Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 94

Recall that in Table 4.1, prostitution was the only female-gender-related offense in the 2018 UCR. Feminist scholars and activists frequently struggle with not “othering” sex workers and not denying their agency, as well as the criminalization of sex work (for adults). Notably, most of the activists are sex workers, and they, as well as many feminist activists and scholars who are not sex workers, increasingly use the labels “sex work” and “sex workers” in lieu of “prostitution” and “prostitutes,” but the criminal legal system and many others, including many sex workers, also or predominantly use the terms “prostitution” and “prostitutes.” Updegrove, Muftic, and Niebuhr (2019) provide one of the most recent and best quantitative sex work/prostitution studies, distinguishing between three prostitution roles: sellers (ones performing the sexual act for a fee), buyers (ones purchasing the sexual act), and facilitators (sex work where a person arranges between the buyer and seller and benefits financially from the sex work). Men/boys were 23% of the sellers, 77% of the facilitators, and 97% of the buyers. Notably, the sellers averaged 33 years older and the buyers 40 years older than the sellers (sex workers) (p. 1601). Conover-Williams’s (2014) extensive Add Health data study examining self-reported offenses found the greatest difference in SMS and non-SMS offending was SMS youth were far more likely to report trading sex for money, and this was significantly higher for males than females, but they found no race/ethnicity differences.

Prostitution is often considered a “vice” or “victimless” offense (many sex workers would disagree, and many would agree, with this categorization). Individuals who do sex work do it primarily for the money. While this is not always for survival, it often is. Along with women’s property and financial offending, sex work offenses appear to be highly correlated with the feminization of poverty. A recent study found “correlates of sex trading status included age, lifetime injection drug use, lower education, child sexual abuse, and unstable housing” (A. A. Jones et al., 2019, p. 15). An example of this is “sugar babies,” whereby a company is specifically interested in recruiting women college students to be paid companions for (primarily) older men. Although the website for this claims it is not prostitution/sex work, it is clear many of the young women do exchange sex for money and/or other perks (thus fitting most legal definitions of prostitution), so that they can do things such as pay college tuition (Hernandez, 2016; Rosman, 2018). Frederick (2014) details the intricate interconnections among SMS young people with sex work, homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health: “Involvement in sex work can feed back into drug use by involving youth in drug using milieus, as well as through the use of drugs to cope with the stress and trauma of sex work” (p. 481). But at the same time that we need to recognize such young people’s vulnerability, Frederick also urges an emphasis on their “diversity of experience, and the opportunities that street life holds for finding acceptance and belonging” (p. 473).

Bachman, Rodriguez, Kerrison, and Leon’s (2019) intensive interviews with drug-involved women released from Delaware prisons, who had an average of 16 arrests each, reported that “their criminal records prevented them from obtaining legitimate employment” resulting in nearly half of them in “survival prostitution,” living in fear of “dying on the street” (p. 587). Shdaimah and Leon’s (2015) powerful ethnographic and qualitative work on sex workers in Baltimore and Philadelphia, also described their participants as “engaged in survival prostitution”:

We found a nuanced picture of moral and rational choice-making in an extremely circumscribed universe of options. Women faced limited economic and social opportunities, and prostitution provided a means to sustain themselves. Our respondents were also influenced by their family and relational ties in ways that made prostitution a logical choice. Sometimes, this was through coercive relationships, in which women were pressured to engage in prostitution by parents or partners. On other occasions, it was a chosen means to help support family members, including sick relatives and children. (Shdaimah & Leon, 2015, p. 330)

Almost one in ten had been sexually assaulted, including extensive child sexual abuse, and 29% had been sexually assaulted during sex work. The participants reported their further denial of agency once caught up in “the system,” where their main goal was not staying or being incarcerated, and they used agency to resist and self-advocate (Shdaimah & Leon, 2015, p. 332).