"Sex Work Matters" brings sex workers, scholars and activists together to present pioneering essays on the economics and sociology of sex work. From insights by sex workers on how they handle money, intimate relationships and daily harassment by police, to the experience of male and transgender sex work, this fascinating and original book offers theoretical discussions as well empirical case studies, providing new ways to link theory with lived experiences. The result is a vital new contribution to sex-worker rights. The book will equip any reader with new theoretical frameworks for understanding the sex industry, challenging readers to explore the topic of sex work in new ways, especially its cultural, economic and political dimensions.

This text analyses attempts to eradicate prostitution from English society, and includes a discussion of early attempts at reform and prevention through to the campaigns of the social purists. "Prostitution" looks in-depth at the various reform institutions which were set up to house prostitutes, analysing the motives of the reformers as well as daily life within these penitentiaries. Attempts at prevention are revealed through close study of the Ladies Association for the Care of Friendless Girls which tried to educate society morally and campaigned for protective legislation for prostitutes. This book reveals: reformers' attitudes towards prostitutes and prostitution; daily life inside reform institutions; attempts at moral education; developments in moral health theories; influence of eugenics; attempts at suppressing prostitution. It is a new addition to the study of prostitution in history, providing the reader with an up-to-date account of the social and political efforts to eradicate it from society.

The Fantasy Factory explores the world of women on the other end of the phone sex lines advertised in magazines like Playboy and Hustler. The author's interviews with these women, as well as her own first-hand experiences as an operator, reveal the complex ways operators and callers negotiate the shifting borders between desire and disgust, fantasy and reality, deception and belief. The Fantasy Factory raises provocative questions about the manufacture of artificial intimacy and the technological mediation of intimacy, as well as about the social construction of sexuality and gender. Flowers discovers that operators-who assume names like Tiffany and Corvette-create a virtual reality in which callers can act out fantasies that operators may find boring, disgusting, or even frightening. She also discovers that even those women who are skilled at keeping their "true self" and their phone sex persona separate find that they have to struggle to protect that self and to maintain the ability to experience real intimacy.

"Interzones" is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn--and how it was crossed--in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities.

Focusing on Chicago's South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. "Interzones" is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major transformations: the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture.

Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these "interzones." From Jack Johnson and the "white slavery" scare of the 1910's to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities.

The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford's look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

"Interzones" is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn--and how it was crossed--in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities.

Focusing on Chicago's South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. "Interzones" is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major transformations: the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture.

Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these "interzones." From Jack Johnson and the "white slavery" scare of the 1910's to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities.

The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford's look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

What is the moral of the human trafficking story, and how can the narrative be shaped and evolved? Stories of human trafficking are prolific in the public domain, proving immensely powerful in guiding our understandings of trafficking, and offering something tangible on which to base policy and action. Yet these stories also misrepresent the problem, establishing a dominant narrative that stifles other stories and fails to capture the complexity of human trafficking. This book deconstructs the human trafficking narrative in public discourse, examining the victims, villains, and heroes of trafficking stories. Sex slaves, exploited workers, mobsters, pimps and johns, consumers, governments, and anti-trafficking activists are all characters in the story, serving to illustrate who is to blame for the problem of trafficking, and how that problem might be solved. Erin O'Brien argues that a constrained narrative of ideal victims, foreign villains, and western heroes dominates the discourse, underpinned by cultural assumptions about gender and ethnicity, and wider narratives of border security, consumerism, and western exceptionalism. Drawing on depictions of trafficking in entertainment and news media, awareness campaigns, and government reports in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, this book will be of interest to criminologists, political scientists, sociologists, and those engaged with human rights activism and the politics of international justice

The problem of prostitution, sex work or sex for sale can often be misunderstood, if we do not take into consideration its spatial, temporal and political context. Understanding Sex for Sale aims to understand how prostitution, sex work or sex for sale are delineated, contested and understood in different spaces, places and times; with a particular focus on identifying how the relation between sex and money is interpreted and enacted. Divided into three parts, this interdisciplinary volume offers contributions that discuss ongoing theoretical issues and analytical challenges. Some chapters focus on how prostitution, sex work, or sex for sale have been regulated by the authorities and on the understandings that regulations are built upon. Other chapters investigate the experiences of sex workers and sex buyers, examining how these actors adjust to or resist the categorisation processes, control and stigma they are subjected to. Finally, a third group of chapters discuss contemporary definitional issues produced by various actors tasked with controlling prostitution or offering social services to its participants. Advancing and placing analytical tools at the forefront of the discussion, Understanding Sex for Sale appeals to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers interested in fields such as, sociology, anthropology, criminology, history, human geography and gender studies.

This book brings an important new perspective to the study of sex trafficking by considering the different types of social contracts which existed in the past that had sexual labour or activity as an inherent component. It outlines the nature of these social institutions - marriage, temporary marriage, debt bondage, and slavery - which were recognized in local law, carried no stigma, and endured for long periods. It discusses how labour pledged in return for a loan of cash or as a result of a punishment dictated by the state often included sexual labour, and how this could take the form of servicing the master of the house, his guests, or foreign travellers, who paid the debt-holder for the privilege, and how even wives of different ranks, temporary or permanent, and children, were pledged as sureties for loans. The book, which covers the modern states of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, argues that cultural norms are not static, that sexual contracts are more complicated than simply 'marriage' or 'prostitution', and that as trafficking for sexual purposes increases, those engaging in humanitarian intervention should improve their knowledge of the historical underpinnings of cultural understandings of familial and contractual obligations.

This critical sourcebook compiles excerpts from the extensive interviews undertaken by the Wolfenden Committee on the subject of prostitution. The Committee is remembered, first and foremost, for recommending the decriminalization of sex between men. However, the other half of its remit-prostitution-has largely been forgotten, despite the fact that prostitution, not homosexuality, was the original impetus behind the Committee's appointment. If we consider the Committee and its Report from this perspective, its status as both a liberal and permissive endeavour must be called into question. This book captures the controversy, diversity and complexity of opinions surrounding prostitution in this period, and provides critical analysis and context. It restores the question of prostitution to its central place in the history of Britain'sso-called progressive era and challenges the way that the Report and its legacy have been characterized. Crucially, this book highlights the substantial evidence gathered by the Committee on prostitution outside of London, which the Wolfenden Report itself largely disregarded. The excerpts, the reprinted report, and the critical introductions to each chapter are intended to spark important debates amongst students, researchers and the public about the history of sexuality, society and the state in twentieth-century Britain.

The expectation used to be that men would be masculine and women would be feminine, and this was assumed to come naturally to them in virtue of their biology. That orthodoxy persists today in many parts of society. On this view, sex is gender and gender is sex. A new view of gender has emerged in recent years, a view on which gender is an 'identity', a way that people feel about themselves in terms of masculinity or femininity, regardless of their sex. On this view, sex is dismissed as unimportant, and gender is made paramount. In the rush to celebrate this new view of gender, we have lost sight of a more powerful challenge to the traditional orthodoxy, namely the feminist sex/gender distinction according to which sex is biological and gender is social. On this view, gender is something done to people on the basis of sex. Women are socialised to conform to norms of femininity (and sanctioned for failure), and masculinity and femininity exist in a hierarchy in which femininity is devalued. This view helps us to understand injustice against women, and what we can do about it. Holly Lawford-Smith introduces and defends gender-critical feminism, a theory and movement that reclaims the sex/gender distinction, insists upon the reality and importance of sex, and continues to understand gender as a way that men and women are made to be, rather than a way they really are.

Winner of the British Society of Criminology Annual Book Prize 2022. As the labour market continues to exploit workers by offering precarious, low-paid and temporary jobs, for some duality offers much-needed flexibility and staves off poverty. Based on extensive empirical work, this book illustrates contemporary accounts of individuals taking extraordinary risks to hold jobs in both sex industries and non-sex work employment. It also opens a dialogue about how sex industries are stratified in the UK in terms of race and culture against the backdrop of Brexit. Debunking stereotypes of sex workers and challenging our stigmatisation of them, this book makes an invaluable contribution to discourses about work, society and future policy.

WINNER OF THE CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 'Brilliantly summons up one girl's life, dreams and suffering. It's ingenious history writing' Mail on Sunday 'A gripping, unputdownable masterpiece' - Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five 'Extraordinary' - Guardian 'Historical writing does not get any better than this' Matt Houlbrook, author of The Prince of Tricksters 1910, Wellington, New Zealand. Lydia Harvey is sixteen, working long hours for low pay, when a glamorous couple invite her to Buenos Aires. She accepts - and disappears. 1910, London, England. Amid a global panic about sex trafficking, detectives are tracking a ring of international criminals when they find a young woman on the streets of Soho who might be the key to cracking the whole case. As more people are drawn into Lydia's life and the trial at the Old Bailey, the world is being reshaped into a new, global era. Choices are being made - about who gets to cross borders, whose stories matter and what justice looks like - that will shape the next century. In this immersive account, historian Julia Laite traces Lydia Harvey through the fragments she left behind to build an extraordinary story of aspiration, exploitation and survival - and one woman trying to build a life among the forces of history.

Adapted into the Channel 4 documentary 'Sex: My British Job' by Nick Broomfield. Ming and Beata share neither the same language nor cultural background, yet their stories are remarkably similar. Both are single mothers in their thirties and both came to Britain in search of a new life: Ming from China and Beata from Poland. Neither imagined that their journey would end in a British brothel. In this chilling expose, investigative journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai works undercover as a housekeeper in a brothel and unveils the terrible reality of the British sex trade. Workers are trapped and controlled - the lack of freedoms this invisible strait of society suffers is both shocking and scandalous and at odds with the idea of a modern Britain in the twenty-first century.

NPR's Best Books of 2020 "Galvanizing and urgent....a slice of queer urban history and a necessary rethinking of sex work as a site of collective labor struggle." -National Public Radio A riveting true story of a young woman's days stripping in grunge-era San Francisco where a radical group of dancers banded together to unionize and run the club on their own terms. When graduate student Jenny Worley needed a fast way to earn more money, she found herself at the door of the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco, auditioning on a stage surrounded by mirrors, in platform heels, and not much else. So began Jenny's career as a stripper strutting the peepshow stage as her alter-ego "Polly" alongside women called Octopussy and Amnesia. But this wasn't your run-of-the-mill strip club-it was a peepshow populated by free-thinking women who talked feminist theory and swapped radical zines like lipstick. As management's discriminatory practices and the rise of hidden cameras stir up tension among the dancers, Jenny rallies them to demand change. Together, they organize the first strippers' union in the world and risk it all to take over the club and run it as a co-operative. Refusing to be treated as sex objects or disposable labor, they become instead the rulers of their kingdom. Jenny's elation over the Lusty Lady's revolution is tempered by her evolving understanding of the toll dancing has taken on her. When she finally hangs up her heels for good to finish her Ph.D., neither Jenny nor San Francisco are the same-but she and the cadre of wild, beautiful, brave women who run the Lusty Lady come out on top despite it all. A first-hand account as only an insider could tell it, Neon Girls paints a vivid picture of a bygone San Francisco and a fiercely feminist world within the sex industry, asking sharp questions about what keeps women from fighting for their rights, who benefits from capitalizing on desire, and how we can change entrenched systems of power.

Once again, prostitution occupies a prominent position on public and political agendas, both nationally and internationally. A topic of concern and interest within social and academic realms, it is a highly moralised, contested issue that is at the centre of heated and drawn-out debates. With each chapter dedicated to a separate country and written by a national authority on the subject, Assessing European Prostitution Policies seeks to explore how prostitution is regulated in 21 European countries, thus drawing out important implications for an effective and humane prostitution policy. Indeed, this innovative volume brings together systematic accounts of how national and local forms of governance influence the commercial market for sex as well as the lives of sex workers and third parties. All chapters cover the history of prostitution policy, national laws regulating prostitution, policy formulation and implementation, the national discourse on prostitution, the gap between national and local regulation, the impact of policy on the lives and rights of sex workers, and sex worker advocacy organizations. In addition to this, the authors examine and highlight how immigration, labour, fiscal and welfare law have as much impact on the sex trade as designated prostitution law. A unique interdisciplinary title that is comprehensive in its coverage, Assessing European Prostitution Policies will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, sex worker advocacy organisations and policy makers interested in fields such as Sexuality and Prostitution, Public Policy, Criminology and Gender Studies.

Sex work has been a contentious issue in a variety of ways throughout history - socially, morally, ethically, religiously and politically. Traditionally noted as one of the oldest professions in the world, sex work has commonly been demonised and is often viewed as a social disgrace. While sex work involves both providers of sexual services, most commonly women, and purchasers of sexual services, most commonly men, providers have attracted the most social commentary. Recent research shows that a limited number of studies have been conducted since 1990 concerning men who procure sexual services. This book aims to help reset this balance. In this book, Philip Birch examines the procurement of female sexual services with a focus on the personal and social aspects of men who procure such exchanges and offers insight into the demographics amongst men who purchase sexual services, alongside an analysis of the reasons why they purchase sex. This book brings together existing literature with analyses of new data to develop a multi-factor model reflecting men's procurement of sexual services and demonstrates the complexities surrounding the procuration of these sexual services in exchange for money. The book considers what contribution the understanding of the personal and social aspects of men who procure sexual services has on re-theorising the purchasing of sex in the 21st Century and will be of interest to academics and students involved in the study of criminology, criminal justice, social policy, law, sociology, sexuality and gender studies.

In an attempt to abolish prostitution, Sweden criminalised the purchase of sex in 1999, while simultaneously decriminalising its sale. In so doing, it set itself apart from other European states, promoting itself as the pioneer of a radical approach to prostitution. What has come to be referred to as 'the Swedish model' has been enormously influential, and has since been adopted and proposed by other countries. This book establishes the outcomes of this law - and the law's justifying narratives - for the dynamics of Swedish sex work, and upon the lives of sex workers. Drawing on recent fieldwork undertaken in Sweden over several years, including qualitative interviewing and participant observation, Jay Levy argues that far from being a law to be emulated, the Swedish model has had many detrimental impacts, and has failed to demonstrably decrease levels of prostitution. Criminalising the Purchase of Sex: Lessons from Sweden utilises a wealth of respondent testimony and secondary research to redress the current lack of primary academic research and to contribute to academic discussion on this politically-charged and internationally relevant topic. This original and timely work will be of interest to sex worker rights organisations, policy makers and politicians, as well as researchers, academics and students across a number of related disciplines, including law, sociology, criminology, human geography and gender studies.

Rachel Cartland came to Hong Kong in 1972 as one of just two female expatriates in the Hong Kong Governments elite administrative grade. Before she retired in 2006, her life was shaped by the momentous events that rocked Hong Kong during those action-packed years: corruption and the police mutiny, the growth of the new towns, the currency crisis of 1983, Tiananmen Square, the change of sovereignty and the devastation of SARS. The backdrop to her story ranges from Kowloons infamous Walled City to Government House to the rural New Territories. This book is full of humour and incident and, at the same time, an accessible account of modern Hong Kong and the forces that shaped it.

What is the moral of the human trafficking story, and how can the narrative be shaped and evolved? Stories of human trafficking are prolific in the public domain, proving immensely powerful in guiding our understandings of trafficking, and offering something tangible on which to base policy and action. Yet these stories also misrepresent the problem, establishing a dominant narrative that stifles other stories and fails to capture the complexity of human trafficking. This book deconstructs the human trafficking narrative in public discourse, examining the victims, villains, and heroes of trafficking stories. Sex slaves, exploited workers, mobsters, pimps and johns, consumers, governments, and anti-trafficking activists are all characters in the story, serving to illustrate who is to blame for the problem of trafficking, and how that problem might be solved. Erin O'Brien argues that a constrained narrative of ideal victims, foreign villains, and western heroes dominates the discourse, underpinned by cultural assumptions about gender and ethnicity, and wider narratives of border security, consumerism, and western exceptionalism. Drawing on depictions of trafficking in entertainment and news media, awareness campaigns, and government reports in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, this book will be of interest to criminologists, political scientists, sociologists, and those engaged with human rights activism and the politics of international justice

This is a pioneering work on "karayuki-san", impoverished Japanese women sent abroad to work as prostitutes from the 1860s to the 1920s. The narrative follows the life of one such prostitute, Osaki, who is persuaded as a child of ten to accept cleaning work in Sandakan, North Borneo, and then forced to work as a prostitute in a Japanese brothel, one of the many such brothels that were established throughout Asia in conjunction with the expansion of Japanese business interests. Yamazaki views Osaki as the embodiment of the suffering experienced by all Japanese women, who have long been oppressed under the dual yoke of class and gender. This tale provides the historical and anthropological context for understanding the sexual exploitation of Asian women before and during the Pacific War and for the growing flesh trade in Southeast Asia and Japan today. Young women are being brought to Japan with the same false promises that enticed Osaki to Borneo 80 years ago. Yamazaki Tomoko, who herself endured many economic and social hardships during and after the war, has devoted her life to documenting the history of the exchange of women between Japan and other Asian countries since 1868. She has worked directly with "karayuki-san", military comfort women, war orphans, repatriates, women sent as picture brides to China and Manchuria, Asian women who have wed into Japanese farming communities, and Japanese women married to other Asians in Japan.

The eighteenth century saw profound changes in the way prostitution was represented in literary and visual culture. This collection of essays focuses on the variety of ways that the sex trade was represented in popular culture of the time, across different art forms and highlighting contradictory interpretations.

The discourse surrounding prostitution is increasingly one of sexual commerce, transaction and commercial exchange. The "sex economy" and the consumer demand for it is often discussed both as a legitimate economic business, in which women have control, and as employment comparable to other forms of low-paid work. So much so, that in some countries it is being seen as a service that should be regulated and given a labour-rights framework. Drawing on extensive and detailed research, Monica O'Connor challenges the suggestion that the sale of women's bodies as commodities can ever be acceptable, and that the male consumer has an acceptable right to buy sexual acts from another person. She disproves the claim that "sex work" is a lucrative occupation for impoverished women and girls that can be considered for regulation as part of the normal economy. She lays bare the harm that "normalising" the sex trade does on women's lives, gender equality and on society as a whole, and exposes the realities that constrain and control women locked in prostitution, debunking the notions of choice and agency.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the anti-human trafficking movement have proliferated over the past few decades, each focusing on different aspects of the problem. Many of these NGOs have joined coalitions to pool resources and expertise. What are the messages that NGOs use to define and prescribe solutions to the human trafficking issue? How do changes in the external political environment or the internal coalition structure impact NGO framing strategy? This book uses a unique dataset to illustrate and analyze the discursive processes of NGOs over three distinct time periods: 2008-2010, 2011-2012, and 2013-2014. The data was gathered from public documents and supplemented by interviews from fifteen US anti-trafficking NGOs involved in the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking (ATEST). This analysis shows that the ATEST coalition has targeted the state (contentious politics) and private industry (private politics) to advance its antihuman trafficking agenda. Sex trafficking has normally been met with tactics from the contentious politics model due to its historical legal connection with prostitution; labor trafficking, on the other hand, has been approached via the private politics model due to its connection with business. However, due to the coalition's formal organizational structure, members have been able to learn from each other and adopt tactics normally reserved for certain types of targets in new ways, such as using contentious political strategies for labor trafficking and vice versa. This study builds theory by showing how coalition learning in social movements across time periods can diffuse tactics and provide new action repertoires for coalition members.

This five volume set deals in detail with Josephine Butler's campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain and the Colonies. At present, access to Butler's work is restricted as a number of relevant anthologies are out of print. The bulk of these can only be read in specialist libraries and the original copies are becoming increasingly fragile after a century of use. This edited collection makes her writing accessible once again, setting it in an appropriate historical context.
In addition to Butler's own work, the thematically ordered volumes include related texts which are important for understanding her campaign. This allows the reader to position Josephine Butler in relation to her opponents and to follow the response to her activities. All the texts are complete and reproduced in facsimile - there are pamphlets, books, media responses to Butler's activities, letters to The Times, articles from The Lancet, Pall Mall Gazette, The Shield and The Dawn as well as private letters both to and from Butler.
The set is introduced through a substantial essay by Jane Jordan, one of the leading international scholars on Butler's life and works, and each volume contains a short introduction by the editors which contextualises the selections.
Butler writes clearly and vividly, combining impeccable logic with passionate commitment. She does not soften her message to protect the sensibilities of her audience. She is uncompromising in her analysis, determined to 'set a floodlight on your doings' as she told a stunned royal commission in 1871. Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns demonstrates the great importance of this fascinating campaigner's work.

The creation of Lima's red light district in 1928 marked the culminating achievement of the promoters of regulation who sought to control the spread of venereal disease by medically policing female prostitutes. Its closure in 1956 was arguably the high point of abolitionism, a transnational movement originating in the 1860s that advocated that regulation was not only ineffective from a public health perspective, but also morally wrong. The Sexual Question charts this cyclic process of regulation and abolition in Peru, uncovering the ideas, policies, and actors shaping the debates on prostitution in Lima and beyond. The history of prostitution, Paulo Drinot shows, sheds light on the interplay of gender and sexuality, medicine and public health, and nation-building and state formation in Peru. With its compelling historical lens, this landmark study offers readers an engaging narrative, and new perspectives on Latin American studies, social policy, and Peruvian history.