Street Prostitution Research Articles

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.’

Informal Urban Economy: A Historical Approach of Paris Street-Level Prostitution

How can districts become totally embedded in informal economy despite harsh state regulation? In this paper, we use qualitative and quantitative data to explain the increasing number of “clandestine” street prostitutes in Paris during The Belle Epoque. We first describe the economics of street prostitution at the time: street prostitutes were young, unskilled and well-paid; they tended to work with pimps that were from the same area and clustered in neighborhoods where they could compete with regulated brothels. Street prostitutes not only generated profits for themselves but also for a whole bunch of actors, thereby switching the whole local economy to this industry, at the expense of the formal economy.

Crime and compassion

Women who are charged with prostitution sit at an intersection of victimization and criminality. It is widely acknowledged that many women who engage in prostitution, especially those engaged in street prostitution, suffer from a variety of problems including past and current trauma and abuse, substance abuse, mental and physical health disorders, and housing instability. Our interviews and focus groups with 17 women currently and formerly engaged in prostitution reveal that survival needs and coercion are factors in their involvement in prostitution. They are also commonly victimized prior to and during their involvement in prostitution. In August 2007, the State’s Attorney’s Office of the City of Baltimore began an initiative to create an alternative for people who are charged with prostitution, which is a crime in Maryland. These efforts stem from what may be considered a discomfort and ambivalence with a criminological approach to offenders who are simultaneously considered victims. Diversionary approaches are an attempt to manage these ambivalent and often conflicting constructions of women who engage in prostitution. However, such programs will largely serve as a palliative rather than a long term solution if they fail to address the personal and structural factors that severely circumscribe the choices available to this marginalized population.

An Ambiguous Compassion: Policing and Debating Prostitution in Contemporary France

Since 1960, prostitution is defined by the French law as incompatible with human dignity. Prostitutes are considered as victims of social maladjustment who should be rescued by social workers and protected from pimps by the police. Major changes in prostitution policies have nevertheless been introduced in 2003, without fundamentally changing the law. Extended means have been given to the police to repress street prostitutes, and, crucially, to arrest and expel those prostitutes who are undocumented migrants. Surprisingly, this coercive turn has not been perceived as contradictory with the former compassionate approach, as repression is deemed to guarantee the protection of prostitutes' human dignity. This paradox stands at the core of the article that explores the public controversies on the issue—and especially the new project to criminalize the purchase of sexual services—among social movements, politicians, government agencies, and intellectuals, as they are expressed in the media and in parliamentary debates.

Attitudes, Beliefs, and Knowledge of Prostitution and the Law in Canada

Prostitution in Canada is technically not illegal; however, current laws make the act of buying or selling sex illegal under most circumstances. The legal status of prostitution was recently brought to public attention after three of these laws were deemed unconstitutional by an Ontario Superior Court judge. The present study recruited 238 Canadian undergraduate students to investigate their knowledge of, and attitudes toward, current Canadian prostitution laws. In addition, the relationship between these attitudes and beliefs about prostitution more generally, were examined. The results indicate that while most students have an accurate understanding of the majority of the laws relating to prostitution, they are unaware of situations in which prostitution can take place without breaking the law. Further, students are generally unaware that communicating for the purposes of prostitution in a public place and being found within a bawdy house are illegal. The number of years participants had lived in Canada was found to be a significant predictor of more accurate knowledge of the laws. Gender, ethnicity, and beliefs about aspects of prostitution were significant predictors of attitudes toward the law. Participants perceived female and street prostitution more negatively than male and indoor prostitution. Implications with respect to education and changes to the current legislation and public policy are discussed.

Social control of immigrant sex workers: transforming a group recognized as “at risk” into a group viewed as “a risk”

PurposeIn this paper, the aim is to present an historical analysis to account for the association between prostitution, disease, and victimization. It also seeks to examine how stigmatization and rejection are currently focused on the immigrant sex worker.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis is based on historical data about regulations in Portugal, in a recent ethnography carried out with street prostitutes and in a current study on immigrant sex workers and health care.FindingsSex workers have been recognized as a group “at risk” both because they are associated with sexually transmitted diseases and because they are acknowledged as victims of traffic and sexual exploitation. This label “group at risk” justifies some state policies often expressed in sanitary and social control measures, as regulations. Because migrant sex workers are simultaneously immigrants and sex workers they are perceived as a threat to social order and a sign of moral disorder and, so, they experience processes of rejection and stigmatization more significantly than local sex workers.Originality/valueThe knowledge of the negative consequences experienced by migrant sex workers implies an effort to produce changes in the policies and practices towards them. All those involved in research or intervention with migrant sex workers have the responsibility to be aware of the discrimination, violence, and control they are subjected to and must be committed enough to challenge them. This paper can be a contribution to that.

Deux usages, deux médiatisations : un dispositif. L'espace public de femmes prostituées et de femmes multipartenaires

From news items and two ethnographies, the first on street prostitution in Ile-de-France, the second on wanderings of women in search for sexual partners in Paris, this article aims at questioning public, physical and media space in terms of genders. Prostitutes occupy pavements and newspapers in a spectacular way. On the contrary, in a big metropolis, multi-partner women are nearly ordinary figures, but who are also at least explicitly ignored of the debates about space. After the presentation of the methodological and epistemological frame of the survey, descriptions of how the two categories of women use urban space will be proposed. Developments will come afterwards about the different scientific and media treatments of space when it is associated to women that are presented as extraordinary or nearly common women. These uses and appearances in the media, apparently contradictory, join in an implicit incorporated reinforcement of women’s space control.

Male Street Prostitution in Dublin: A Psychological Analysis

This study assessed the mental health characteristics of 12 male street prostitutes (MSPs) in Dublin, with particular regard to issues of homelessness, substance abuse, depression, suicidal ideation, and self-esteem. Participants completed five psychometric tests, which indicated that all of the participants had above average levels of depression and suicidal ideation and low levels of self-esteem. This study found that candidates likely to become MSPs are young males with a combination of factors, including a background of childhood sexual or physical abuse, leaving school early, running away from home, and a dependence on heroin.

Rehab Retrospect: Former Prostitutes and the (Re)construction of Deviance

In this study, in-depth qualitative interviews with former street prostitutes currently in an outpatient drug rehabilitation program are utilized to examine the transition out of prostitution and from a deviant to a non-deviant identity. Little extant literature explores the relationships between stigma management and desistance as prostitutes attempt to exit the industry. This research finds that while in rehab, the women activated meanings of their previous drug addiction both as a stigma management technique and as a cognitive process that distances them from the prostitute identity. They conceptually bundled their prostitution identity with that of drug addiction, ultimately reinforcing that they completed the transition out of deviance.

P2-S5.03 Hyperfeminine and vulnerable: gender identities and HIV/AIDS in transgender women in BogotÁ, Colombia

BackgroundStudies in current literature show high HIV prevalence rates in transgender women all around the world. Transgender women face very high-levels of marginalisation, violence, stigma and discrimination, which in turn...

Regulation of Sex Work in Scotland ESRC

Though Scotland’s prostitution scene shares many characteristics with that existing in England and Wales, legal responses and national prostitution policies have often been markedly different. Moreover, the interpretation and enforcement of the law has varied considerably within and between Scottish cities, with policing and management having developed ‘organically’ within given contexts to produce distinctive enforcement regimes (Georgiou and McCallum, 2002). Much attention in the literature has accordingly been devoted to the way street prostitution is differently policed in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen (the only cities where street prostitution has existed to any significant degree); however, the selling of commercial sex in the form of adult entertainment, sex shops, pub stripping, massage parlours and escort working is something that occurs across a diverse range of communities, concerning most local authorities to some extent.

Regulation of Sex Work in Netherlands

In the UK media, the Netherlands is often described as sexually liberal because of the seeming availability and visibility of commercial sex and pornographic materials. But Kilvington et al (2001) argue that the majority of the population remain strongly censorious, and the moral attitude of the Dutch towards prostitution is not so different from that of other European countries. Hekma (2000) and Oosterhuis (1998) likewise argue that to work in prostitution is to face stigmatization, condemnation or pity from the Dutch public. However, the pragmatism characteristic of Dutch social policy has meant that the sex industry has been long regarded (like other undesirable social phenomena) as an activity whose impacts on society as a whole might best dealt with through pragmatic tolerance (van Doorninck et al., 1998). As such, while brothels were technically illegal in Dutch cities between 1911 and 2000, they only attracted the attention of the public prosecutor where obvious nuisance or exploitation has occurred. In the case of street prostitution, soliciting and purchasing sex has also been tolerated when it occurs in the designated and managed tippelzones that exist in major Dutch cities. This does not imply that the Dutch government has turned a ‘blind eye’ to sex work, or adopted a laissez faire attitude; rather it has identified prostitution as requiring particular attention because of the risks of exploitation and coercion which adhere to commercial sex, as well as the potential nuisances that might be caused to local communities by sex work.

Regulating Sex Work in the EU

Contemporary prostitution policy within the European Union has coalesced around the view that female prostitution is rarely voluntary, and often a consequence of sex trafficking. Responding, different nation-states have, however, adopted antithetical legal positions based on prohibition (Sweden), abolition (UK) or legalization (Netherlands). Despite the apparently sharp differences between these positions, in this article we argue that there is now a shared preoccupation with repressing spaces of street prostitution. Noting the forms of exploitation that nonetheless adhere to many spaces of off-street work, we conclude that the state and law may intervene in sex work markets with the intention of tackling gendered injustice, but are perpetuating geographies of exception and abandonment.

Being Outside: Constructing a Response to Street Prostitution - A Report of the Expert Group on Prostitution in Scotland

In 2003, the Minister for Justice constituted the Expert Group with the aim of considering the legal, policing, health and social justice issues surrounding prostitution in Scotland.

It’s Not Only for the Money: An Analysis of Adolescent versus Adult Entry into Street Prostitution*

Numerous studies examine the causal factors of entrance into prostitution and find economic marginalization, substance addiction, and interpersonal networks are common reasons women enter the trade. However, we know less about the role that age of onset plays in shaping female pathways into prostitution. Here, we build from insights into previous research by analyzing not only entry pathways but also how age categories are linked to time spent in the trade and whether the length of time in prostitution exacts a greater “toll” on women. Drawing from the feminist and age of onset literatures, we analyze 40 in-depth interviews with female street prostitutes from five U.S. cities. Our results underscore the importance of age as an organizing feature of women’s pathways into prostitution and the potential associated consequences of working in this trade.

Neighbors’ anxieties against prostitutes’ fears: Ambivalence and repression in the policing of street prostitution in France

At the end of the 1990s, prostitution became a renewed political issue in France with the arrival of migrant women supposedly under the grip of organized criminal networks. Neighbors of new prostitution zones expressed ambivalent feelings, mixing compassion toward victims of human trafficking with fear of the threat created by people belonging to a criminal underworld. Authorities have adopted ambiguous policies as well, first and foremost with a law that pretends to rescue prostitutes while making soliciting an offense. These policies aim to make prostitutes disappear from the urban space by forcing them to return underground. Since then, prostitutes live in fear of being assaulted, harassed, and, for those who are illegal migrants, expelled from France. Mobilizations have been unable to challenge these policies, as prostitutes’ supporters are divided between those who define prostitution as sex work and those who think it is modern slavery. Prostitutes ’ fears is the price they are paying for responding to neighbors ’ anxieties, and the political use of these feelings is based on class, ethnic and gender inequalities.

Deadly Inertia: A History of Constitutional Challenges to Canada's Criminal Code Sections on Prostitution

This paper examines rhetoric surrounding prostitution law reform in Canada from 1970 to the present. During the 1950s and 1960s, there was very little media or political attention paid to prostitution. It was not until the mid 1970s that perceived problems with prostitution law began to surface, driven by concerns that the criminal code statute prohibiting street prostitution was not enforceable. In 1983 the Liberal government appointed the Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution to consider options for law and policy reform. However, the Conservative government that received the report in 1985 rejected the sweeping law changes the Special Committee recommended, opting instead to rewrite the street prostitution offence. Since then the murder of somewhere between 200 and 300 street prostitutes has prompted renewed calls for law reform. The debate on law reform culminated in 2006 with a parliamentary review that saw all four federal political parties agreeing that Canada’s prostitution laws are “unacceptable,” but unable to agree about how to change them. The majority report held that consenting adult prostitution should be legal, while the minority report held that it should be prohibited. In 2007 the Standing Committee on the Status of Women recommended that Canada adopt the Nordic model of demand-side prohibition. As the deadlock continues, women in the street sex trade continue to be murdered. Faced with this deadly inertia, two groups of sex workers have challenged several Criminal Code sections relating to prostitution, arguing that they violate several of their Constitutional rights, including their right to “life, liberty and security of the person”. The paper concludes with an update on the progress of the Charter challenges now before the courts.

Weighing the Consequences of a Deviant Career: Factors Leading to an Exit from Prostitution

Research on how individuals leave sex work examines this transition by focusing on either structural/economic conditions that keep them in the trade or internal changes that prompt exiting. Leaving certain roles, such as those deemed criminal and deviant, may be more challenging due to labeling, stigma, and a lack of resources. In this study, the author analyzes the particular factors that lead women to exit street prostitution via enrollment in “helping” organizations. The author finds extant theories do not fully capture how multiple factors combine to pull women off the streets. Rather, the author contends it is both internal and external factors that lead women to initially exit prostitution. This study draws on interviews with thirty-six street prostitutes from four different U.S. cities to address these concerns.

Sex Work Matters: Exploring Money, Power, and Intimacy in the Sex Industry

* Introduction: Beyond the Sex in Sex Work - Alys Willman and Antonia Levy * Part 1. Beyond Divides: New Frameworks for Understanding the Sex Industry * 1. Sex Work Now: What the Blurring Boundaries around the Sex Industry Means for Sex Work, Research and Activism - Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck * 2. The (Crying) Need for Different Kinds of Research - Laura Agustin * 3. The Meaning of the Whore: How Feminist Theories on Prostitution Shape Research on Female Sex Workers - Juline A. Koken * Part 2. Managing Multiple Roles * 4. To Love, Honour, and Strip: An Investigation of Exotic Dancer Romantic Relationships - Mindy S. Bradley-Engen and Carrie M. Hobbs * 5. Sex and the Unspoken in Male Street Prostitution - Kerwin Kaye * 6. enforced ab/normalcy: the sexworker hijras and the (re)appropriation of s/he identity - Mashrur Shahid Hossain * Part 3. Money and Sex * 7. Let's Talk About Money - Alys Willman * 8. Show Me the Money: A Sex Worker Reflects on Research into the Sex Industry - Jo Weldon * 9. Selling Sex: Women's Participation in the Sex Industry - Melissa Petro * Part 4. Sex Work and the State * 10. Pimping the Pueblo: State Regulated Commercial Sex in Neoliberal Mexico - Patty Kelly * 11. Deviant Girls, Small-Scale Entrepreneurs and the Regulation of German Sex Workers - Anne Dolemeyer, Rebecca Pates, Daniel Schmidt * 12. Sex Work, Communities and Public Policy in the UK - Maggie O'Neill and Jane Pitcher * Part 5. Organizing Beyond Divides * 13. Sex Workers' Rights Activism in Europe: Orientations from Brussels - Giulia Garofalo * Conclusion: Pushing Boundaries in Sex Work Activism and Research - Melissa Ditmore

Pan-pan Girls: Humiliating Liberation in Postwar Japanese Literature

This paper looks at some literary representations of the ‘pan-pan girls’ in postwar Japan. ‘Pan-pan’ is a derogatory term for street prostitutes who (mostly) served the soldiers of the occupying forces. Immediately after World War II, the Japanese government established the RAA (Recreation Amusement Association) and employed several thousand women to provide sexual services for foreign soldiers, ostensibly to protect Japanese women of middle and upper classes from rape and other violence. When the RAA was closed down in 1946 due to the US concern over widespread VD, many of the women who lost their jobs went out on the street and became private and illegal prostitutes – the pan-pan girls. With their red lipstick, cigarettes, nylon stockings and high-heel shoes, often holding onto the arms of tall, uniformed American GIs, the ‘pan-pan girls’ became a symbol of the occupation, and have been textually reproduced throughout the postwar period. This paper analyses the images and representations of the ‘pan-pan girls’ in postwar Japanese literature, to consider how the ‘pan-pan girls’ have functioned as a metaphor for the occupation and contributed to the public memory construction of the occupation. I identify some major codes of representations (victimisation, humiliation, and national trauma; eroticism and decadence; sexual freedom and materialism) and argue that the highly gendered and sexualised bodies of the ‘pan-pan girls’ have continued to allow simplistic and selective remembering of the occupation at the expense of recalling the pivotal role of Japanese patriarchy in the postwar period.