Women In Prostitution Research Articles

‘Black Velvet’ and ‘Purple Indignation’: Print responses to Japanese ‘poaching’ of Aboriginal women

In 1936 a flurry of newspaper reports alleged widespread prostitution of Aboriginal women and girls to Japanese pearlers. The claims had a dramatic impact. Within weeks of them being printed a report was placed before the Department of the Interior. A vessel was commissioned to patrol the Arnhem Land coast. The allegations were raised at the first meeting of State Aboriginal protection authorities. Cabinet closed Australian waters to foreign pearling craft and a control base was established in the Tiwi Islands. Japanese luggers were fired upon with machine guns and a crew detained in Darwin. These escalating events occurred within five years of a series of attacks on Japanese by Aborigines (culminating in the infamous Caledon Bay spearing of five trepangers, along with the killings of two white men and one policeman on Woodah Island), and only five years before Australian and Japanese forces waged war. Much ink was spilt over the course of this print scandal, and while reports made use of established language such as 'vice' and 'outrage', a telling omission was the commonly known phrase 'Black Velvet'. The lapse could be considered a deliberate attempt to mask the expression's explicit reference to the tactile sensations associated with illicit white contact with racialised genitals. However tracing its use reveals that the phrase exclusively pertained to white men's sexualisation of Aboriginal women. Aboriginal women were not 'Black Velvet' to Japanese men, indicating this colloquial language played a role in establishing settlers' sense of proprietorial ownership of Aboriginal women's bodies - quite literally, for whom Aboriginal women were out-of-bounds.

Resignificando la imagen y el concepto de la mujer prostituta. Un aporte desde Trabajo Social

Recognizing the importance of the feminine figure in a world where women are judged and denigrated for their occupation, particularly in the case of sexual workers, makes part of the process of social transformations that our society must go through in order to recognize both the problem itself and women as subjects, and to deconstruct the situation of subordination, rights violation, and discrimination of women, who usually are the ones who carry all the responsibility of a shared activity such as the exchange of sex and money.   Based on the findings of a research project on feminine prostitution inprivate rooms of the Sixth Avenue of the city of Cali, this article seeks to analyze the importance of the contributions of social work as discipline/profession in resignifying the existing concept and image of prostitute women. This will include examining interviews and life narratives by the actors participating in private rooms, who in some way or another promote the sexual dynamics that takes place in there. It is therefore necessary tothink about a problem that has economic, religious, social, and cultural implications, but that hides the numerous factors that affect the women who perform this occupation, categorizing them only from the point of view of their job and considering them as subjects only from their condition of sexual workers, while ignoring other dimensions and roles in their lives.

Private lives of public women: Photos of sex workers (minus the sex) in South Korea

We mostly learn about women in prostitution through representation by non-sex-workers: activists, policy-makers, journalists, and academics. What comes through are often hypersexualized and essentialized images of sex workers as either victims or agents. This dichotomy not only essentializes their lives but also undermines women as partners for engagement. Against this background, what could be learned from photographs taken by women in prostitution of their everyday lives? How do they supplement or challenge existing discourses of prostitution? What do the photographers and viewers get out of such an endeavor? And finally, what do the quotidian aspects of life have to do with research on sex work and sexuality in general? These are some of the questions this essay raises through the author’s experience of organizing an exhibition of photographs taken by women in a South Korean red-light district in 2009. The project took place at a time when these women’s lives were undergoing dramatic change at the intersection of neoliberal development and anti-trafficking projects, materialized in the demolition of the red-light district and increasing criminalization of prostitution in South Korea. Between October 2009 and April 2010, 40 of these photographs went on a traveling exhibition “Our Lives, Our Space: Views of Women in a Red-Light District” on the east coast of the USA. This article discusses some of the impact that the exhibition has had on its viewers and the photographers. It concludes by suggesting how a study of prostitution “minus the sex” could point to new avenues of sexuality studies.

“Asia's Missing Women” as a Problem in Applied Evolutionary Psychology?

In many parts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, women and children are so undervalued, neglected, abused, and so often killed, that sex ratios are now strongly male biased. In recent decades, sex-biased abortion has exacerbated the problem. In this article I highlight several important insights from evolutionary biology into both the origin and the severe societal consequences of "Asia's missing women", paying particular attention to interactions between evolution, economics and culture. Son preferences and associated cultural practices like patrilineal inheritance, patrilocality and the Indian Hindu dowry system arise among the wealthy and powerful elites for reasons consistent with models of sex-biased parental investment. Those practices then spread via imitation as technology gets cheaper and economic development allows the middle class to grow rapidly. I will consider evidence from India, China and elsewhere that grossly male-biased sex ratios lead to increased crime, violence, local warfare, political instability, drug abuse, prostitution and trafficking of women. The problem of Asia's missing women presents a challenge for applied evolutionary psychology to help us understand and ameliorate sex ratio biases and their most severe consequences.

Helping victims of prostitution and trafficking

Child sex trafficking and adult women involved in street-based prostitution are two problems affecting the city of Toledo, Ohio. While various agencies worked independently to address these problems, there was no collaborative effort. We decided to organize a year-long roundtable that included people from Toledo-based social service, criminal justice, and health care systems, as well as concerned citizens, church groups, and survivors of prostitution. Our intent was to develop responses that were specific and sensitive not only to the needs of prostituted women and trafficked teens, but also to service providers and members of the community. In this article, we report on our project, its accomplishments, and lessons learned.

"Prostitutionsfrågan" - perspektiv och nycklar till en grumlig debatt

Since the American “Sex Wars” were fought in the 80’s between different strands of feminism, feminists have been arguing about how to interpret the issue of prostitution. The positions taken differ in points of departure, analytical focus, epistemological claims and of course in suggested solutions. This article examines this heated debate, as articulated within the Western context during the last some twenty years, suggesting a way of structuring it. Using distinctions such as analytical-empirical, pragmatic-idealistic and fragmented-coherent, I discuss how the different approaches to the issue of prostitution are phrased. In the article, I discuss six key points of conflict. 1. Is prostitution understood as a) purely an act or b) also as a gendered institution, with an impact on society as a whole? 2. Who is visible in the discussion about “prostitution”? a) Women in prostitution, who are made equivalent with prostitution, or b) the buying men, who are seen as key actors in prostitution? 3. How is “the whore” interpreted? As a) an empirical figure, embodied by the sex working woman, breaking gendered norms, or as b) a gendered filter of interpretation through which women are measured and constructed as women, manifesting gendered norms? 4. How is prostitution understood? “Per se”/in idealistic terms or as it manifests it self/in a pragmatic terms? In other words, is prostitution a) taken to be impossible to abolish but possible to reform, as to become what it really is – sex work – or is it b) seen as important to make fundamental changes in society, which can’t come about as long as prostitution is accepted? 5. What is seen as negotiated in the prostitution contract? Is it a) sex that is bought and sold, or is it b) women’s sexual but non reproductive bodies, i.e. women’s accessibility for men? 6. Is prostitution taken as a) a postulate, laying ground for how we should define politics and policy, or b) as a practice that can and should be challenged and politically contested.

Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960, by Julia Laite.

Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960, by Julia Laite. Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ix, maps, 299 pp. $85.00 US (cloth). Buying and selling sex has never actually been illegal in Britain. However, solicitation and other activities that facilitate commercial sex were increasingly prohibited by legal statute and police action since the late nineteenth century. In Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, Julia Laite explores the complex and contingent experience of prostitutes in relation to the criminal justice system. Laite questions both the motivations and utility of criminalization, arguing that it helped to make prostitution about specific demons in society that could be managed by specific laws, rather than a sign of something very wrong in the fundamental structure of society or the state itself' (p. 216). More often than redressing exploitation and the dangers associated with commercial sex for women, Laite argues, criminalization instead created dynamics which encouraged the involvement of third-parties, organized crime, and women's increased vulnerability to physical harm. Present-day positions and policies on prostitution, Laite concludes, fail to recognize these histories or the harmful consequences of past legal interventions. Laite extends the study of British prostitution through the first half of the twentieth century, from the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act to the 1959 Street Offences Act, a critical period in which prostitution was increasingly the fodder of tabloid sensationalism, public concern and state intervention. During this period prostitution came to be more circumscribed than it had been at any other time in Britain's modern history (p. 2). Critical to understanding commercial sex and its treatment by the criminal justice system is the common prostitute, a term never legally defined, but pervasive in the ongoing criminalization process. Statutes against solicitation were based on an understanding of the public nuisance caused by the common prostitute, an unrespectable urban character distinct from the respectable ordinary citizen. Women entered prostitution for many reasons. Some with dependent children, parents, or partners valued the income and flexible time commitments. Others were coerced or believed they had no other options. Some enjoyed the work. But they all did it, as Laite points out, because there were customers for commercial sex. These included a similarly diverse range of men and motivations. Despite historians' focus on prostitute women, it was men who comprised the majority of individuals participating in commercial sex. Laite's chapter on male clients, and references to male third-parties, pimps, touts, and landlords recognized that on many levels prostitution was inflected by a variety of gender relations. Unlike prostitute women, men were never legally liable for their role in commercial sex and therefore remained largely invisible in the historical record. Still, Laite reminds us that their role cannot be discounted; clients' sexual desires, their spending and earning patterns, their mobility, their leisure patterns and their attitudes were highly determinative of the forms that commercial sex would take (p. 44). Criminalization was, according to Laite, an ongoing process that was both contingent and historically specific. Legal reforms never reduced the incidences of commercial sex, and instead increasing prostitutes' reliance on third-parties, while also undermining women's ability to work safely. …

Caught in the victim/criminal paradigm: female migrant prostitution in contemporary Italy

This article offers a critical exploration of exclusionary practices enacted in Italy towards migrant prostitute women. It identifies the double construction of migrant prostitute women as victims of sex trafficking and as illegal/criminal migrants as a dominant paradigm that informs policy approaches aimed at addressing their presence in the country. It explores how this paradigm has emerged in the specific context of contemporary Italy, how it has been sustained, by whom and with what consequences. By drawing on the exploration of a specific incident, the article shows how gendered and racialised constructions of dangerous migrant sexualities can inform decisions over what determines the slippery and unstable demarcation between those who are identified as victims and those who are identified as criminals. Finally, the article suggests that, caught within the restrictive victim/criminal paradigm, migrant prostitutes fail to be recognised and treated as subjects.

The violence in everyday of prostitution of women: invisibility and ambiguities

To reveal the meaning of violence in everyday female prostitution. we used a phenomenological approach of Martin Heidegger. The survey was conducted in Teresina / Piauí / Brazil, with 11 women members of the Association of Prostitutes of Piaui. The data were produced by means of open interviews conducted by a script with questions regarding their experience as a prostitute and its relationship to violence. The reports indicate that it is prostitution a risky activity in which gender violence is a phenomenon present. In the relational world, prostitution and violence are intertwined in the face of negotiations established between women and men with formal contracts in the dark, verbally, without witnesses, and whose object of contract is the woman herself for the purpose of providing sexual pleasure to the contractor. Through interpretative analysis was possible to understand the lived violence leads women to remain in daily life where is this fear, inauthenticity and ambiguity. violence unveils lived relations of domination and assertion of male power, manifested by violence physical, psychological, moral and sexual. The study advances in scientific knowledge by showing that violence against women, in prostitution, must be understood as a process factual as well as the suffering experienced by them.

Between Emotional Politics and Biased Practices—Prostitution Policies, Social Work, and Women Selling Sexual Services in Denmark

This article is an exploration of current Danish discourses on prostitution based on a material consisting of long-standing ethnographic fieldwork in the field of street prostitution, including interviews with sex workers, counselors, and policy makers, and of analyses of legal documents, newspaper articles, and evaluative reports commissioned by governments. The article outlines a polarized debate about possible change to the current legislation and how the ‘othering’ and victimizing rhetoric of main actors are based on generalization and biased estimations and a mutual blaming for “stealing the voices” of sex workers. It is demonstrated how this polarized and victimizing discourse mediated by social workers in encounters with women in prostitution reduces the women's possibilities to perform rationality and thus their ability to gain relevant capital in the eyes of the counselors. By reducing the women in prostitution to victims, the media and the social system in the last instance can be said to rob them their status as ‘citizens.’

Prostitution and Trafficking in Portugal: Legislation, Policy, and Claims

This paper documents recent changes in legislation and policies surrounding prostitution in Portugal while discussing the role played by sexual trafficking in the way prostitution is framed, institutionally and socially, in the country. In Portuguese legislation, prostitution has not been a crime per se since 1982, but activities related to prostitution, including pimping and benefitting from the prostitution of others, are considered crimes. This legal inconsistency is further complicated by the lack of specific policies addressing the living and working conditions of sex workers. At the same time, growing concern about sex trafficking has resulted in a new set of policies that ultimately influence the regulation of prostitution, in particular the prostitution of immigrant women. This paper shows that these sex-trafficking-related policies and practices have contributed to creating idealized types of “victims” and investigates the risks and consequences of this typology.

Geographic profiles of violent clients of prostitute women and clients overall

Female prostitutes have the highest homicide victimization rate of any group of women ever studied. Violent crimes against prostitutes have low clearance rates. However, cleared cases indicate that most perpetrators are prostitutes' clients. We present geographic profiles of violent clients and clients overall based on patronizing arrest data from 8 states and 3 cities in the U.S., and other data on hundreds of violent clients. We compare clients overall with adult men residing in the same areas and compare violent clients with clients overall on several spatial measures.Both violent clients and clients overall are overwhelmingly local. The journey-to-crime distance is not useful for profiling violent clients. Most efforts to link geographically distant prostitute victims are unlikely to be successful. Perpetrators encountered most of their victims on or very near prostitution strolls known by police, thus surveillance in these areas is a potentially productive investigative strategy.

JUSTifying Scrutiny: State Power in Prostitution Diversion Programs

Neoliberal policies are characterized by a blurring of therapeutic and coercive mechanisms, heightened scrutiny, and a focus on individual problems at the expense of systemic factors. Foucauldian scholars typically examine the mechanisms by which government regulates people in subtle and overt uses of its power; yet scholars often neglect empirical exploration of people's lived experience and its relation to larger social and policy contexts. In this article the authors draw upon their separate ethnographic research projects on the formation and functions of state programs that work with women engaged in street-level prostitution to foreground women's lived experience. Attention to how prostitution diversion programs work and how they are experienced demonstrates the higher costs women may pay under this incarnation of the neoliberal state. Nevertheless, many workers carry out this surveillance and coercion with empathy and care. Women prostitutes recognize this care and may respond to it, even crediting it with their lives' improvement. Despite their gratitude, the reality is that these programs are appreciated because the alternative is so untenable and potentially life threatening. Regardless, the neoliberal policies that have withdrawn welfare assistance and which therefore facilitate rather than address the problems of prostitute women remain unchanged by the care of devoted workers within these programs.

Transactional relationships and sex with a woman in prostitution: prevalence and patterns in a representative sample of South African men

BackgroundSex motivated by economic exchange is a public health concern as a driver of the Sub-Saharan African HIV epidemic. We describe patterns of engagement in transactional sexual relationships and sex with women in prostitution of South African men, and suggest interpretations that advance our understanding of the phenomenon.MethodsCross-sectional study with a randomly-selected sample of 1645 sexually active men aged 18–49 years who completed interviews in a household study and were asked whether they had had sex with a woman in prostitution, or had had a relationship or sex they took to be motivated by the expectation of material gain (transactional sex).Results18% of men had ever had sex with a woman in prostitution, 66% at least one type of transactional sexual relationship, only 30% of men had done neither. Most men had had a transactional relationship/sex with a main partner (58% of all men), 42% with a concurrent partner (or makhwapheni) and 44% with a once off partner, and there was almost no difference in reports of what was provided to women of different partner types. The majority of men distinguished the two types of sexual relationships and even among men who had once-off transactional sex and gave cash (n = 314), few (34%) reported that they had had sex with a ‘prostitute’. Transactional sex was more common among men aged 25–34 years, less educated men and low income earners rather than those with none or higher income. Having had sex with a woman in prostitution varied little between social and demographic categories, but was less common among the unwaged or very low earners.ConclusionsThe notion of ‘transactional sex’ developed through research with women does not translate easily to men. Many perceive expectations that they fulfil a provider role, with quid pro quo entitlement to sex. Men distinguished these circumstances of sex from having sex with a woman in prostitution. Whilst there may be similarities, when viewed relationally, these are quite distinct practices. Conflating them is sociologically inappropriate. Efforts to work with men to reduce transactional sex should focus on addressing sexual entitlement and promoting gender inequity.

Sexual Protection, Citizenship and Nationhood: Prostituted Women and Migrant Wives in South Korea

This article examines the making of two distinct groups of women—‘prostituted women’ and migrant wives—into citizen-subjects in South Korea at the turn of the twenty-first century. Though the lives of these women barely intersect, they become visible in the public sphere as victims of sexual violence and therefore in urgent need of state protection. Defined as such, prostitutes and migrant wives come under the gaze of the state and civil society through anti-prostitution policy and multiculturalism policy respectively. I suggest that, through the language of protection, the South Korean state and civil society seek to redefine moral order and national borders through the regulation of a woman's body and sexuality. For prostituted women, leaving prostitution restores them to the embrace of the nation as good Korean daughters. For immigrant wives, reproduction is their gendered path to citizenship as good Korean mothers. Through an analysis of the gender ideals reproduced in these policies, and their repercussions on the lives of women, I tease out the gendering of citizenship and nationhood and its tensions with the universalist ideals of gender equality and human rights in the modernising project in South Korea.

What Does It Mean to Be a Prostitute?: A Lived Personal Experience of Women in Prostitution

Résumé Cette recherche a utilisé une enquête exploratoire à fin ouverte, une immersion et une recherche autodirigée dans l’expérience active selon le guide de recherche heuristique de Moustakas (1990) et l’analyse de contenu de Patton (2002), Mayring (2000) et Flick (1989) pour enquêter sur et découvrir des expériences personnelles vécues de femmes dans la prostitution. Pour que la pratique du soutien psycho-social et de l’assistance aux clients soit efficace, il faut les comprendre. Comme Rogers (1961) le note, une compréhension sensible emphatique des sentiments et communications tels qu’ils apparaissent à l’autre personne à ce moment, ou carde de référence interne, est une condition essentielle à un changement de personnalité constructif. En se concentrant sur les expériences personnelles subjectives des femmes dans la prostitution depuis leur enfance jusqu’à l’âge adulte, cette étude examine les obstacles qu’elles ont rencontrés, les relations et les ressources avant qu’elles ne soient concernées par la prostitution. Cette étude s’est principalement concentrée sur les obstacles qu’elles ont rencontrés en grandissant , examinant comment ces femmes géraient l’expérience vécue d’être-au-monde. Le but de cette étude était de fournir une « voix » aux femmes dans la prostitution en révélant ce que cela signifie que d’être une prostituée . Les expériences personnelles de femmes dans la prostitution étaient comprises à travers leur interprétation subjective transmise. Elles ont verbalement « revécu » leur expérience à nouveau. Dans cette étude a été impliquée aussi la réintégration de connaissance dérivée de découverte et de synthèse de l’intuition des chercheurs et de compréhension tacite en dépeignant les participants à la recherche en tant que personnes entières.

Trauma and Substance Abuse Among Women in Prostitution: Implications for a Specialized Diversion Program

This study was undertaken to inform the implementation of a specialized prostitution diversion program to help women quit prostitution and avoid criminal prosecution. Data on 17 women’s experience of trauma and substance abuse and their views on how these experiences affected their involvement in prostitution were gathered in focus groups and face-to-face interviews (including measures of substance abuse, trauma, and PTSD) conducted at a drop-in program in Baltimore, Maryland. The results indicate that the women experienced high levels of trauma and substance abuse interwoven with prostitution. Trauma-informed services and integrated substance abuse and trauma-specific treatment are needed.

Prostitution and the 1960s' origins of corporate entertaining in Japan

Synopsis It is the strong contention of the ‘Japan studies’ literature that corporate entertaining is not generally connected to the prostitution of women in Japan. White collared men are described as enjoying mere ‘sexual titillation’ in their patronage of hostess venues for after-hours wining and dining. I argue against this contention through examining the historical development of corporate entertaining as a practice of middle class Japanese men. This examination shows the 1960s' origins of corporate entertaining to be fundamentally intertwined with the development of the sex industry sector in Japan that trades women as ‘hostesses’. I look at the impact of this development on working class Japanese women, and give evidence of their prostitution, trafficking, and murder in hostess venues in the 1960s and 1970s.

Selling sex sells: Representations of prostitution and the sex industry in sexualised popular culture as symbolic violence

Synopsis The mainstreaming of the sex industry into popular culture is evident in the proliferation of commercial sex premises in urban spaces and the popularity of pimp/ho chic. In this paper we explore representations of prostitution, including what stories are told about prostitution in films and television and how the dynamics of prostitution are presented as a template for intimate relationships. Throughout the paper we contrast this glamourisation with the empirical realities of prostitution that include violence and psychosocial harm. While the sex industry is portrayed as empowering and entertaining in popular culture, its existence as cause and consequence of gender inequality is unchallenged. We suggest that these representations constitute symbolic violence, obscuring the gendered inequality of commercial sex and the physical, sexual and psychological harm experienced by women in prostitution.

Comparing the Occurrence of Trichomonas vaginalis Infections Today to Ten Years Ago Among Women Prostitutes and Gynecology and Obstetrics Patients

Trichomonas vaginalis is is a monoxenous parasite which lives in human urogenital systems and causes sex transmitted disease through human sexual contact. Disease frequency has been seen at different rates in different communities or in the same community depending on people's sociocultural status. Previously we made a study for determining prevalence of T. vaginalis infection in woman living in Istanbul. We made this present study for determining any difference in prevalence in comparison to the results of ten years earlier. A total number of 207 vaginal discharge samples which were collected from two different hospitals, (93 from Venereal Diseases Hospital [VDH] and 114 from Cerrahpasa Ob&Gyn Clinic), were evaluated under direct microscopy and were cultured for T. vaginalis in a Cystein-Peptone-Liver-Maltose (CPLM) medium. T. vaginalis was observed under direct microscopy and grew in culture in 2 (0.97%) of 207 vaginal discharge samples [1 (1.1%) patient from VDH and 1 (0.9%) patient from Cerrahpasa]. The incidence of trichomoniasis has significantly decreased compared to the year 2000 in both VDH and Cerrahpasa populations (p=0.038) according to X2 test results. This epidemiologic study shows the importance of social development in the incidence of infectious diseases.