Goodness, Lisa, giving Ms. Dupre a record contact runs the risk of teaching “watching teens a lesson that is but rarely true” about what gets rewarded in life? By and large I doubt it. In any event, the United States is a nation, not a nursery. I’d also add, and I’m sure you’d agree, that most young runaways are driven to abandon their homes by desperation, familial collapse, substance abuse and other problems, not the thought of musical fame.
On a thoroughly lighter, thoroughly bloodier note, this whole mess is a good excuse to talk about the once infamous vicar of Stiffkey, a parson from Norfolk, my home county. True he was john, not hooker, but his end was so sufficiently memorable that it could, I’m sure, serve as a useful ‘teaching moment’ for all. Defrocked by the Church of England in the 1930s for his over-enthusiastic outreach to ladies of the night, he ended up as an amusement park act in a cage re-enacting, it turned out incompetently, the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. One day in 1937, one of the lions, Freddy, decided to put an end to this pantomime, and with it, the ex-vicar.
I don’t know whether the incidence of prostitution fell in the wake of this tragedy, but you cannot blame Freddy for not doing his best to ‘deliver a message’.