Since the fall of the Iron curtain starting in 1989 in Hungary, millions of Central and Eastern European girls and women have been forced to work in the European sex industry (estimated 175,000 to 200,000 yearly). In this paper, we present our work with the Amsterdam-Amstelland (Netherlands) police to find suspects and victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution. 266,157 suspicious act...

In this article, I examine the representation of prostitutes in the law, beginning with the Contagious Diseases Acts. These construct the female prostitute in a way that reflects Victorian sexual morality and gender expectations. I go on to explore how subsequent legal representations create complex discourses of prostitution in which the prostitute body is held as the site of the prostitute's ...

We investigated attitudes and behaviors associated with prostitution and sexual aggression among 101 men who buy sex and 101 age-, education-, and ethnicity-matched men who did not buy sex. Both groups tended to accept rape myths, be aware of harms of prostitution and trafficking, express ambivalence about the nature of prostitution, and believe that jail time and public exposure are the most e...

Is sex work (specifically, prostitution) vulnerable to technological unemployment? Several authors have argued that it is. They claim that the advent of sophisticated sexual robots will lead to the displacement of human prostitutes, just as, say, the advent of sophisticated manufacturing robots have displaced many traditional forms of factory labour. But are they right? In this article, I criti...

PURPOSE This study compared the mental symptoms, especially symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), of women who escaped prostitution, helping activists at shelters, and matched control subjects. MATERIALS AND METHODS We assessed 113 female ex-prostitutes who had been living at a shelter, 81 helping activists, and 65 control subjects using self-reporting questionnaires on demographi...

Through a close examination of Amnesty International’s (Amnesty) own arguments and sources, this paper demonstrates that Amnesty’s proposal to decriminalize prostitution or “sex work” will harm those it claims to help. It concludes that the best available evidence indicates that decriminalization of prostitution would: increase sex trafficking, leave prostituted women or “sex workers” more vuln...

This paper describes the findings from a 10-month ethnographic study of the female sex industry in a large British city. I argue that sex workers construct a continuum of risk which prioritizes certain types of dangers depending on the perceived consequences and the degree of control individuals consider they have over minimising the likelihood of a risk occurring. Although health-related matte...

In a seminal paper, Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn (2002) introduce a puzzling stylized fact— that prostitution is “low-skilled, labor intensive, female, and well paid’’—and offer a provocative explanation: sex workers draw a compensating differential due to the foregone opportunity to “sell’’ their fertility in the marriage market. In so doing, they not only provide the first formal model of occu...