I am speaking out today because I am deeply disturbed by what I am seeing from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee). We are witnessing a dangerous, systemic shift in language that spits in the face of survivors and undermines decades of work in child protection.
The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women monitors the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. In their February 2026 Concluding observations on the seventh periodic report of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Committee repeatedly uses the terms “minor sex workers” and “sex work among minors.” Let’s be brutally honest about what this language means: this is rebranding child rape as work.
As a survivor of child sexual exploitation and trafficking, I know exactly what this language does. It does not empower children. It protects predators, buyers, and traffickers. When we change the words, we change the level of protection. When you label a child’s trauma as a labor category, you strip away the urgency of rescue and replace it with the bureaucracy of regulation. This puts children in so much more danger than they already are.
Why We Must Fight This Language: The Dangerous Message We Send
We have to look at what this language actually does to the heart of a child. Using the term, “minor sex worker” tells a child currently trapped in exploitation that their abuse is just a job and their trauma is a task. It shifts the burden of performance onto the child and removes the guilt from the predator. For those of us who survived this as children, this language is a second betrayal. It rebrands our stolen childhoods as a professional history. Cleaning the vocabulary of violence and rape strips away a victim’s right to be seen as a child in need of protection, and replaces it with the cold, detached status of a worker. It tells children that the world sees their bodies as a marketplace, not a life to be guarded. Our children are being put in danger because of this. Imagine if it were your child sold for rape, and it was called work. How would you feel?
The shift in terminology is not a mere update in vocabulary; it is a fundamental betrayal of human rights. Here is why we cannot let this stand:
- First, exploitation is not work. A child cannot consent to being sold for sex or trafficking. The United Nation’s own Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes prostitution of a minor as a form of violence and sexual exploitation. By calling it “work,” the UN is legitimizing commercial sexual abuse.
- Second, there is an inextricable link to trafficking: The language of “minor sex worker” and “sex work among minors” ignores the truth that prostitution has links to sex trafficking. You cannot stop sex trafficking while you are busy normalizing the very market that fuels it.
- Finally, it is a betrayal of human rights: This language creates a legal loophole for predators. It treats a human rights violation as a career choice. It effectively abandons the child to protect an industry.
A Call to Action
The human rights field should not adopt the language of pimps. Using terms like “minor sex worker” are not just words in a report; these words undermine decades of work of building legal and moral fences to keep our children safe. This is not a debate over terminology. It is a battle for the soul of child protection.
We must stand for the truth and facts: the prostitution of children is not labor. It is rape. It is exploitation. It is a system of violence that has no place in a civilized society. We must refuse to normalize a market that thrives on the destruction of childhood. Children are not commodities.
Our duty is to protect the child—not the industry that consumes them.
Jane Lasonder is a survivor of child sexual exploitation and trafficking who has dedicated her life to international advocacy, training, and speaker engagements. She serves as the Chair of the International Survivor of Trafficking Advisory Council (ISTAC) for OSCE-ODIHR and Chair of the Hope for Justice Survivor Leaders Council. Jane is also a member of the Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre (MSPEC) at Oxford University and the Interparliamentary Task Force on Human Trafficking (ITHT).
An accomplished author of three books, her latest work, Health and Slavery, was published internationally by Springer. In October 2024, she was honored by the Human Trafficking Foundation with the Anti-Slavery Award for “Outstanding Contribution to the Fight Against Modern Slavery” in the Empowering Survivor Voices category. She was also a runner-up for the global Freedom United Storytelling for Freedom Award.
Jane writes this in her own capacity as a survivor voice.
