12 Year Old Stripper
And the Strip Club Wasn’t Punished
By Daniel Muniz

It was pretty outrageous when a 12 year old girl was able to dance nude at the Diamonds Cabaret strip club in Dallas Texas. But what was truly disturbing was that the sexually oriented business did not automatically lose its license or suffer any negative consequences because the city of Dallas didn’t have an ordinance that prevents minors from stripping. The authorities arrested a few people but the club was unscathed.

The chain of events that led to this incident began when a 12 year old sixth grader, who was also a runaway, aimlessly wandered through Dallas. She was eventually befriended by stripper Demonica Abron, 27, and her friend David Bell, 22. But instead of informing the police about the runaway they found, Abron offered to let the pre-teen stay with her for a while. Afterwards, the exotic dancer was then able to persuade the young girl to join her at the strip club she worked at to see how she would fare in dancing naked as a job.

Now here is how things got murky.

The club asked the underage girl for identification when they handed her an application to fill out and naturally, she couldn’t produce any. No problem!

She completed the paperwork using a fake name. However, the problem was with her birthday so she told the club personnel that she forgot it but she explained that she was 19. No problem! The club employee gave her the year that she would have to be born in so she could be the age of 19.

For the next interview, another club employee asked her to remove all of her clothes to see if she would have any difficulty dancing completely in the nude. Apparently, she passed the test because she was able to dance that very night in her birthday suit. She also earned $100, which she split with club.

But this minor’s stint as a nude dancer only lasted for about two weeks.

The police then promptly arrested both Abron and Bell and slapped them with felony charges because of their involvement in getting this minor to work at a strip club. However, the firestorm that ensued was about club itself especially since law enforcement had already found a 17 year old working there shortly before this incident. There are a lot of things that the authorities could bust Diamonds Cabaret for but hiring minors is not one of them. As a result, the strip club was not in any danger of losing its operating license.

However, the Dallas city council then quickly amended their ordinances to prevent this from happening again.

But the real issue is that municipalities all over the country need to be proactive at how strippers are hired within their city limits. As vividly shown with Diamonds Cabaret, some of these establishments don’t care if a girl is a minor because they will hire anybody if there is not an apparatus set up that prevents carelessness.

Many cities have approach this problem in one of two ways.

They either require strippers to be licensed from their jurisdiction so that way a profile of them is already in their files or they require clubs to maintain detailed records for each dancer, such as copies of an original photo, current driver’s license, criminal record report, and fingerprints.

Either way, valid documentation and identifying information prevents a minor from lying about who they are and especially about their real age. Of course such rules won’t stop everyone but it is rigorous enough that it will prevent most underage girls from easily obtaining employment from places like Diamonds Cabaret.

My personal preference is for the burden to be placed on the sexually oriented businesses instead of local governments issuing out permits to strippers. This is a responsibility that belongs to these establishments and if they refuse to maintain detailed records, then they ought to be nailed to the wall such as having their operating licenses automatically revoked for an entire year. Such a drastic consequence will ensure that minors are not hired.

And that is the approach that the city of Dallas implemented.

They even went one step further in requiring that the owner of these establishments have someone who is designated as the “official club operator” during business hours. That person is then solely responsible for every activity that occurs during their watch. In that way, the owners or top management of a sexually oriented business cannot have “plausible deniability” on the bad decisions and poor judgment of their employees because someone in an authoritative capacity is present on the premises at all times.

It was just pure sloppiness in how a 12 year old was able to dance nude on the stage of a strip club. However, Diamonds Cabaret was able to get away with it because the city wasn’t equipped to deal with recklessness.

Although municipalities cannot stop sexually explicit businesses from operating, they can at least do their part to ensure that underage girls are never allowed to take their clothes off for money.

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