The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (28 page)

When discussing these issues, however, one often runs up against people who are convinced that the picture is very different. Sometimes they even quote studies. But are these studies good
sources of data? Let’s consider the interim report of Eaves for Women and London South Bank University PE:ER Project (Prostitution Exiting: Engaging through Research) that came out in May 2011.

The first and most striking problem with the report? The sample they’ve recruited is not representative of UK sex workers overall. For one thing, it only surveys female sex workers.

That alone is enough reason to be sceptical of the results, because they don’t make it clear men and transgender people are excluded. While women represent the majority of UK sex workers,
they are by no means all. But those devoting their efforts to the ‘rescue’ of sex workers love to focus on women. Organisations like Eaves don’t count and don’t cater for
male and transgender sex workers.

The second problem is that the types of sex workers they survey are not representative. It’s tough to get exact numbers, but it’s estimated that street-based workers only account for
5–20 per cent of all sex work. In the Eaves report, streetwalkers comprise 62.3 per cent of the respondents. Why is this a problem? Because in assessing such issues as drug use and abuse,
they report overall averages of their sample and extrapolate to sex workers in the country as a whole. Their averages will be skewed, heavily, by not having a representative sample. There is no
correction made in the data for this difference between their chosen sample and the sex worker population at large.

Another way in which the results are distorted is by classifying 6.1 per cent of respondents as ‘trafficked’. Again, this is far higher than is true in the UK as a whole. And
that’s not even considering the problem of what definition of ‘trafficked’ they’re using.

As a former statistician dealing with population-based data, I know that one of the most important criteria for an acceptable study is to make sure the sampled population
reflects the status of the population as a whole. If this is not done, the results are not reliable.

The work by Suzanne Jenkins at Keele contained responses from 29 men (26.6 per cent of respondents) and 8 per cent of her respondents were transgender. This certainly is similar to my own
experience. When I worked as an escort, there were about twenty girls represented by the agency, and four men.

The second problem with the PE:ER Project report is how respondents were found: the majority, 88.5 per cent, were recruited through support services. Who accesses support services? People who
need help, of course. It would be a little like surveying a divorce court and claiming the results were representative of all married couples!

What claims does the PE:ER Project make? The rate of drug dependency in the women working on the streets was 71.8 per cent. That in itself is interesting, since it is widely assumed that all
street sex workers are drug addicts, and seven in ten is a long way from ‘all’. But it is still very high. Notably, in their numbers about sex workers based off the streets, the rates
plummet to less than a third. It seems reasonable to assume, since they only recruited through support services, that the reality is that a lot less than 70 per cent of street-based workers are
addicts, and that a lot less than 30 per cent of the off-street workers are. But the potential gulf between the people they queried and sex workers as a whole is never addressed.

There are other interesting questions raised by their numbers that they don’t bother to examine. For instance, the fact that drug dependency in off-street sex workers is half what it is
for those on the streets suggests that it might be problems with addiction that influence where sex workers end up, not the other way round. The report seems to assume that sex work causes
addiction, without considering that the causal relationship could easily be the other way round.

The study also reports that an additional one in ten (10.5 per cent) of the women were using drugs on a recreational level. That sounds like a lot. But is it? No comparisons are made with the
general population anywhere in the report. In fact, this percentage is comparable with the UK in general. The British Crime Survey estimates 12 per
cent of respondents in
England and Wales and 9 per cent in Scotland are recreational drug users – among students, the percentages of recreational drug use are even higher.
¹⁵³

So many of the beliefs repeated about prostitution are wrong, easily disproven . . . and believed with almost religious fervour. Ever hear the one that claims, ‘seventy-five per cent of
women in prostitution become involved when they are under the age of eighteen’? Let’s look at the data. It turns out that in the UK, the breakdown is average age of twenty-one for
streetwalkers, twenty-five for off-street and agency escorts, and nearly thirty-two for sauna sex workers.
¹⁵⁴
So, for the ‘75 per cent’
claim to be even plausible, some interesting data manipulation needs to have happened. The number would be more likely to be accurate if the majority of sex workers were streetwalkers. But as this
isn’t the case, it must be that the number comes from studies of limited size that only looked at young streetwalkers, and extrapolated this to prostitution in general.

Another common claim is that 45 per cent of prostitutes report childhood sexual abuse and 85 per cent childhood physical abuse. These figures derive from a paper on streetwalkers which was
commissioned as part of a crime reduction programme.
¹⁵⁵
It involved a handful of interviews with women in sex work who were contacted in conjunction
with drop-in centres. Did it compare these data against comparable, non-sex work people accessing similar services? Was there a control population? No. In other words, the results are statistically
pointless.

Speaking of which, you can tell a lot about a study by who is recruited to give input. In that particular study, tables show that the survey respondents included 872 ‘local community
members’, 139 ‘project staff’ (including police), and fewer than 40 people actually involved in sex work. Of which none were men.

Studies that focus exclusively on streetwalkers are widely relied on by anti-prostitution writers. The reason why these studies are not representative as they claim is because the lives of many
streetwalkers are so much more chaotic than the lives of the majority of prostitutes.

A 2005 study by Ronald Weitzer of George Washington University highlights a number of these differences.
¹⁵⁶
It found that escorts saw their work
positively, while the brothel girls were merely satisfied
and streetwalkers were mainly dissatisfied. It found that 97 per cent of escorts surveyed reported an increase in
self-esteem after they started sex work, compared with 50 per cent of Nevada brothel workers and 8 per cent of streetwalkers. Other studies from elsewhere in the world confirm this - a Dutch study
from 2004 showed similar results.
¹⁵⁷
An earlier study from the US found that 75 per cent of escorts felt that their lives had improved since starting
sex work, 25 per cent reported no change. No respondents said their lives were worse.
¹⁵⁸
An Australian study found that half of all prostitutes
considered their work as a ‘major source of satisfaction in their lives; 70 per cent said they would choose sex work again if they had their lives to live over.
¹⁵⁹

The most recent push to eliminate street prostitution really took off in the 1990s. The Labour party was inspired by the highly publicised ‘cleanup’ of Times Square
in New York City by mayor Rudy Giuliani. Shadow Home Secretary Jack Straw recommended ‘reclaiming the streets for the law-abiding citizen, with Shadow Leader Tony Blair endorsing
‘Operation Zero Tolerance’. Once in government, Labour continued to focus on an approach to crime reduction that aggressively cracked down on visible exchange of money for
sex.
¹⁶⁰

While having sex for money is legal, soliciting and loitering are not. As a result, prostitution crackdowns overwhelmingly target streetwalkers. While it’s hard to come by exact numbers,
evidence shows streetwalkers only account for 5–20 per cent of all prostitutes – the remaining 80–95 per cent work elsewhere, such as in brothels, in massage parlours, or as call
girls.
¹⁶¹

It’s widely assumed that the presence of streetwalking, brothels, and the like promotes crime. Streetwalking appears to happen more often in dodgy areas. But one of the problems with data
is teasing out the cause from the effect. In other words, is prostitution something that encourages local crime, or do streetwalkers happen to work in areas in which higher crime rates already
exist?

You might expect the government to be interested in which came first in this chicken-or-egg situation but, by and large, they are not. Consider the Home Office document
Kerb-Crawling,
Prostitution and Multi-Agency Policing
.
¹⁶²
The report looks at a police crackdown in Finsbury Park, London. Its very first sentence states,
‘When centred
upon residential areas, street prostitution and kerb-crawling can significantly reduce the quality of life enjoyed by a local population.’

Because the idea of ‘significance’ has numerical and statistical connotations, you should expect any document that claims to be fact-based and invokes the idea of significance to be
prepared to back it up with numbers. I’m afraid if you’re going to say something has been ‘significantly’ reduced, then you’re going to have to quantify that.

Does this paper do so? The answer, predictably enough, is no. They do trot out a few polls, though. A poll estimates 89 per cent of residents think prostitution is a ‘major problem’,
but that means nothing in terms of real increase in crime and real effects on the area.

Does prostitution ‘significantly’ affect crime? No idea. Do people feel it does? Yes – but that’s not the same thing. Popular perception is a strange thing, and not the
same as reality. For example, 61 per cent of Americans believe the world was created in seven days. That’s not the same thing as there being evidence of it happening. It’s not even the
same as there being a ‘significant’ chance that it happened.

The paper states, ‘Tackling kerb-crawling and street prostitution in an area leads to its displacement or deflection to alternative sites.’ Now that is interesting. It could imply
that the authors are concerned about the welfare of sex workers who are moved on. After all, the welfare of those involved is surely as important as homeowners’ feelings, right?

Ah, no. ‘[A]lthough there was some evidence of displacement, it was to areas such as the nearby shopping streets, which residents found less objectionable.’

In other words, it is house prices and the appearance of propriety the Finsbury Park effort was bothered about, not sex workers’ safety and health. The only result desired – and
obtained – was that the streetwalkers moved to a less populated area. And it is a result that puts them at higher risk of attack.

Contrary to popular belief, streetwalkers don’t just jump into any car. That would be, even in a job people think of as inherently dangerous, an unacceptable level of risk. In fact,
streetwalkers often get together to discuss strategies for reducing harm. They do this by sharing number plates and descriptions of dodgy kerb crawlers, vetting clients, and only going to places
they know. Outreach services like drop-in centres and night vans also help this effort, keeping ‘ugly
mugs’ books and being a valuable point of contact.
Streetwalkers perform a balancing act between maximising client exposure, while still avoiding potential harm.

When police and vigilante residents displace sex workers, women have a new balancing act to negotiate – one that puts them at a disadvantage. This is something that has happened time and
again in Britain.

The once well-established red-light area of Balsall Heath in Birmingham, where prostitutes sat in the windows of flats along Cheddar Road, started to be targeted in the 1990s by the Muslim
community. Groups of men went after the women, both while they were working and when they weren’t. It was a campaign of harassment meant to drive the red lights away for good.

Harassment forces sex workers to get into clients’ cars quickly, and possibly be unable to avoid dangerous kerb crawlers. When vigilantes and police roam the pavements, sex workers wait
until the wee hours to come out, making them more isolated and vulnerable to harm.
¹⁶³

In the end, those actions did not improve sex workers’ lives. Prostitutes left Balsall Heath alright, but not for a different kind of work. They simply relocated, many going two miles away
to Edgbaston, and the cycle began anew.

Such an approach can also result in a transfer of activity from streetwalking to other ways of obtaining money. High-profile crackdown results in repeated arrests, which translate to fines that
sex workers, now burdened with criminal records, are unable to pay except by more prostitution or by fraud, shoplifting, and dealing drugs.
¹⁶⁴

Take Aberdeen, for instance. From 2001 onwards, the city had an established tolerance zone for sex workers around the harbour. That ended with passage of the Prostitution (Public Places)
(Scotland) Act in 2007. In the following months, the city centre experienced an influx of streetwalkers and an increase in petty crimes.

Quay Services, which operates a drop-in centre for streetwalkers, reported that sex workers became more afraid to seek assistance, and the number of women coming to the centre dropped to
‘just a handful’.
¹⁶⁵
There was also evidence that displacing sex workers led to more activity in the sex trade, not less – convictions
for solicitation tripled.
¹⁶⁶
This kind of ‘crime shuffling’ takes prostitution out of one
area and dumps it on
another. It only resembles an improvement if you fail to look at the full picture.