center of her research. It also leads her into the methodological pitfall of using the stereotype to select her research population, artificially limiting the scope of research to the children she herself suspects of prostitution and jeopardizing the depth of her analysis. The relation between economic calculation and morality is equally problematic. For Montgomery, if children sell their bodies, it is simply because “they can and because prostitution is, and always will be, an industry that lays a premium on youth” (p. 48). But not all children in Baan Nua prostitute themselves: some do not work at all, and others work as street vendors, beggars, refuse collectors, or in sweatshops. The fact that the income from these jobs is so much lower than what can be earned in prostitution raises the question of why not all children in the community prostitute themselves. An answer to this question would have substantiated Montgomery’s claim that children’s work, whether in prostitution or outside of it, is essentially a matter of economic calculation and therefore morally neutral. The fact that many of the younger children were not articulate and “did not have the vocabulary to discuss what they did” (p. 73) raises doubts about these children’s capacity for making economic calculations. Montgomery’s presupposition that economic calculation is morally neutral is equally debatable, as it is mostly siblings and mothers who sell these young children into prostitution to opt out of it themselves. No doubt this is sound economic calculation, but that does not make it morally neutral. And what about the calculations of the clients who the older children and parents regard as friends and benefactors? Attributing to children who work as prostitutes agency and the capacity to make economic calculations cannot clearly replace a sound theoretical framework on exploitative practices and how they are reproduced both across generations and at the level of society.

Montgomery addresses an extremely sensitive and challenging topic. Her book contains a useful discussion of previous work on the topic of child prostitution and is supported by a case study that gives us an inside glimpse, however limited, of child prostitutes’ social world. The effort is commendable and useful for those who wish to carry it one step further. Future researchers will need to deal, both at the level of theory and of research methodology, with the ways childhoods outside the Western world are not only constructed as deviant but also fragmented into stereotypical media items, NGO targets, and law-and-order-issues.