Contending with Violence: Female Prostitutes' Strategic Responses on the Streets

Abstract

Female street prostitutes often work within environments where violence is a prominent feature of daily life. Consequently, they experience high rates of physical and sexual assault. While scholars debate whether they are victims or empowered agents, we find neither category accurately captures their experiences with work-related violence. Drawing on interviews and informal conversations with 17 female street prostitutes, we illustrate they engage in four nuanced types of strategies in response to violence, which are shaped by the options available to them. We also find each type has an external or internal foci that holds implications for their own criminality.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Katja Guenther, Janet Lever, the anonymous reviewers, and Editor Craig Forsyth for their helpful feedback on this article.

Notes

¹For a more detailed dicussion of the media coverage of female violence, and how this skews social perceptions, see Chesney-Lind and Pasko (2004).

²We do not use the term “prostitute” to stigmatize the workers but rather for the sake of clarity. To that end, we use both “sex worker” and “prostitute” throughout the article, which pertain specifically to female street prostitutes. The experiences of street prostitutes are vastly different from other sex workers (e.g., strippers or escorts), therefore we use “prostitute” because it is what the women call themselves and denotes a particular population.

³While there were a total of 40 interviews conducted in the initial research project, this article only relies on interviews with 17 prostitutes and conversations with these individuals that ensued during fieldwork. We only included 17 women in our sample because they were the ones who provided elaborate descriptions about the violence they encountered while working on the streets, and discussed how they resisted and coped with it. The excluded 23 were unable or unwilling to relay detailed stories and/or discuss their experiences with violence in-depth.

⁴Most of the women in this sample stated they did not work under pimps. Past research confirms this trend and suggests the significance of pimps may be declining among adult prostitutes (Maher 1997).

⁵Davies and Evans (2007) also explore the emotional strategies sex workers use to cope with violence and assault, however their sample is comprised of indoor workers, a group who experience considerably less risk of violence vis-à-vis street prostitutes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sharon S. Oselin

SHARON S. OSELIN is an Assistant Professor of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on gender, crime and deviance, social movements, and culture. Her work appears in a variety of journals, such as American Sociological Review, Mobilization, Sexualities, and Sociological Perspectives, among others. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how women exit prostitution.

Aaron Blasyak

AARON BLASYAK is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Syracuse University in the Maxwell School of Public Policy. Broadly, his areas of interest are social theory, gender, and sexuality. He is currently developing a research project on same-sex families.