When I reviewed the national arrest statistics for 1995 in preparation for another paper, I decided to also look at other arrest categories that I know are surrogate for prostitution arrests, focusing on women’s arrests because of the long-term enforcement emphasis on women, and because it is unusual for women to hang out on the street in the way that men often do. First I looked at vagrancy, loitering, disorderly conduct, and runaway status, because most prostitutes are not charged with soliciting, engaging in, or agreeing to engage in prostitution, which requires some evidence to prosecute, but for violating an array of local and state ordinances having to do with the so-called public order. Then, I looked at drug offenses and drunkenness, both of which often involve street arrests. The number of women arrested on these charges was quite substantial. In 1995, 3,989 women were arrested for vagrancy, 34,011 for loitering, 108,830 for being runaways, 112,036 for disorderly conduct, 62,458 for drunkenness, and 190,729 for drug offenses, totaling 512,053 women arrested essentially for violating the public order. After I added the prostitution-specific charges, the number of women arrested came to 561,544 (U.S. Department of Justice, 1996). This compares with 442,763 in 1986, the first year for which I was able to look at the data (a 26.8% increase, compared to what otherwise looked like a decline in prostitution arrests). Although not all of those arrested are or were prostitutes, most of the arrests were made on the street, and involved street people, many of whom were homeless or bordering on homeless, drug dependent, and/or trading sex for survival.
All law enforcement in the United States is discriminatory in terms of race, including arrest, prosecution, and sentencing practices. With sex work, the emphasis is on the most visible activity, which is on the street, and in the 1980s, COYOTE estimated that although 85-90% of prostitution arrests are made on the street, only 10-20% of prostitutes are street workers, although the law is the same wherever prostitutes and clients contact each other, and whatever their ethnicity. Partly because of racial discrimination by the owners and managers of escort services, strip clubs, brothels, and other off-street establishments, the street-based workers are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. But the arrests may be even more discriminatory. The federal statistics report that 36.8% of people arrested on prostitution charges are Black, a small number (1.9%) are Native American or Asian/Pacific Islander, and 60.9% are white, suggesting that most prostitutes arrested are white. However, they count persons with Spanish surnames as either Black or white, thereby seriously underreporting the discriminatory nature of the enforcement. Moreover, the women who work off the street, more safely and for more money per transaction, and who are mostly white and Asian, are rarely arrested. In New York City, FROST’D contacts several thousand women over the course of a year, the large majority of whom are Latinas, the invisible ones in the arrest statistics. One student of street prostitution in New York City (Cohen, 1980) initially hypothesized that the reason for the racial discrepancy was that there was more police activity in ethnic minority neighborhoods, where Black women were more likely to work. What he found, however, was that the police were, in fact, more active in white neighborhoods, where most of the prostitutes were also white. He then hypothesized that the racial bias of the mostly white police department was to blame. My own hunch is that police intensify the enforcement when darker women drift towards and/or into white districts. Although prostitutes have been working in and around New York’s Times Square since early in this century, their presence did not become a major issue until the 1960s, when Black prostitutes moved from Harlem to the theater district because white customers had stopped going to Harlem.
Enforcement practices in Las Vegas, Nevada, where all prostitution is illegal, also support this hypothesis. In recent decades, the casinos have increasingly relied on the implication of sex to draw customers to their stage shows and gaming tables. Elegant prostitutes who fit the stereotype of a blonde Las Vegas showgirl are allowed to work with impunity, so long as they don’t draw customers away from the gaming tables. Black prostitutes, however, are not allowed to work in the casinos and hotels (African-Americans have been admitted as customers only since 1962). Not surprisingly, the percentage of street prostitutes who are Black is high. The laws are rigidly enforced against street prostitutes, and a large number of Black women are arrested each night. For a few years, the city ran a mandatory “counseling” program for prostitutes, which operated from eight p.m. to midnight. The poor, Black prostitutes were in the counseling program, while the middle- and upper-class white prostitutes made money working the casinos.
In all cities, there are periods of intense enforcement, followed by periods of relative calm, often seemingly without any clear logic to the pattern. Traditional analysts claim that preelection politics always demand raids, although since most people worry about burglary, rape, and murder more than prostitution, it is difficult to see how arresting prostitutes would help incumbents. However, prostitution is a crime without complaining witnesses other than the police. That is, while police make arrests for other offenses after a victim has made a complaint (e.g., for burglary or rape) or a body has been found (i.e., murder), with prostitution, soliciting arrests are made after the police pretend to be clients, getting someone to solicit them or agree to their solicitation (i.e., entrapment), and loitering with “intent” to commit prostitution arrests (the overwhelming majority of prostitution-related arrests) are based on a police officer’s statement that he or she watched the person behaving like a prostitute (e.g., walking in a “known” prostitution area, talking to people in cars, talking to other pedestrians, or dressing a certain way). With burglary, and other victim-reported crimes, there is a low “clearance” rate, meaning few arrests in relation to the number of reported offenses. However, since prostitution arrests do not require a complaint from a “victim,” the high number of arrests is counted against nothing, and used to mask the poor record of solving other kinds of crimes. This is true of drug-related and gambling arrests, as well, which rarely if ever have a complaining witness who is not a police officer, or someone the police have deputized for a short period of time.
In 1996, New York City’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, implemented a major, long-term crackdown on poor, street people, supposedly to improve New York’s “quality of life.” While the media has paid a lot of attention to arrests of panhandlers, primarily men, in fact a primary target has been female prostitutes, particularly in poor neighborhoods slated for commercial development. In 1995, when I began to work for a street outreach project to sex workers in some of those neighborhoods, the outreach staff observed police activity on only a few days and nights a week, and the women knew what the schedule was. By 1997, the staff observed police making arrests almost daily, and by 1998, some police were trying to intimidate women to keep them from using our services, and/or arresting them as they left our mobile units. While the usual practice used to be to keep women arrested for prostitution in jail overnight or over the weekend, and then let them go for “time served,” women are now often sentenced to do jail time for several weeks or months, in some cases on outstanding warrants for such things as failing to complete community service, rather than for anything specifically related to prostitution.
When the law only prohibited actively soliciting or engaging in prostitution, prostitutes felt that they had some ability to avoid police entrapment—they could try to evaluate the potential client and avoid police. However, in at least half of the states, including California, Washington, and New York, recent revisions to the law have made it a crime to passively “agree,” or even to “manifest agreement,” to engage in prostitution. This means that the undercover police officer can initiate all mention of sex and money, and if the prostitute merely smiles, the police can say she agreed.
In the early 1980s, police in Everett, Washington set up a phony escort service, placing ads in the paper to recruit employees. The ads merely offered high-paying jobs. Women who answered the ads—many of whom had never worked as prostitutes be
fore— were asked if they would be willing to engage in prostitution. If they agreed, they were arrested. When the case came before the court, all of the charges were dropped (presumably because of the outrageousness of the sting operation). Nevertheless, the women had permanent records of a prostitution arrest and became “known prostitutes,” vulnerable to arrest for “loitering for the purposes of prostitution,” should they be on the wrong city block at the wrong time. One officer actually had sex with one of the women, excusing it in court by saying he didn’t “come.”
If enforcement of prostitution laws is designed to reduce the amount of prostitution, it has failed miserably. Moreover, crackdowns are often followed by an increase in robberies, many of which involve some form of violence, as well as burglaries and other real property crime, as the people who have been dependent on the now-jailed sex workers seek to replace lost income. Just as important, they are often followed by an increase in crimes against prostitutes. For example, some clients take the government’s hostility towards prostitutes as license to rape, steal from, beat up, and even kill them. In addition, ordinarily nonviolent domestic relationships can become violent as income drops precipitously, and even police feel freer to use physical violence while making arrests.
The arrests tend to either trigger or reinforce prostitutes’ dependence on so-called pimps, who are often their only friends outside of jail who can arrange for bail, an attorney, child care, or simply give them moral support. Indeed, some women who worked independently before their first arrest are recruited into working for pimps by other women in jail who convince them of the need to have someone outside to take care of business. Crackdowns can also result in migration to other cities, which cuts off sex workers’ connections with local friends and networks of support, including agencies that could help them move on to other occupations if they wanted to. During the New York City crackdown, FROST’D saw the number of sex workers who used its services drop from more than 700 a month to as few as 300.
In 1949, the United Nations called for the decriminalization of the specific transaction between prostitute and customer that is prostitution, although it recommended keeping all related activities a crime. In those countries that have adopted most of the provisions of the convention (Canada, most European countries), the problems that so plague the prohibited system in this country still exist, but are less severe. One problem is that the continued prohibition of related activities makes it impossible for prostitutes to find a place to work legally, or to legally advertise their services or solicit prospective clients. This leaves the prostitute subject to exploitation by third parties, including landlords, bar owners, bell captains, etc., as well as owners and managers of sex work establishments, who are willing to risk arrest in exchange for the profit. The pimping and pandering laws are used to arrest women who work together for safety, even when no money changes hands, as well as to arrest sex workers’ lovers, and sometimes their children, as much as they are used to arrest brutal exploiters.
That is because criminalization of pimping and pandering makes no distinction between a coercive relationship and one that is mutually voluntary, or between a lover relationship in which one person supports another by working as a prostitute, and an employer-employee relationship in which several prostitutes turn over some or all of their earnings to a third party. Thus the laws both make it difficult for prostitutes to lead normal lives outside of their work, and fail to protect them from abusive exploitation. When prostitutes who have been beaten and/or raped by pimps report the crime to the police, all too often both police and prosecuting attorneys refuse to prosecute the real crime, and instead press charges of pimping and pandering, activities to which the prostitutes may have no objection. In a way, it is like arresting a man who rapes his wife for marrying her, not for the rape. Prostitutes in countries that have decriminalized prostitution but left pimping a crime feel the prohibition reinforces their dependence on abusive men, and a major demand of sex workers, worldwide, is the decriminalization of their personal relationships (Pheterson, 1989).
Occupational Safety and Health
A Delineation of Occupational Risk
When most people think of the hazards associated with prostitution, they think first of either sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), violence, or drug dependence. However, from a sex worker’s point of view, those are extreme hazards. On a day-to-day basis, occupational hazards they describe compare with those in other industries (Alexander, 1998).
Routine Concerns. A number of sex workers have talked to me about occupational injuries, particularly repetitive stress injuries; foot, knee, and back problems; and bladder and kidney infections related to repeated vaginal intercourse. Allergies to latex and/or nonoxynol-9 can also be a problem. Since AIDS has forced the adoption of universal precautions in sex work, as in health care, an increasing number of sex workers have reported vaginal irritation associated with using latex condoms, and one study suggests that latex allergies can be triggered by the use of nonoxynol-9 preparations to try to prevent HIV infection. This last is because nonoxynol-9 both causes vaginal inflammation in many women and triggers the release of latex molecules, which can eventually trigger an allergic response to latex (Stratton, Hamann, Beezhold, 1996). Moreover, condoms coated with nonoxynol-9 are widely distributed to sex workers by public health programs, despite the evidence that frequent use is associated with significant rates of vaginal irritation, and may therefore facilitate the transmission of HIV.
Infectious Diseases. Less routine hazards are infectious diseases. Most familiar, of course, are the conventional STDs, such as gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydia, as well as a number of viral diseases, such as HIV, Hepatitis (HBV and HCV), Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), and Herpes (HSV). However, although some epidemiologists like to claim that prostitutes are a “reservoir of contagion” or a “core group of high frequency transmitters,” in the United States, less than 5% of STDs are associated with prostitution (Darrow, 1984; Conrad, 1981; Rosen, 1982; Brandt, 1985), and many prostitutes have few if any STDs during their work career.
Prostitutes have always been quite concerned about STDs. They know, for example, that gonorrhea is often asymptomatic among women, and increasingly among men as well, and that if untreated, it can lead to a life-threatening condition known as pelvic inflammatory disease (PID). Therefore, they have tended to be quite responsible in being checked for disease to protect themselves, as well as to protect others. They quickly learn to recognize the symptoms of STDs in men and refuse to have sexual contact with men they believe to be infected. They have always made use of any available prophylactic measures, including such barriers as sponges soaked with vinegar or lemon juice, condoms, and diaphragms. This caution has only increased since the outbreak of AIDS. Even brothel managers, who in the past encouraged women not to demand condoms, by charging more for unprotected sex, are more likely to operate with an all-condom policy.
The prostitutes least likely to protect themselves from STDs, including HIV, are those who are seriously dependent on drugs, particularly crack cocaine, and too financially desperate to insist on such precautions. The prohibition of prostitution has not served in any way to solve this problem, indeed compounds it, especially since police often confiscate condoms during an arrest, or sometimes merely as a form of harassment.
Although the public health emphasis has been on STDs, sex workers are vulnerable to other infectious diseases because of their close contact with the public, especially respiratory infections, and because of the conditions in which they work in some countries, such serious illnesses as malaria and dysentery. However, because most research has been fueled by concerns about the potential risk clients face, there has been little to no attention paid to prostitutes’ general health.
Emotional Stress and Substance Use. Sex work can be emotionally stressful due to both the risk of and actual arrest and violence, exploitative working conditions, and the impact of stigma and/or isolation. Two studies found a significant prev
alence of depression, especially among street prostitutes, who face the greatest risk of both violence and arrest (Alegría, et al., 1994; El-Bassel, et al., 1997). In part as a result of stress, easy access to and lowered inhibitions against recreational drugs, and the pleasure that some drugs give, chemical dependence is an occupational hazard. The drugs used include heroin and other downers, but also such drugs as marijuana and cocaine, particularly in its smokable form. Although many observers view prostitution as the cause of the drug dependence, one study of sex workers who use drugs found that almost half (48%) did so before becoming involved in prostitution, and began prostitution to earn enough to pay for the drugs. Others began using drugs after beginning prostitution, to enable them to stay awake and alert, cope with anxiety and the risks they take, and/or sleep (James, 1975). Another study of prostitutes and drugs found that while all of the street prostitutes interviewed had used heroin at one time, only 84% had ever been addicted. At the same time, while 22% of “high-class” prostitutes had tried heroin, none had become addicted (Goldstein, 1979). Among the very low-income street-based prostitutes FROST’D serves, drug use is very high, with more than 95% using some kind of drug, nearly 70% smoking crack at least some of the time, and nearly 40% having a history of injecting drug use (Wallace, Alexander, Horn, 1997).
Sex Work Page 23