http://rictornorton.co.uk/gu15.htm#:~:text=Reformers%2C%20especially%20later%20in%20the,of%20Catherine%20Street%20and%20Bridges„ Reformers, especially later in the century, complained that girls as young as 12 or 13 years old were soliciting men, and The Times in 1786 and 1788 complained that ‘infant prostitutes’ 9 or 10 years old were offering themselves to men along the Strand, and inviting them into the bagnios of Catherine Street and Bridges Street. Letters in The Times even claimed that some female boarding schools were run by bawds to supply recruits to their brothels. By portraying the prostitute as a child and a victim, reformers generated sympathy for prostitutes, which helped in the campaign to ameliorate their genuinely wretched lives. But the ‘child brothels’, complained of by reformers, have never been documented, and most prostitutes were in fact adult women rather than girls. The average age of prostitutes was probably no lower than 18, possibly much higher. Of twenty-five prostitutes arrested by Sir John Fielding in 1758 in the bawdy houses of Hedge Lane, eleven were aged between 18 and 19. Twelve of the twenty-five women began working as prostitutes at the age of 18 or older, though one, now 15 years old, had plied the streets since the age of 12. (Many of the women seized that night were already infected with venereal disease.) Statistics about ages of defendants in criminal prosecutions were not recorded until late in the century, from 1791 (and even then only the ages of people convicted rather than those acquitted). For 1791–99 and 1820–25 the mean age of women convicted at the Old Bailey for prostitution-related offences was 28 years. The mean age of ‘disorderly women’ held at Bridewell 1815–17 was 26 years. A Select Committee of Police examining this problem in 1816 determined that the mean age of prostitutes was 24 years. Persons acquitted were likely to be younger than persons convicted (who would more likely be repeat offenders). It is impossible to produce statistics for most of the eighteenth century, but not even anecdotal evidence would suggest a youthful age profile for the average streetwalker. It seems very likely that prostitutes entered the trade in their late teens or early twenties.”
again what sorrt of sex were they soliciting and not get tearing or messed up? just orals or what?
