The majority of sex industry research focuses upon the female seller and the male consumer. When research strays from this blueprint to include men as sexual service providers, it tends to be under the pretext of ‘homosexuality’; the client gender remains stable – male. Furthermore, very little research in this area compares the experiences of women and men working in the same sector of the sex industry (Weitzer, 2005b). I therefore seek to address these issues by asking ‘what are the experiences of female and male escorts (who work heteronormatively)?’ Using narrative research and storytelling, twenty in-depth interviews with escorts were conducted, from the perspective that sex work is work. Analyses are divided into four areas: working practices; the role of power in the escort-client dyad; ‘stigma’, and lastly, interpersonal relationships. I suggest that the ‘straight’ male escort market occupies a more ‘casual’ position in comparison to the ‘professionalised’ female sector, and this is reflected in the struggles male escorts encounter trying to secure a steady income stream from escorting alone. I argue that although women and men discuss similar escorting experiences, women benefit from the well-established female market (with its associated ‘unwritten rules’ of standard practice), whereas men are more likely to enact their work in non-standard and sometimes ambiguous ways. Stigma, when discussed, is most often attached to the female body (hence the female sex worker), although I mount a more theoretical challenge toward the academic tendency to assume the presence of stigma in sex workers’ lives. I then position participants’ experiences within their broader networks of relationships, and offer the suggestion that attitudes toward sex (not necessarily toward sex work) in society and interpersonal relationships are instrumental in how escorting is negotiated relationally. Lastly, I locate my findings within the recent shift toward recognising women as sexual consumers, set against a political backdrop of potential movement toward the decriminalisation of sex work in England and Wales.

Adopting a participatory approach, this thesis examines Merseyside Police’s treatment of violent and other crimes against sex workers as hate crime - through the lens of what is referred to as the ‘Merseyside hate crime approach’ The first academic study to do so, it describes the development of the approach and explores the key elements which constitute it. It proposes the approach is a banner encompassing a range of policing and partnership initiatives - not just the inclusion of sex workers in the force’s hate crime policy, but including, critically, a wider shift from enforcement to protection-focused policing and improved support for sex worker victims of crime. Based on analysis of data from interviews with 22 sex workers and 39 police officers, it reports support for the approach and the notion that sex workers can be victims of hate crime. It argues that sex workers’ experiences of victimisation fit a number of definitions of hate crime, straddling those foregrounding prejudice and those foregrounding the targeting of ‘perceived vulnerability’. As such they can be included as a hate crime group and there are tangible benefits for inclusion. However, the thesis asserts there is some way to go in fully integrating sex workers into hate crime procedures in Merseyside. It supports the further development of an inclusive model for understanding hate crime which includes non-established hate crime groups and recognises intersectionality. It argues that the hate crime approach to sex work is progressive - within the UK framework of the quasi-criminalisation of sex work, it offers a rights-based approach to addressing violence against sex workers. Nonetheless, it cautions the approach should not be seen as an end it itself in the regulation of sex work, with international research evidence pointing to decriminalisation as a more conducive framework to address crimes against sex workers.

This thesis examines prostitution in Cardiff from 1900 until the ratification of the 1959 Street Offences Act. Drawing from geographical theories, the opening chapters detail how the spaces of prostitution were products of interrelations: commercial sex intertwined with everyday spaces and spatial uses, while representations of ‘place’ embedded prostitution within a temporal moral geography of wider ‘problem’ behaviours. The thesis then demonstrates the limits to what can be revealed about prostitutes’ lives, reading against stereotypes to reveal patterns of migration and poverty. However, we are faced with significant obstacles to uncovering who sold sex in the interwar years, as debates over prostitution became embroiled in racial anxieties over Butetown. While emerging in response to the First World War and concerns over immigration, this connection was drawn from broader imperial hierarchies of race through which sexual behaviour represented a marker of ‘difference’. Notions of racial difference were (re)produced within particular contexts, and fears over the involvement of black and Maltese men in Cardiff’s prostitution predated the emergence of similar concerns in London. The final third of the thesis explores regulation from three angles: policing, governmentality, and materiality. It reveals how regulation was exercised through a more complex configuration of actor-networks than the police and the law, being driven by temporal discourses linked to the shifting priorities of Nonconformist politics, wartime concerns, and interwar social hygiene and immigration controls. Urban planning also shaped the spatial regulation of prostitution, particularly in the 1950s as part of wider attempts at urban regeneration and zoning. Building on insights into materiality in urban history, this study demonstrates how material environments also functioned as a diffuse form of agency, being an element of a recursive relationship between urban development and policing that shaped both the spatial uses of prostitutes and the ways in which their behaviours were regulated.

Traditionally, the law has largely ‘understood’ and regulated prostitution on the basis of some form of moral reflection on the sale of sex. Such a reflection is evident in recent policy efforts to criminalise the sale and/or purchase of sex, as outlined in inter alia the so-called ‘Honeyball Report’. The report suggests that prostitution is a violation of human dignity, which leads to a call to action to criminalise the purchase of sex. This study engages with this proposition, and poses the question: ‘Does prostitution violate human dignity? There are three core themes of dignity identified across the literature, in human rights theory and in international human rights law, as well as in Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), grounded in an understanding that human dignity is inherent and inalienable in all persons. As the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and its associated international conventions recognize, this concept of inherent human dignity is the bedrock upon which human rights are founded. Modern conceptualisations of human dignity constructed by US scholars are appraised and three key descriptive elements of dignity; Inherence, Personal Inviolability and Autonomy are drawn together to form a model, called ‘IPA’ dignity. Thereafter, the idea of dignity violation is explored and examined using the jurisprudence of Article 3 ECHR to demonstrate judicial recognition of the idea of violation. This ‘violation’ of dignity as expounded examines various ways in which dignity may be violated. The model is critiqued, and it is established that in order to answer the hypothesis question, a descriptive model of dignity requires some normative framework in order that it be utilised to assess the dignity violation of sex workers in prostitution. The model is considered in a normative usage, according to the natural law theory of John Finnis in Natural Law and Natural Rights, in which Finnis sets out a normative call to action for the promotion of certain objective goods, the collective of which amounts to a life ‘worth pursuing’. To provide a sociological context for the study, the subject of prostitution is introduced as it is understood in the academic discipline of sociology, and relevant literature therein is reviewed around the central issue of what is termed here ‘the prostitution encounter’; that is, the sale/purchase of sexual services. A sociological explanatory model called the Gender and Male Violence Model (GMV) is justified as most appropriate for the study. Narratives taken from the seminal literature in the sociology of prostitution are analysed using a phenomenological method to consider the experiences of the sex worker of the prostitution encounter, and an evaluation is made as to potential modes of dignity violation within the prostitution encounter. This leads to an indication that the human dignity, modelled as IPA dignity and framed with the normative call to action of Finnis which directs that human agents should promote human flourishing and, a fortiori dignity, may be violated. Using these methods, the study concludes by indicating that prostitution may indeed violate human dignity.

This research identifies and explores the emotions of women who are exiting (leaving) prostitution. In both the prostitution and desistance literature, emotional factors clearly emerge as part of the process of change for exiters and desisters; however, there has been very little direct focus on their importance and impact on this process. The research makes a unique contribution to the desistance literature by mapping the process of change for women with particularly complex and challenging circumstances and focusing on the emotional aspects of this change. Overall, the research confirms that understanding the emotional aspects of exit offers new insights and gives rise to a new approach to service provision. The findings reveal that emotions are central to desistance and that role transition is a prerequisite for desistance. The data has shown that exit is a process of self-determination, becoming one’s authentic self, and that this process is bound up with emotional drivers and barriers. The process of exit necessarily involves fostering positive emotional experiences through both external and internal changes. The data suggests that an understanding of dominant emotional constructs at any given time will give a gateway into how best to respond to the needs and motivations of the exiter through service provision and offers an emotionally intelligent model to meet these needs. Service provision plays a key role in bridging the change in lifestyle of exiters through generating emotional energy, increasing access to alternatives, fostering hope, and enabling women to reimagine their lives.

This study contributes to our understanding of the social organisation and lived experience of men in China’s sex industry. It employs a social epidemiological model to analyse the multiple levels of influence on HIV (and other non-HIV) risks to which this highly marginalised group are exposed. It highlights the complex interrelations between different factors influencing the lives of male and transgender sex workers (MSW) in China. It is the first mixed methods study of its kind in the Chinese MSW context. The thesis analyses data collected during five months of fieldwork in Shenzhen, China. Working through a community-based MSW organisation, a participatory approach was taken to study design and data collection. Community advisory boards were organised and used to develop and test study instruments. A structured survey was undertaken with MSW (n=251), with a sub-sample purposely selected for semistructured interviews (n=21). Key informant interviews were conducted with representatives from local and international organisations (n=5). Multiple linear and binary logistic regressions were used for quantitative data analyses, while qualitative data were coded thematically. Both data types are given equal weight throughout the analysis. The thesis demonstrates how China’s recent macro-level social and economic changes, characterised here through the microcosm of life in the city of Shenzhen, interact with the lived experiences of the men in the study, driving their rural-urban migration and contributing to their entry into sex work. The phrase “laugh at poverty, not at prostitution” was used by many of the respondents to explain their decision to sell sex, but this apparently simple idiom belies a more complex reality in which economic factors intersect with social networks, sexual orientation and an escalation in the provision of sexual services. Sex work careers are represented as providing both opportunities (for escaping poverty, expressing sexual identity, and accessing cosmopolitan lifestyles), as well as risks. Risk, understood as a socially constructed phenomenon, refers not only to HIV transmission, but also violence from clients, control by mami (pimps), and entrapment and arrest by the police. Multiple risks and opportunities arise through a range of social and professional interactions between the different actors involved in the industry, necessitating their dynamic management by the MSW. Sex work, HIV and homosexuality alongside migrant identities are highly stigmatised in China, and the active management of these intersecting identities, in part through their sexual practices, allows the MSW in this study to continue in their work without ‘losing face’. The MSW have complex sexual networks of male and female, paid and paying, and non-commercial partners. In exploring their partner concurrency, this complexity is examined, through the lenses of stigma and identity. Local, emic understandings of ‘safe sex’ indicate that while levels of HIV fear are substantial among the MSW, and condom use is commonly discussed, safety and hygiene are frequently conflated, and both are associated with HIV-avoidance. Hygiene, through showering and general cleanliness, is considered an important part of ‘safe sex’ for this group, but also emerges as a metaphor employed to counter the perceived dirtiness of selling sex for some of the MSW. The findings highlight the complexities involved in selling sex for these men. They must actively negotiate their work, risks and identities, while also being subject to unequal power relations and forces largely beyond their control. This thesis aims to present a nuanced account of these dynamic processes.

Risk of HIV and illness are the dominant context in which sex work is discussed in India and there is a lacuna of social scientific analysis of sex workers’ lives. HIV interventions negotiated between global actors such as UNAIDS, World Bank, USAID etc, the Indian government, state level AIDS prevention bodies, and the local NGOs, have constructed ‘sex work’ as an epidemiological category rather than treating it as a social concept. Based on fieldwork in HIV prevention NGOs, and participant observation and interviews with sex workers in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, in August 2004-August 2005 to understand the realities of the sex workers lives, this thesis proposes research on sex workers, with specific reference to gender and sexuality. Theoretically the research seeks to answer the question: how to understand agency of vulnerable populations and how do sex workers use agency in oppressive environments? This thesis also engages with the feminist debate of selling sex as profession or as oppression of women’s rights. I argue that sex workers actively negotiate sex work and their lives with the means at their disposal. This is done not only in the context of negotiating the risks of sex work but also in the broader context of other needs, for example money, love and sexual desire. While sexuality is a taboo in India, the analysis contributes to the understanding of discourses of women’s sexuality and the sexual behaviour of sex workers in Chennai. While the women’s experiences are closely knit into the global nexus of the HIV industry, sex work comes across as a complicated knot of poverty, desire, women’s oppression, love, cooption, and motherhood.

Between 1919 and 1936 proceedings for solicitation in Liverpool fell by 98%, with the city having gone from accounting for 17.5% of street prostitution in England and Wales to just 0.3% between these years. So infrequent were arrests against street prostitution by the mid-thirties - for example, in 1934 there were just 10 arrests for solicitation compared to 733 in 1919 - that from 1937 solicitation and brothel offences appeared as an amalgamated category in the local criminal statistical returns. In the national context, proceedings for solicitation fell by 29% between 1919 and 1936, a considerably smaller but nevertheless significant decline. Indeed, this image of decline and improvement seemingly accords with the broader historiography of British prostitution which has tended to conceptualise the interwar period as one of relative stability sandwiched between the upheaval of the First and Second World Wars and emerging from the shadows of Victorian depravity. Crucially, however, in the midst of continued decline prostitution garnered intense political and public attention in Britain throughout the interwar period, crystallised nowhere more palpably than in the establishment of the Street Offences Committee in 1927, the first serious review of prostitution legislation since the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the late-nineteenth century. Whilst the past five years have seen the emergence of the first sustained studies of interwar prostitution, the historiography remains geographically limited to London. This thesis offers the first sustained study of prostitution in interwar Liverpool. Through a close reading of Liverpool’s court registers it also marks the first critical examination and ultimately challenge of this concept of decline. In moving beyond the smokescreen of improvement it exposes the period as a complex and distinct moment in the history of British prostitution, and one which allows us to make sense of why at the very time the offence rates were showing unprecedented decline prostitution never strayed far from the political, legal and cultural agendas.

This study uses non-random and snowball sampling methodologies in order to get a truer insight into the life, activities and health care problems of 100 drug using prostitutes, and 50 non using prostitutes in Manchester, contacted directly in the streets or saunas / massage parlours. A subsidiary study of 120 male clients of female prostitutes was also conducted by means of self-completed questionnaires and telephone interviews. Among the sample in the main study of female prostitutes, drug users, 71% of whom were injecting users, were shown to have had a much more disrupted childhood than non users. They were also more likely to take risks in relation to condom use, to the type of sexual and drug taking activities they were engaged in, and to their general health care. A majority had been for an HIV test, with 2 reporting a positive result. Most of them (78%) had had at least one pregnancy, 10% of these making their first contact with health services whilst in labour. Access to methadone scripts tended to reduce criminal activity and rates of injecting, but only 13% had regular contact with community drug services which were not regarded as very useful. 4 The client study revealed that 62% of the sample were either married or living with a regular partner, and 86% in full time employment. One fifth had had a venereal disease check, and one fifth an HIV test (none reported positive). A majority used condoms (mostly supplied by the prostitute), although 23% reported not using one in their last contact. Clear implications arise from the study for the health, social services and criminal justice systems to ensure greater efforts are made to respond to the needs of female drug users.

In this qualitative research, Turkey's nationaJ policy and practice against sex trafficking is explored by looking at the interactions between sex trafficking, prostitution and migration regimes. Turkey has adopted definitions and legislation from the UN Protocol and this research focuses upon how international discourses have been understood and practised in a local context. I refer to feminist critiques of the UN Protocol, and show how Turkey'S national counter-trafficking rhetoric is heavily influenced by prostitution regime based on 'public health' and moral concerns as well as 'irregular' migration on the basis of national security and 'illegal' working. Findings indicate that the framing of sex trafficking as a problem of organised crime rather than as a type of migration obscures the strong connection between sex trafficking and migration. Furthermore, the definition of the phenomenon apart from prostitution obscures the connection between the prostitution regime in Turkey and its effects on sex trafficking. This tendency is especially visible in national legislation and law enforcement, where attempts to distinguish between forced and voluntary prostitution can 're-victimise' trafficked women in different stages of identification and protection mechanisms. Therefore, this study focuses on sex trafficking by showing how prostitution and migration regimes inform and affect the policies and practices against sex trafficking within local settings. It argues that those regimes play an important role in policy and practice against sex trafficking; they weaken the protection system which may cause 're-victimisation' of 'victims' of sex trafficking. This research challenges institutional responses to sex trafficking and makes policy recommendations founded on empirical research. It adds to our understanding of the prostitution regime in Turkey, its effect on trafficking and the needs of trafficked women. It has wider policy implications for other migrant groups, such as migrant domestic workers, who suffer from the same policies and practices in Turkey and the findings are transferable to other countries.