Recent years have seen a 'quiet revolution' in the way that the sex industry is regulated and governed. The consensus around what the problems of prostitution are has broken down and in its place a plethora of contradictory themes has emerged. "Regulating sex for sale" examines the total package of reforms and proposals that have been introduced in this area since May 2000. Bringing together some of the most well-known writers, researchers and practitioners in the field, it provides a detailed analysis and critical reflection on the processes, assumptions and contradictions shaping the UK's emerging prostitution policy. What are the unintended consequences of recent policies and how do they impact on the populations that they regulate? Do they contain any possibility for radical intervention and/or new ways of governing prostitution? The book describes the impact these policies have on indoor sex workers, street-based sex workers, young people, men or those with drug misuse issues. It also looks at the assumptions made by policy makers about the various constituencies affected, including the communities in which sex work takes place. This is the first book to address the contradictions in current policy on prostitution in England and Wales and will be of interest to academics, postgraduate students and policy makers in criminal justice, as well as in other areas, including children and young people, community safety and urban studies.

In the post-Cold War era, economic globalization has resulted in the buying and selling of human beings. Poverty, social instability, lawlessness, gender biases, and ethnic hostility have entrapped millions in the world of modern day slavery, with the result that human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world. Every year, men, women, and children from across the globe are transported within or across borders for the purpose of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Despite the plethora of journalistic articles written on human trafficking there is a need for more rigorous academic analysis of the phenomenon. Although groups from many different ideologies have embraced policies to end human trafficking, there are still many gaps and unanswered questions, particularly with regard to the amount of, and nature of the phenomenon. This book provides an insight into the complexity of human trafficking by addressing both how the scope of globalization impacts the sex industry and forced labor, and how vulnerability is a growing cause of human trafficking, affecting traditional diasporic and migratory patterns. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Exiting Prostitution provides a critical re-examination of the growing body of literature on exiting and desistance. Moving beyond accounts which are mainly centred on men desisting from crime, this book focuses on female desistance, particularly in relation to prostitution and the exiting process.With interviews from over one hundred women involved in prostitution, the authors uniquely examine the exiting process considering not only the barriers and obstacles that women face when trying to leave prostitution, but also their individual strengths, capacities and aspirations. In this way, this book aims to present an approach that is more positive and progressive. It also provides a guide to best practice through an examination of the types of support that are currently available to those women involved in both on-street and off-street prostitution, and develops an outline model of support.Written by a highly experienced team of experts in the field, this book provides useful guidelines for practitioners and policymakers on types of intervention and ways in which to further develop exiting programmes.

Human trafficking has moved from relative obscurity to a major area of research, policy and teaching over the past ten years. Research has sprung from criminology, public policy, women s and gender studies, sociology, anthropology, and law, but has been somewhat hindered by the failure of scholars to engage beyond their own disciplines and favoured methodologies. Recent research has begun to improve efforts to understand the causes of the problem, the experiences of victims, policy efforts, and their consequences in specific cultural and historical contexts.

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Global Human Trafficking: Critical issues and contexts" foregrounds recent empirical work on human trafficking from an interdisciplinary, critical perspective. The collection includes classroom-friendly features, such as introductory chapters that provide essential background for understanding the trafficking literature, textboxes explaining key concepts, discussion questions for each chapter, and lists of additional resources, including films, websites, and additional readings for each chapter.

The authors include both eminent and emerging scholars from around the world, drawn from law, anthropology, criminology, sociology, cultural studies, and political science and the book will be useful for undergraduate and graduate courses in these areas, as well as for scholars interested in trafficking."

While sex work has long been controversial, it has become even more contested over the past decade as laws, policies, and enforcement practices have become more repressive in many nations, partly as a result of the ascendancy of interest groups committed to the total abolition of the sex industry. At the same time, however, several other nations have recently decriminalized prostitution. Legalizing Prostitution maps out the current terrain. Using America as a backdrop, Weitzer draws on extensive field research in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany to illustrate alternatives to American-style criminalization of sex workers. These cases are then used to develop a roster of "best practices" that can serve as a model for other nations considering legalization. Legalizing Prostitution provides a theoretically grounded comparative analysis of political dynamics, policy outcomes, and red-light landscapes in nations where prostitution has been legalized and regulated by the government, presenting a rich and novel portrait of the multifaceted world of legal sex for sale.

This new collection explores for the first time male sex work from a rich array of perspectives and disciplines. It aims to help enrich the ways in which we view both male sex work as a field of commerce and male sex worker themselves.

Leading contributors examine the field both historically and cross-culturally from fields including public health, sociology, psychology, social services, history, filmography, economics, mental health, criminal justice, geography, and migration studies, and more.

Synthesizing introductions by the editors help the reader understand the implications of the findings and conclusions for scholars, practitioners, students, and members of the interested/concerned public.

This text addresses the following two questions: "What kinds of problems can the law solve?" and "What kinds of problems does the law create?" Using these questions as starting points, Meier and Geis evenhandedly explore the role and function of law relating to six major issues that often divide Americans today: prostitution, drug use, homosexuality, abortion, pornography, and gambling. Statutes and public opinion have shifted dramatically over recent decades in regard to these behaviors. The book details these developments and offers explanations of why they have occurred. Some people view all or some of these behaviors as acts that ought to be permitted, as part of individual freedom. Others find one, some, or all of them to be genuine threats to the country's social and moral fiber and believe that they ought to be criminalized. Still others maintain that action ought to be taken to limit some of the behaviors, but that using the criminal justice system is not the best way to proceed. Meier and Geis' provocative book offers sophisticated, in-depth discussions of these issues, then reviews the conflicting opinions about the proper role of criminal law in dealing with them. It is written in straightforward, jargon-free language, providing an ideal background for exploring the facts and views regarding what are often contentious concerns. Criminal Justice and Moral Issues increases student understanding through the abundant use of relevant illustrations, examples, and case studies.

The black heart of human exploitation and the brave few seeking change

A child is sold for sex every ten miles on Brazil's BR-116 motorway. This 2,700-mile road is "The Highway to Hell" for the thousands of children, some as young as nine, who are trapped in sophisticated child prostitution rackets organized by businessmen and politicians.

An experienced journalist, Matt Roper has witnessed the extent of the trafficking firsthand. Highway to Hell documents his journey on this road. He meets the girls and hears their stories; he interviews truck drivers, pimps, brothel owners, and traffickers; and talks to the brave souls who are trying to make a difference.

Part documentary, part personal memoir, Matt honestly shares his struggles to understand what his Christian faith has to say about the things he encounters and how God wants him to respond.

It's 1953 in Southern California, Patty is five years old, and her mother hasn't been home in two days. A police officer eventually arrives and takes Patty and her brothers to juvenile hall-their mother has been drinking again. Twenty-eight years later, Patty herself is an alcoholic mother to three children. Divorced and homeless, she soon realizes that she can't support her children with her job cleaning houses, so she accepts the offer of a man who works at the gas station: she'll have sex with him for money. For the next seventeen years, Patty lives a double life as a sex worker. Though she supports her family with the money she makes, she struggles to be the parent she wants to be, until she realizes she has become just like her own mother: an alcoholic who doesn't give her children what they need. When Patty gets sober, her life begins to change. She finds healing through therapy, spirituality, community, and, most importantly, speaking the truth to her children. Powerful and insightful, Patty's story is proof that we all are capable of healing ourselves-and that forgiveness can transform our lives completely.

An intimate and original look at the lives of Nevada's legal sex workers through the voices of current and former employees, brothel owners, madams, and local law enforcement The state of Nevada is the only jurisdiction in the United States where prostitution is legal. Wrapped in moral judgments about sexual conduct and shrouded in titillating intrigue, stories about Nevada's legal brothels regularly steal headlines. The stigma and secrecy pervading sex work contribute to experiences of oppression and unfair labor practices for many legal prostitutes in Nevada. Sex and Stigma engages with stories of women living and working in these "hidden" organizations to interrogate issues related to labor rights, secrecy, privacy, and discrimination in the current legal brothel system. Including interviews with current and former legal sex workers, brothel owners, madams, local police, and others, Sex and Stigma examines how widespread beliefs about the immorality of selling sexual services have influenced the history and laws of legal brothel prostitution. With unique access to a difficult-to-reach population, the authors privilege the voices of brothel workers throughout the book as they reflect on their struggles to engage in their communities, conduct business, maintain personal relationships, and transition out of the industry. Further, the authors examine how these brothels operate like other kinds of legal entities, and how individuals contend with balancing work and non-work commitments, navigate work place cultures, and handle managerial relationships. Sex and Stigma serves as a resource on the policies guiding legal prostitution in Nevada and provides an intimate look at the lived experiences of women performing sex work.

What is it like to work in a place that is both a thriving and close-knit community and a globally recognised part of the commercial sex industry? London's Soho has always been a place of complexity, contrast and change throughout its colourful history, yet urban branding, local community initiatives and licensing regulations have combined to 'clean up' Soho, arguably to the point of sanitisation, and commercial over-development remains a continuing threat. In spite of all this, Soho retains its edge and remains a unique place to live, work and consume. Based on a ten-year ethnographic study of working in Soho's sex shops, combining archival material, literary sources, photographic materials and interviews with men and women employed there, Tyler draws together insights from history, geography and cultural studies to tell the unseen story of this fascinating work place.

A wealthy madam who was known from San Francisco to Victoria in the early part of the 20th century, Stella Carroll was glamorous, worldly and determined to succeed. Her bordellos were fashionably decorated and patronised by the affluent and the powerful; she offered the best of everything - fine food and wine, cigars, entertainment and, of course, girls. The author, with the co-operation of Stella's family in California and New Mexico, has provided an intimate portrait of this infamous, unrepentant woman, her business and her tenuous relationships with double-dealing politicians and corrupt police, whose co-operation was essential to her success in the shadowy world she inhabited. Stella was a woman of contrasts. Her scandalous lifestyle and fiery temper often landed her in court on morals charges, yet she was devoted to and supportive of her family and gave generously to orphans and charities. This compelling non-fiction narrative is a fascinating look at Stella's life and at how things were in Victoria 100 years ago.

America s first anti sex trafficking law, the 1910 Mann Act, made it illegal to transport women over state lines for prostitution or any other immoral purpose. It was meant to protect women and girls from being seduced or sold into sexual slavery. But, as Jessica Pliley illustrates, its enforcement resulted more often in the policing of women s sexual behavior, reflecting conservative attitudes toward women s roles at home and their movements in public. By citing its mandate to halt illicit sexuality, the fledgling Bureau of Investigation gained entry not only into brothels but also into private bedrooms and justified its own expansion.

Policing Sexuality" links the crusade against sex trafficking to the rapid growth of the Bureau from a few dozen agents at the time of the Mann Act into a formidable law enforcement organization that cooperated with state and municipal authorities across the nation. In pursuit of offenders, the Bureau often intervened in domestic squabbles on behalf of men intent on monitoring their wives and daughters. Working prostitutes were imprisoned at dramatically increased rates, while their male clients were seldom prosecuted.

In upholding the Mann Act, the FBI reinforced sexually conservative views of the chaste woman and the respectable husband and father. It built its national power and prestige by expanding its legal authority to police Americans sexuality and by marginalizing the very women it was charged to protect."

The sex industry is an endless source of prurient drama for the mainstream media. Recent years have seen a panic over "online red-light districts," which supposedly seduce vulnerable young women into a life of degradation, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's live tweeting of a Cambodian brothel raid. The current trend for writing about and describing actual experiences of sex work fuels a culture obsessed with the behaviour of sex workers. Rarely do these fearful dispatches come from sex workers themselves, and they never seem to deviate from the position that sex workers must be rescued from their condition, and the industry simply abolished-a position common among feminists and conservatives alike. In Playing the Whore, journalist Melissa Gira Grant turns these pieties on their head, arguing for an overhaul in the way we think about sex work. Based on ten years of writing and reporting on the sex trade, and grounded in her experience as an organizer, advocate, and former sex worker, Playing the Whore dismantles pervasive myths about sex work, criticizes both conditions within the sex industry and its criminalization, and argues that separating sex work from the "legitimate" economy only harms those who perform sexual labor. In Playing the Whore, sex workers' demands, too long relegated to the margins, take center stage: sex work is work, and sex workers' rights are human rights.

Feminists have long differed in their view of prostitution. While some regard it as a classic form of exploitation and degradation, others offer a more sympathetic interpretation of women's involvement in the sex industry. In this important new book, Maggie O'Neill seeks to explore the theoretical debates on prostitution and the relevance of these to the everyday lived experiences of women working on the streets.

Based upon her own ethnographic research - defined as ethno-mimesis - the author seeks to undermine and demystify stereotypical images of prostitutes. She explores the narratives offered by prostitutes themselves, as well as other forms of their representation in film, art and photography, and shows how these various mediums may be used to shed light on the socio-economic processes and structures which lead women into prostitution. These personal accounts produce what O'Neill refers to as 'a politics of feeling', which, she argues, may be used to transform attitudes, policy and practice in relation to female prostitution. By relating these individual experiences to critical feminist theory, the book deepens our understanding of the phenomenon of prostitution in contemporary society.

The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in gender studies, feminist theory and sociology.

"Common women" in medieval England were prostitutes, whose distinguishing feature was not that they took money for sex but that they belonged to all men in common. Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England tells the stories of these women's lives: their entrance into the trade because of poor job and marriage prospects or because of seduction or rape; their experiences as street-walkers, brothel workers or the medieval equivalent of call girls; their customers, from poor apprentices to priests to wealthy foreign merchants; and their relations with those among whom they lived. Through a sensitive use of a wide variety of imaginative and didactic texts, Ruth Karras shows that while prostitutes as individuals were marginalized within medieval culture, prostitution as an institution was central to the medieval understanding of what it meant to be a woman. This important work will be of interest to scholars and students of history, women's studies, and the history of sexuality.

Available for the first time in English, this is the definitive account of the practice of sexual slavery the Japanese military perpetrated during World War II by the researcher principally responsible for exposing the Japanese government's responsibility for these atrocities. The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women, who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military, first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit in a Toyko District Court stating that they had been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese ways of remembering the war.

Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system nor given compensation directly to former comfort women.

This English edition updates the Japanese edition originally published in 1995 and includes introductions by both the author and the translator placing the story in context for American readers.

For the past 50 years, the easy availability of prostitutes to American servicemen in South Korea has been a matter of policy between the U.S. military and the Korean government. Focusing on the early 1970s, when the Nixon Doctrine threatened a sharp reduction of U.S. military presence in Asia, this book carefully traces the way in which Korean prostitutes were controlled by the United States and the Republic of Korea as part of joint security arrangements.

Generations of social thinkers have assumed that access to legitimate paid employment and a decline in the 'double standard' would eliminate the reasons behind women's participation in prostitution. Yet in both the developing world and in postindustrial cities of the West, sexual commerce has continued to flourish, diversifying along technological, spatial, and social lines. In this deeply engaging and theoretically provocative study, Elizabeth Bernstein examines the social features that undergird the expansion and diversification of commercialized sex, demonstrating the ways that postindustrial economic and cultural formations have spawned rapid and unforeseen changes in the forms, meanings, and spatial organization of sexual labor.
Drawing upon dynamic and innovative research with sex workers, their clients, and state actors, Bernstein argues that in cities such as San Francisco, Stockholm, and Amstersdam, the nature of what is purchased in commercial sexual encounters is also new. Rather than the expedient exchange of cash for sexual relations, what sex workers are increasingly paid to offer their clients is an erotic experience premised upon the performance of authentic interpersonal connection. As such, contemporary sex markets are emblematic of a cultural moment in which the boundaries between intimacy and commerce--and between public life and private--have been radically redrawn. Not simply a compelling exploration of the changing landscape of sex-work, "Temporarily Yours" ultimately lays bare the intimate intersections of political economy, desire, and culture.