Sex Work: Current Research Agendas

Abstract

Though prostitution represents a form of economic exchange, it is not a mainstream economic institution and, in general, governments and other funding agencies have been interested in prostitution only as a problem of social control and/or public health. It follows, then, that street prostitution (the most visible and seemingly 'uncontrollable' form of prostitution) has received the lion's share of research attention, and within this, the research agenda has been largely set by a model of prostitution as female sexual deviance, not rational economic action. As a result, the available body of empirical evidence on prostitution reflects a concern with the characteristics and practices of individual prostitutes (their health, psychobiography, sexual history, drug use, etc.), and a neglect of the social and organisational features of prostitution, power relations within prostitute-client transactions and, above all, a neglect of questions about the demand for prosti tution. This represents a very real problem for all those who are engaged in theoretical, political or policy debate on prostitution, and it is a problem with which both of the books under review here grapple. The research upon which McKeganey and Barnard's Sex Work on the Streets is based began from a concern to identify the extent of HIV infection amongst street based prostitutes in Glasgow. As the authors note, 'Public anxieties and uncertain ties over HIV infection were in large part the makings of this book. Were it not for public health concern over the potential role that prostitution might play in the spread of HIV, it is unlikely that our research would have attracted funding' (99). Rather than simply interviewing a sample of prostitute women already attending genito-urinary clinics (as a number of previous researchers concerned with possible links between HIV and prostitution had done), McKeganey and Barnard determined to use a variety of ethnographic techniques in red light areas. Over a three-year period they conducted more than 800 hours of field research on the streets and one consequence of this was that by the end of the study, 'the focus on HIV infection was much less pronounced' (99). The immersion into the research subject's world implied by ethnography focused McKeganey and Barnard's atten tion on the many and considerable other risks that street prostitutes face in the course of their work, as well as or more than on 'the risks that they are presumed to represent to others' (99) as a potential conduit of HIV infection. Thus the authors moved well beyond the initial remit of assessing the risk of HIV infection associated with street prostitution to address questions about the lived experience of street prostitution in Glasgow. This is, indeed, the main strength of the book, which describes, among other things, the reasons for women's movement in and out of prostitution, street