The story of Magdalena, raised in a Costa Rican slum by an alcoholic mother and pedophile stepfather. Runaway at 12, married at 13, mother at 14 and divorced prostitute at 15. A story of poverty, drugs, sex, violence and survival as told by Magdalena.

The scholars who contribute to this issue utilize diverse research methods to examine the lived experiences of people engaged in prostitution and the people and institutions that process them. They look at the production of knowledge about prostitution and trafficking by institutional stakeholders, and how legal responses to prostitution and trafficking are affected by class, race, ethnicity, and migration. Drawing on data derived from innovative research methods including auto-ethnography, re-calculation of historical data, and participatory methods, the authors challenge us to re-examine the pro-sex/abolitionist divide, the historical theories of prostitution and ethical concerns around research with people engaged in prostitution. Instead our authors offer new configurations of sex, gender, and prostitution to better inform future scholarship, policy, and programming.

This is the only book that systematically examines transgender sex work in the United States and globally. Bringing together perspectives from a rich range of disciplines and experiences, it is an invaluable resource on issues related to commercial sex in the transgender community and in the lives of trans sex workers, including mental health, substance use, relationship dynamics, encounters with the criminal justice system, and opportunities and challenges in the realm of public health. The volume covers trans sex workers' interactions with health, social service, and mental-health agencies, featuring more than forty contributors from across the globe. Synthesizing introductions by the editor help organize and put into context a vast and scattered research and empirical literature. The book is essential for researchers, health practitioners, and policy analysts in the areas of sex-work research, HIV/AIDS, and LGBTQ/gender studies.

Amaya is a young Filipino immigrant who has been an exotic dancer in Honolulu, Hawaii before she was even 21. This novel is a semi-biographical examination of Amaya's life in the rural Philippines, her early teenage years in Hawaii and her life as an exotic dancer. She is unapologetic about her profession of getting naked nightly for an endless parade of customers and her descriptions of life inside a strip club, her fellow dancers, and the customers they perform for are sometimes crude and cynical, but they're also laced with humor, many times black humor. Amaya is direct and honest about her reasons to become an exotic dancer, and benefits and the dark side of the profession, and about her attempts to get out of the life. Hopefully, this novel will provide the reader a better understanding of the women caught in this career either by choice or happenstance and paints them in a shade of normalcy that is not found anywhere else. The language is many times rough and offensive, but it is the world Amaya lives in.

Sex trafficking is a state crime. Nevertheless, it is also a federal crime when it involves conducting the activities of a sex trafficking enterprise in a way that affects interstate or foreign commerce or that involves travel in interstate or foreign commerce. Section 1591 of Title 18 of the United States Code outlaws the activities of sex trafficking enterprise that affects interstate or foreign commerce, including patronising such an enterprise. The Mann Act outlaws sex trafficking activities that involve travel in interstate or foreign commerce. This book provides an overview of sex trafficking. It focuses on the sex trafficking of children in the United States and reviews the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act.

The story of sex tourism in the Gringo Gulch neighborhood of San Jose, Costa Rica could be easily cast as the exploitation of poor local women by privileged North American men men who are in a position to take advantage of the vast geopolitical inequalities that make Latin American women into suppliers of low-cost sexual labor. But in Gringo Gulch, Megan Rivers-Moore tells a more nuanced story, demonstrating that all the actors intimately entangled in the sex tourism industry sex workers, sex tourists, and the state use it as a strategy for getting ahead. Rivers-Moore situates her ethnography at the intersections of gender, race, class, and national dimensions in the sex industry. Instead of casting sex workers as hapless victims and sex tourists as neoimperialist racists, she reveals each group as involved in a complicated process of class mobility that must be situated within the sale and purchase of leisure and sex. These interactions operate within an almost entirely unregulated but highly competitive market beyond the reach of the state bringing a distinctly neoliberal cast to the market. Throughout the book, Rivers-Moore introduces us to remarkable characters Susan, a mother of two who doesn't regret her career of sex work; Barry, a teacher and father of two from Virginia who travels to Costa Rica to escape his loveless, sexless marriage; Nancy, a legal assistant in the Department of Labor who is shocked to find out that prostitution is legal and still unregulated. Gringo Gulch is a fascinating and groundbreaking look at sex tourism, Latin America, and the neoliberal state.

Masculine Identities and Male Sex Work Between East Java and Bali introduces the reader to the stories of young male sex workers in South Bali. These are accounts of gang warfare, bodies, and violence which speak to the dreams, aspirations, and failures of a generation of young men in contemporary Indonesia.

The Cultural Politics of European Prostitution Reform traces case studies of four European Union countries to reveal the way anxieties over globalization translates into policies to recognize sex workers in some countries, punish prostitutes' clients in others, and protect victims of human trafficking in them all.

This book examines how feminist movements have contested the dominant discourses and state politics that have impeded women's autonomy over their bodies since the late 1960s. It deals with two important facets of this struggle, prostitution and the right to abortion, as they relate to the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.

This book identifies risk and protective factors influencing routes into, through and out of sexual exploitation and sex work. It explores how the sense made of key childhood and adult experiences influences the ability to manage roles and identities and choices they feel empowered or forced to make.

"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.

The story is unthinkable: 121 people, sold into human slavery, were being transported in a small container from Burma into Thailand. Even though they were suffocating and calling the driver for help, their pleas were ignored and the people locked in the container truck were deprived of oxygen. After their frantic pounding caused the truck to swerve, the driver, afraid of being caught by the police, abandoned the group. When the truck was finally discovered, 54 of the 121 people were dead. The real story doesn't end with the horror of that day; it continues on with corruption, cover-ups and a nation ignoring that human trafficking exists in their country. This book gives a shocking look into the world of human trafficking.

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.

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.