Is it off topic to wonder how the story of the badly behaved boy and his mother ended? Presumably with the police involved, they got separated and she was "protected" even more, albeit deprived of a livelihood. Maybe in another era, the consensus was that sex work was such a great job that legal penalties were needed to disincentivize it or there wouldn't be enough women left to be wives and housekeepers. In these more enlightened times, we consider it such a horrible job that anyone who would do it must be crazy or coerced, and needs to be shown that there are alternatives, but we retain the legal penalties in case we're not sure.