Sex Work On The Streets

* How and why do people sell and buy sex? * What are the risks associated with prostitution? * Should prostitution be legalized? This book is the most detailed study ever provided on street prostitution. It is based on three years' research in which the authors interviewed prostitutes and their clients and spent many months working in a red light area. The book makes extensive use of direct quotes from the women and the men, as well as fieldnotes from the authors based upon their observations in the red light area. Topics covered in the book include the women's negotiations with clients, HIV, drug use and violence. The book also describes the impact of working as a prostitute on women's home life. No attempt is made to moralise about prostitution in the book, instead the authors concentrate on the experiences of the women and men involved in selling and buying sex, and describe prostitution from their standpoint. Sex Work on the Streets will be of interest to a wide range of students and researchers in sociology, social policy, criminology and women's studies.

How and why do people sell and buy sex? What are the risks associated with prostitution? Should prostitution be legalized? This book is the most detailed study ever provided on street prostitution. It is based on three years' research in which the authors interviewed prostitutes and their clients and spent many months working in a red light area. The book makes extensive use of direct quotes from the women and the men, as well as fieldnotes from the authors based upon their observations in the red light area. Topics covered in the book include the women's negotiations with clients, HIV, drug use and violence. The book also describes the impact of working as a prostitute on women's home life. No attempt is made to moralise about prostitution in the book, instead the authors concentrate on the experiences of the women and men involved in selling and buying sex, and describe prostitution from their standpoint. Sex Work on the Streets will be of interest to a wide range of students and researchers in sociology, social policy, criminology and women's studies.

In his collection of Prairie essays-some of them profoundly personal, some poetic, some political-Roger Epp considers what it means to dwell attentively and responsibly in the rural West. He makes the provocative claim that Aboriginal and settler alike are "Treaty people"; he retells inherited family stories in that light; he reclaims the rural as a site of radical politics; and he thinks alongside contemporary farm people whose livelihoods and communities are now under intense economic and cultural pressure. We Are All Treaty People invites those who feel the pull of a prairie heritage to rediscover the poetry surging through the landscapes of the rural West, among its people and their political economy.

While street prostitutes comprise only a small minority of sex workers, they have the highest rates of physical and sexual abuse, arrest and incarceration, drug addiction, and stigmatization, which stem from both their public visibility and their dangerous work settings. Exiting the trade can be a daunting task for street prostitutes; despite this, many do try at some point to leave sex work behind. Focusing on four different organizations based in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Hartford that help prostitutes get off the streets, Sharon S. OselinOCOsa Leaving Prostitution aexplores the difficulties, rewards, and public responses to female street prostitutesOCO transition out of sex work. Through in-depth interviews and field research with street-level sex workers, Oselin illuminates their pathways into the trade and their experiences while in it, and the host of organizational, social, and individual factors that influence whether they are able to stop working as prostitutes altogether. She also speaks to staff at organizations that aid street prostitutes, and assesses the techniques they use to help these women develop self-esteem, healthy relationships with family and community, and workplace skills. Oselin paints a full picture of the difficulties these women face in moving away from sex work and the approaches that do and do not work to help them transform their lives. Further, she offers recommendations to help improve the quality of life for these women. A powerful ethnographic account, a Leaving Prostitution aprovides an essential understanding of getting out and staying out of sex work."

“Our voices scrubbed out and forgotten. There are those who research and write about sex workers who often forget we are human.” —Amy Lebovitch Shawna Ferris gives a voice to sex workers who are often pushed to the background, even by those who fight for them. In the name of urban safety and orderliness, street sex workers face stigma, racism, and ignorance. Their human rights are ignored, and some even lose their lives. Ferris aims to reveal the cultural dimensions of this discrimination through literary and art-critical theory, legal and sociological research, and activist intervention. Canadian cities are striving for high safety ratings by eliminating crime, which includes “cleaning” urban areas of the street sex industry. Ironically, sex workers also want to live and work in a safe environment. Ferris questions these sanitizing political agendas, reviews exclusionary legislative and police initiatives, and examines media representations of sex workers. This book has much to offer to educators and activists, sex workers and anti-violence organizations, and academics studying women, cultural, gender, or indigenous issues.

Incorporating the voices and insights of street sex workers through personal interviews, this monograph argues that the material conditions of many street workers — the physical environments they live in and their effects on the workers’ bodies, identities, and spirits — are represented, reproduced, and entrenched in the language surrounding their work. As an ethnographic case study of a local system that can be extrapolated to other subcultures and the construction of identities, this book disrupts some of the more prevalent academic and lay understandings about street prostitution by providing a thorough analysis of the material conditions surrounding street work and their connection to discourse. McCracken offers an explanation of how constructions can be made differently in order to achieve representations that are generated by the marginalized populations themselves, while placing responsibility for this marginalization on the society in which these people live.

Providing an overview of prostitution today, this book approaches the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective, cutting across the conventional boundaries of sociology, criminology, politics and social policy in the context of a variety of projects in different parts of the country and the broader national policy.