Developing Appropriate Community Responses to Compensated Dating among Adolescent Girls: Perceptions and Preferences of Various Stakeholders

Compensated dating,” or “teen prostitution,” is a global concern that has drawn the attention of researchers, policy makers, and helping professionals. This phenomenon has been particularly prevalent in Asian countries. It was a well-known social issue in Japan in the 1990s, Taiwan in the 2000s, and Hong Kong in the 2010s, and it is likely to be a concern in the affluent cities of Mainland China in the coming decades. Although many previous studies have examined the patterns, contributing forces, and consequences of compensated dating involving young people, very few studies have investigated public views of interventions to combat compensated dating. Local studies on juvenile girls are also limited. This proposed study is intended to fill this gap.Based on Hunter’s (1985) concept on social control, Triplett and colleagues’ (2003) elaboration of neighbourhood-institutional control on crime rates, and the proposed project PI’s work on measuring public views to handling domestic violence (Li et al., forthcoming), community responses to handle crime can be undertaken at various levels:the private level,parochial level,criminal justice level, andhelping professional level.Stakeholders differ in their social background and professional training, and so they may have different perspectives on a given issue and the best way to handle it. Therefore, a comparative study of this kind promises to not only enrich our understanding of people’s perceptions of compensated dating but also provide a valuable reference for policy makers, researchers, and practitioners in designing relevant responses to this problem. In addition, the study will assess the influences of personal background characteristics, professional background, respondents’ attitudes toward gender roles, and perceptions of compensated dating on preferences for responses to this problem.The proposed study will involve the collection of survey data from approximately 1,200 stakeholders and of qualitative data from eight focus groups over a 27-month period from January 2013 to March 2015 with an amount of about HK$450,000. We will use these data to empirically assess public views of compensated dating involving underage persons and their attitudes toward various criminal justice and social responses to this problem.The knowledge, expertise, and research experience of the project PI and her collaborator will be complementary, which will help to facilitate project implementation and to generate multiple perspectives on the problem. In addition, the PI and her collaborators have experience in researching the topic of compensated dating and performing studies on stakeholders’ views. These factors should guarantee a high level of feasibility for project implementation.