‘[Peers Give] You Hope that You Can Change Too': Peers’ Helping Relationships for Women Exiting Street-based Sex Trade

ABSTRACT

A growing body of research demonstrates that peer support can facilitate drug use and mental health recovery and reduce health care costs. However, with few exceptions, peer support has not been systematically studied in the context of street-based sex trade, despite its potential benefits for this vulnerable population. This paper fills this gap by looking at the impact of peer support on 29 substance-use involved women formerly selling sex on the streets. Women were recruited for in-depth interviews from five recovery programmes for women with substance-use problems in a large metropolitan area in Northeast US. Results indicate that peer support can facilitate women's exit by providing a safe and accepting arena to share and normalise past experiences in the sex trade, serving as role models, and providing trustworthy advice. The findings emphasise the need for collaboration between peers and professionals in programmes that assist women exiting the sex trade; they also highlight providers’ limitations in interactions with exiting women, and stress the need for non-judgmental attention to women exiting the sex trade.

KEYWORDS:

• Prostitution
• sex work
• peer support
• exiting
• substance use
• recovery
• peer coaches
• mental health

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all the brave, beautiful and brilliant women who shared their past traumas and present insecurities and regrets with me, who trusted me with their life stories for the benefit of other people. I also would like to thank the Division of Victimology of the American Society of Criminology, who awarded me the Larry Siegel Fellowship that partially funded this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use the term prostitution over sex work as that is the term used by my study participants, who do not identify as sex workers who view sexual acts as a job (Cimino 2019) and talked about prostituting themselves on the streets.

2 I deliberately did not specify a period that women had to be out of prostitution to be included in the study, in order to be inclusive in my recruitment. The criterion used was that they were no longer actively engaging in street prostitution. One participant was excluded because her interview revealed that she was still actively engaging and not interested in quitting prostitution.

3 The majority of respondents regularly attended AA or NA support groups. Part of the participation in these groups entails finding a sponsor (usually from the same group) who is another person in recovery who would guide the participant through the 12-step process.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Division of Victimology, American Society of Criminology [grant number Larry Siegel Graduate Fellowship for Victimology].

Notes on contributors

Nili Gesser

Nili Gesser is an interdisciplinary mixed-methods researcher. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Anderson Sexual Violence Prevention Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Dakota. She received her PhD in criminal justice from Temple University. She is a former prosecutor and a victim advocate. Her research interests centre on prostitution and substance use, sexual violence prevention, therapeutic jurisprudence, agent-based modeling (ABM), peer support, and victimology. Her research has been published in Psychology, Public Policy, and the Law; Victims and Offenders; and Qualitative Criminology.