Stigma and Risky Behaviors among Male Clients of Sex Workers in the UK

ABSTRACT

Building on existing theoretical work on sex markets, this study uses data from the 2001 British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) to replicate the analysis of the demand for paid sex. It formally tests the effects of attitudes, risky behaviors, and personal characteristics of a sample of men on the demand for paid sex. Previous theoretical work argues that stigma plays a fundamental role in determining both demand and risk, and in particular due to the presence of stigma, the demands for unpaid sex and for paid sex are not perfect substitutes. This study finds a positive effect of education (proxy for income), negative effects of professional status (proxies for stigma associated with buying sex), positive and significant effects of all risky behavior variables, and no significant effects of variables that measure the relative degree of conservatism in morals.

KEYWORDS:

• Prostitution
• demand for sex
• stigma
• risky behavior

JEL Codes:

• J16
• C35

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for providing feedback on various drafts of this paper.

Notes

1 Stigma is measured as an index based on the following three questions: “People will treat me differently if they find out that I go to prostitutes”; “Most people look down on men who go to prostitutes”; and “Most people think that men who go to prostitutes are bad people” (Pitpitan et al. 2015).

2 The sample was taken by distributing a survey to customers of a Sexpo exhibition held in Melbourne in 2001. This is a commercial event hosting a wide range of exhibitors of products associated with sex; of 4,905 respondents, 1,225 received a version of the questionnaires with questions on sex workers. Among the 1,225 respondents, 612 were men and 601 were women.

3 This is a limitation in our theoretical model. We could include in the model a probability of being caught. Then the capacity for reputational losses (L_r) would not be reduced by the amount of paid sex (S) but by a probability of being caught. In the empirical part, this could be a function of the intensity of policing in different towns/districts. In the UK, different districts have different regulations and different resources to combat “curb crawling.” Pitpitan et al. (2015) found that Latino clients in Mexico who reported greater stigma also reported a greater preference for having sex with a female sex worker in a setting where there is a risk of getting arrested, whereas non-Latino clients reported the opposite.

4 This is the clients’ reply to the following question: “Do you like to be in control when you are having sex?” For more details, see Della Giusta et al. (2009).

5 We underline that it would be important in the future to ask women the same questions about paying for sex, given women’s increasing demand for paid sex (Sánchez Taylor 2001; Thorbek and Pattanaik 2002; Bauer 2014).

6 Table A1 in the Appendix show descriptive statistics for the total number of people who paid for sex.

7 See correlation matrix in Table A2 of the Appendix.

8 The parents’ social class measure in the dataset had fewer categories than the respondents’ social class with the partly skilled and unskilled group together, which we grouped with the employed or unclassifiable category, as we did for own social class.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marina Della Giusta

Marina Della Giusta is Associate Professor of Economics and Head of Department of Economics, University of Reading, UK. Her research interests are in well-being, gender, and behavioral economics, focusing on the role of social norms in decision making in relation to paid and unpaid work, sex work, green choices, and risk.

Maria Laura Di Tommaso

Maria Laura Di Tommaso is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Turin in Italy and Affiliate of Collegio Carlo Alberto. Previous positions include: College Lecturer in Economics at Robinson College and Research Associate in the Department of Applied Economics, University of Cambridge. Her interests are in the fields of feminist economics, economics of gender, the capability approach, and micro-econometrics. Current research projects include measuring capabilities in a gender perspective, gender pay gap in Italy, an economic analysis of sex work, and nurses and doctors’ labor supply in Norway.

Sarah Louise Jewell

Sarah Louise Jewell is Lecturer in Economics at the University of Reading, UK. She lectures in microeconomics, labor economics, and econometrics. Her main research interests are in the field of labor economics; her research focuses on human capital, the graduate labor market, time use, and well-being.