Researching Prostitution

Eva Buschi, a professor at the School of Social Work of the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, interviewed managers of sex establishments for a study entitled Violence in the Sex Business and concluded that lack of regulation was a major problem for both sex workers and the establishments themselves.

In other businesses workers get contracts, in which the tasks to be performed, the price and how long they should take are clearly laid down. In the sex business today this is mostly not the case, she told swissinfo.ch.

One problem is that managers of sex establishments are afraid of falling foul of the law forbidding the promotion of prostitution, she explained.

But the study shows that violence is a daily reality in the business. It occurs among customers, between the managers and the workers, and among the workers themselves. However, the managers of the businesses often downplay the issue. They tend to see their main problem as social stigmatisation.

Given that the legal sex business generates a turnover put at 3.5 billion Swiss Francs ($4.4 billion) per year, Buschi says it should be approached pragmatically, ensuring that workers are given the best possible conditions.

If sex work is professionalised, it will help destigmatise the work, and be easier to draw a divide between legal and illegal sex providers, the study says. Both owners and clients will find it harder to put pressure on the workers, and that in turn will give them extra protection and make it easier to confront problems. The greater the pressure on sex workers, the greater the danger that they will, for example, accept a drunken client or agree to perform their services without a condom.

The authorities in Nidau in canton Bern have already introduced conditions for granting permits to would-be sex establishments. The move was regarded as a possible model for the rest of the country.

The managers of the establishments have to guarantee that the women are declared as sex workers and not as tourists, and that they are in the country legally. They must give the women information leaflets in their own languages about their rights and duties -- including that they must declare their earnings to the tax authorities. Nor must the managers charge excessive prices for rooms or slap on unreasonable extra charges. In addition, the local advisory centre must be given unlimited access to the sex workers.

The police can make unannounced visits to check that the rules are being followed.

The impact of adult entertainment on rape statistics in Camden: a re-analysis. by Brooke L Magnanti, PhD.

Abstract

A 2003 report [by the anti-prostitution campaigners of Lilith] on the impact of lap-dancing clubs on sexual assault in Camden, London had significant influence on the perception of the contribution of adult entertainment to crime statistics. In spite of mathematical corrections to the statistics in the report, its original conclusions are still widely reported in both academic and mass media.

This paper presents a broader analysis of the impact of lap-dancing clubs by calculating accurate rates of incidence, analysing statistics from a longer time period, and comparing the results with crime rates in neighbouring boroughs of London. The rate of rape in Camden is lower than that in comparable boroughs, including ones with no such clubs. The overall trend for London boroughs, while higher than the national average, shows a decrease where national statistics are on the increase

Melon Farmers Comment

It is of course good to see the Lilith nonsense challenged, but it seems a pity that it takes pseudo science to demonstrate the bleedin' obvious.

Does anyone intuitively think, given a massively changing society, that anyone can correlate anything significant to a tiny percentage of the male population visiting lap dancing clubs. Surely this pails into insignificance compared with say demographic changes such as ageing populations, declining religion, cultural changes dues to European and South Asian immigration, economic changes, policing changes with the advent of CCTV, DNA, database surveillance, massively increased impact of the internet (with enough influence to decimate other branches of the adult industry), changes to patterns of alcohol consumption, declining influence of tobacco, and of course the certification of video nasties...the list is endless...

What are the chances that 'any' effects of a couple of lap dancing venues can be mathematically extracted from this fog of major societal influences?

I would guess somewhere in the ballpark of 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

The Internet has spawned a virtual subculture of customers who share information electronically about prostitution, according to a new study co-authored by a Michigan State University criminologist.

The research by MSU's Thomas Holt and Kristie Blevins of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte challenges the common perception that sex customers act alone and do not interact for fear of reprisal or scorn. The study appears in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.

Holt, assistant professor of criminal justice, said today's Web-savvy customers use the Internet to solicit prostitutes and to provide each other with warnings of prostitution hot zones and stings, which can hamper the efforts of law enforcement officials.

The growth of these deviant subcultures has made it more difficult for law enforcement, said Holt, who has helped police devise prostitution stings. On the other hand, it gives us a new opportunity to use the way the offenders communicate to better target their activities.

The study analyzed prostitution Web forums in 10 U.S. cities with the highest rates of prostitution arrests: Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dayton, Elizabeth, Forth Worth,  Hartford, Inglewood, Las Vegas Memphis.

In the Web forums, customers provide detailed information on the location of sexual services on the streets and indoors, as well as ways to identify specific providers, information on costs and personal experiences with providers.

The open nature of the forums led the users to carefully disguise their discussions with a unique language, or argot, based largely on code and acronyms. This argot may help customers and sex workers to avoid legal sanctions and any social stigma associated with participating in the sex trade, the researchers said.

The study also said the customers place significant value on the notion that paid sexual encounters are normal and nondeviant. These Internet communities help these individuals justify their behavior, Holt said.

New evidence has been published which fundamentally undermines the government's arguments in favour of criminalising those who pay for sex.

The research comes from Vancouver, and was conducted by the University of British Colombia. It found a direct correlation between criminalisation and increased violence against sex workers.

Evidence from Vancouver and the UK shows that criminalisation reinforced stigma and facilitates violence against sex workers, a spokesperson for the International Union of Sex Workers told politics.co.uk: We know that the government's policies in the policing and crime bill although they are described as intending to protect vulnerable women, they will in fact increase the level of violence sex workers experience - both indoors and out.

The new research follows a damaging report from the respected Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) which found the majority of the migrant workers in the UK sex industry were not forced or trafficked.

It also concluded that criminalising clients would not stop the sex industry and that it would be pushed underground, making it more difficult for migrants working in the UK sex industry to assert their rights in relation to both clients and employers.

Taken together, the research provides a devastating critique of the government's policy platform, which was based on an attempt to end the trafficking of women into the UK to work in the sex industry.

The Vancouver research found the factors causing a prevalence of violence could be stemmed by decriminalising the sex industry.

According to the report's author, Professor Kate Shannon, factors such as being forced to service clients in cars or public places, inability to access drug treatment and a prior assault by police all correlated with violence against female sex workers: The persistent relationship between enforcement of prostitution and drug use policies (e.g. confiscation of drug use paraphernalia without arrest, and enforced displacement to outlying areas) suggests that criminalisation may enhance the likelihood of violence against street-based female sex workers.

The findings support global calls to remove criminal sanctions targeting sex workers, Professor Shannon said.

A sexual health expert is calling for the decriminalisation of prostitution across Australia, saying it will help prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Basil Donovan from the National Centre in HIV is using a study of sex workers in New South Wales, where prostitution has been decriminalised, to back his call.

The study shows that sex workers in that state have lower rates of sexually transmitted diseases than their counterparts in other areas of Australia.

Sex worker Sharon said: When I came to Sydney I couldn't believe the difference in attitude, you know, workers don't have to worry about getting a criminal record or worrying about police knocking down the door.

I found that working in New South Wales has been more conducive to accessing health services and taking control of my health than when I was in Perth worried about, you know, the police or when I was in Victoria feeling forced and insulted and degraded and invaded by having to go for mandatory testing.

Basil Donovan said:  In Sydney you are looking at a chlamydia prevalence that means how many women are infected in any one day are one to two per cent in Sydney sex workers.

The general population of prevalence for women of the same age is four to five per cent. Count the school girls is about one to two per cent or slightly higher. The prevalence of gonorrhoea in sex workers in Sydney is about as close as you can get to zero.

The findings of the study are being presented at the Australasian Sexual Health Congress presently being held in Perth. Professor Donovan says the results in New South Wales are in contrast to other states where prostitution is either illegal or regulated.

Professor Donovan says the requirement, in Queensland and Victoria, for brothels to be licensed has meant much of the industry has stayed underground. The substantial part of the industry is effectively illegal cause it's not licensed. It's very difficult to run health promotion programs and to access those women to ensure that they are seeing doctors.

Janelle Fawkes from Scarlet Alliance which represents Australian sex workers backs the findings. She says the key to containing sexual diseases in the sex industry is education and ensuring workers are motivated to get medical treatment. She says the use of 'licenses' makes the situation worse: In licensing framework model you end up with a large percentage of the industry that is operating outside of the legal framework, therefore it doesn't have the same levels of access to HIV prevention, education, outreach by a sex worker organisation, being covered by the states workplace conditions for occupational health and safety et cetera.

Why is it that prostitution is so relatively well-paid?

It is documented that in diverse cultures and over many centuries, prostitutes have indeed made much more, sometimes several multiples more, than comparably (un)skilled women would make in more prosaic occupations. From medieval France and imperial Japan to present-day Los Angeles and Buddhist Thailand, this income differential has persisted, although its size depends on various factors.


Prostitution Diminishes Marriage Chances

Two economists, Lena Edlund of Columbia University and Evelyn Korn of Eberhard-Karls-Universitat Tubingen, have published an intriguing paper, A Theory of Prostitution, see www.iies.su.se/seminars/papers/Edlund.pdf

Developing the consequences of their mathematical model, Edlund and Korn argue that the primary reason for the income differential is not the risk sometimes associated with the practice of prostitution but rather that prostitutes greatly diminish their chances for marriage by virtue of their occupation. Men generally don't want to marry (ex)prostitutes, and so women must be relatively well-compensated in order to forgo the opportunity to marry.

Employing market concepts, doing some calculus and assuming that "women sell and men buy," the authors also conclude that prostitution generally declines as men's incomes increase.

Wives and prostitutes are competing "commodities" (in the reductionist view of economists, that is), but wives are distinctly superior in that they can produce children that are socially recognized.

Thus, if men have more money, they tend to buy the superior good and, at least when wives and prostitutes come from the same pool of women, tend to buy (rent) the cheaper good less frequently.

More obvious perhaps is that prostitution generally declines in areas where women's incomes and opportunities are greater.

Putting these two tendencies together suggests that if one wishes to reduce prostitution, increasing the incomes of both men and women is likely to be more effective than imposing legal penalties.


Sex Ratios, Foreign Prostitutes and Cultural Factors

Another consequence of the authors' model is that a high ratio of men to women tends to increase prostitution's relative profitability (versus marriage).

If the surplus of men over women is temporary, say, because of war or upheaval, then the surplus usually leads to an even greater incentive to prostitution.

As permanent residents in a location, men are potential participants in both the marriage market and the sex markets, whereas if they're visitors, only the latter market is generally available and the supply of prostitutes and their incomes rise. The authors cite the example of modern sex tourism.

The model also predicts that how much a woman damages her chances to marry by becoming a prostitute depends on how likely it is that she'll be exposed as one.

The likelihood shrinks if the woman leaves home and migrates to a different part of the country or to a different country altogether. This would also explain why foreign prostitutes are likely to be cheaper than domestic ones.

More generally, the abundance of foreign prostitutes shouldn't come as a surprise. Immigrants generally have difficulty finding employment and, except at the high end of the scale, prostitution does not place much of a premium on language skills. As in other parts of the economy, globalization is controversial and is one reason the number of women trafficked for sexual purposes is exaggerated. (It is considerably smaller than the number of people trafficked for nonsexual labor.)

There are good reasons — from academic studies to the sheer ubiquity of prostitutes — to believe that trafficking is relatively isolated and that only a small fraction of prostitutes are coerced into prostitution.

One last prediction the model makes is that the income differential paid to prostitutes will rise with the status the culture accords wives.

That is, if wives are valued highly, would-be prostitutes are giving up a lot by becoming prostitutes and will require more money to do so. And if wives have few privileges, would-be prostitutes aren't giving up much to become prostitutes and thus need less inducement to do so.

Cultural tolerance, of course, is a determinant not only of the income differential but also of the number of women who become prostitutes. Compare, for example, Thailand and Afghanistan.


Bottom Line

Like any statistical model, this one ignores the diversity of real people and the complexities of love and pleasure, changing social mores, et cetera. Still, once all its equations have been solved, a simple fact remains: Most women enter prostitution for the money.

This being so, legalizing it, regulating it (strictly enforcing laws against pimping, child prostitution, public nuisance and so forth) and improving the economic prospects for women seem to me a greatly preferable approach to it than moralistic denunciation.