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... According to national statistics, prostitution arrests average around 100,000 per year (Weitzer, 1999). On average, 70% of those arrested for prostitution offenses are females and a disproportionate of this percentage tend to be poor African American women (Nelson, 1993b;PEN, 2003;San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution, 1996). Nationally, 38.9% of arrests for prostitution in 1991 were African Americans (Nelson, 1993b). ...
... On average, 70% of those arrested for prostitution offenses are females and a disproportionate of this percentage tend to be poor African American women (Nelson, 1993b;PEN, 2003;San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution, 1996). Nationally, 38.9% of arrests for prostitution in 1991 were African Americans (Nelson, 1993b). In 1999, nearly 75% of the 5,651 women arrested for prostitution related offenses in Chicago were African American (Karp & Naka, 2001). ...
... Moreover, in Vancouver, British Columbia between 1991 and 1995, 29% of convicted prostitutes were jailed while only .5% of convicted Johns (or those who patronize prostitutes) were jailed (Weitzer, 1999). Over the years, of those convicted and ultimately sentenced to jail in the United States for prostitution offenses, the majority were women of color (Nelson, 1993b;PEN, 2003). ...
Street prostitution is intrinsically related to poverty. Female prostitutes, in disproportionate numbers, are known to be ethnic minorities who are impoverished, uneducated and possess few marketable skills. Viewed as depraved individuals, lawmakers have and continue to chastise these women through the law. Consistency in enforcing prostitution laws, which includes laws against patronizing prostitutes, nonetheless, has been and continues to be inequitable. The female prostitute or sex worker continues to be the target of enforcement strategies, while the illegal activities of the sex buyer are minimized or completely ignored. Sentencing practices have also followed suit. The aim of this article, then, is to (1) discuss Africana womanist theory in the context of prostitution; (2) present structurally centered arguments for why poor and minority women resort to prostitution; (3) discuss prostitution laws; (4) examine the differential practices of law officials between the female prostitute and the male customer (a.k.a., the John) with a specific focus on John Schools; and (5) propose short term and long term solutions that may start to redress the impact of structural racism, sexism and classism on the female prostitute.
... Women and girls are actively recruited by pimps and are harassed by johns driving through their neighborhoods. There is an essential sameness between the abduction into prostitution of African women by slavers, on the one hand, and today's cruising of African American neighborhoods by white johns searching for Black women to buy (Nelson, 1993). ...
... African American women are arrested in prostitution at a higher rate than others charged with this crime (Nelson, 1993, MacKinnon & Dworkin, 1997. ...
In the recent literature on prostitution, there has been a focus on HIV which has tended to exclude discussion of the physical and sexual violence which precedes and which is intrinsic to prostitution. The literature of two time periods (1980-84 and 1992-1996) is critically reviewed in order to describe this trend.The normalization of prostitution in the medical and social sciences literature, the tendency to blame the victim of sexual exploitation, and the ways in which racism and poverty are an inextricable part of prostitution are discussed here. The social invisibility of prostitution, needs of women escaping prostitution, and an overview of recent criminal justice responses to prostitution are summarized.
... Prostitution causes exceptional harms to women of color and formerly colonized women in the sex trade (Nelson, 1993;Carter & Giobbe, 1999;Deer, 2010;Butler, 2015). Racism is a factor compelling many women's entry into prostitution, since Women of color are overrepresented in prostitution and they are also overrepresented as COVID-19 victims in the US (Lindsey, 2020), with environmental racism contributing to their victimization (Cabrera, 2020). ...
... 128 According to Vednita Nelson, the founder of Break Free, the "lack of culturally sensitive services" for Black women trap them in prostitution. 129 This includes overly sexualized stereotypes of Black women, limited healthcare services in Black communities, and fewer educational opportunities leading to perpetual poverty. 130 These intersecting issues illustrate the need for institutional reforms-like Chapter 141-that promote community collaboration. ...
... That is, the importance of understanding how systems of prostitution also rely on racial and economic inequalities and that these intersect with the inequalities women as a class experience vis-à-vis men as a class (e.g. Butler 2015; Carter and Giobbe 1999;Nelson 1993). Radical feminist analyses of prostitution tend to be centred around the issue of harm, both the harm done directly to women in systems of prostitution and the harm done to women as a class through the existence of systems of prostitution (Barry 1995). ...
The notion of unacceptable work has formed, in part, as a counterweight to the push for decent or better forms of work. That is, naming and understanding the functioning of unacceptable work helps ‘promote respect for rights at work by eliminating egregious labour practices’. There are important insights around unacceptable work to be gained from feminist debates on the sex industry. Engaging with these debates through the prism of unacceptable work can illuminate the way in which systems of prostitution can function simultaneously as forms of labour and as forms of exploitation and violence against women. If prostitution/sex work meets many of the criteria available for understanding unacceptable forms of work, then the question of abolition can be raised from a labour rights perspective. Following this logic, it is also possible to view the Equality/Nordic Model of asymmetric decriminalisation of the sex industry (where prostituted persons are decriminalised, but brothel owning and the purchase of sexual access are criminalised) as a form of innovative policy to address unacceptable work, and promote decent work.
... Women of color and Indigenous women have written and spoken powerfully about how sex industries are built on racism and histories of colonialism. For example, Carter (2004) has made critical connections between the prostitution of black women and slavery (see also Carter & Giobbe, 1999;Nelson, 1993); Butler (2015) has applied a critical race feminist perspective to prostitution and its impacts on women of color; Stark (2014), Smiley (2016), Farley, Lynne, and Cotton (2005), and Farley et al., (2011), among others, have examined the ways that the prostitution of Indigenous women and girls is also connected to ideologies and processes of colonization. Numerous individual women and feminist women's groups outside of academia have also developed important analyses in regard to the foundational roles that racism and colonization play in the prostitution of women of color and Indigenous women. 2 Intersecting with patriarchy and racism are the ways in which poverty funnels women into prostitution (e.g., Marttilla, 2008;Monroe, 2005). ...
... Black women who get involved with sex work often have greater difficulty than their white counterparts with finding alternative forms of support that will not leave them as vulnerable to sexual exploitation and incarceration. Vednita Nelson (1993) discusses how the law keeps many Black women trapped in sex work: "Racism in the courts results in Black women paying higher fines and doing more jail time than white women. Racist probation officers and child protection workers can create nearly impossible case plans for Black women, setting them up to fail and resulting in their being returned to jail or losing custody of their children" (82). ...
... New studies, focused primarily on Native American women and girls, reveal systematic patterns of sex trafficking in Minnesota (Farley et al. 2011;PAVSA 2014). Given that traffickers prey on marginalized populations and vulnerable girls, it is not surprising that studies find Native American and African American women and girls are disproportionately trafficked in Minnesota (Nelson 1993;Carter and Giobbe 1999). Vednita Carter is the director of a Minneapolis organization to provide services for victims of trafficking named Breaking Free: Sisters Helping Sisters Break Free. ...
Advocacy and scholarship addressing sex trafficking as a human rights issue has become a transnational effort, but there has been less attention to sub-national efficacy. Through analyzing progressive justice system responses to domestic violence in Duluth, Minnesota that have been adopted worldwide, this paper demonstrates how to effectively apply these local advances in order to address sex trafficking on a global scale. This paper makes a theoretical contribution to understanding the intersections between domestic abuse and sex trafficking. A key empirical finding is that a coordinated community response (including the justice system and women’s organizations) is crucial for advancing domestic abuse training, monitoring, and legislation — and this coordination can also be productively utilized for improving responsiveness to victims of sex trafficking across a diverse range of socio-legal and economic contexts.
... Comparatively, when Black women are represented in leisure spaces, they are often hypervisible (Aitchison, 1999;Shaw, 1999), as Black women's bodies are stereotyped as abnormal (Newton, Guo, Yang, & Malkin, 2012;Riddick & Stewart, 1994), hypersexual (Miller-Young, 2010;West, 2006), and their social location highlighted as deviant (Wyatt, 1992;Yuen, Arai, & Fortune, 2012). This is often implied to represent excusable means for exploitation and violence (McNair & Neville, 1996;Nelson, 1993). This hypervisbility requires the recognition of race in conjunction with gendered body politics (Henderson, 1996); we specifically discuss sexual commodification and body representation through a review of Black feminist-related research. ...
Through an interdisciplinary lens, this paper proposes two concepts for Black feminist analysis (visibility and hypervisibility) to augment feminist leisure scholarship. We examine questions of invisibility in relation to the systematic oppression that besets Black women in society, and in the academy, through their absence as research participants and researchers. This raises a new sense of invisible marginality that may exist in scholarship, and otherwise. With hypervisibility in body politics, Black women are represented in stereotyped and commodified ways throughout leisure spaces and scholarship. The critique of historical and contemporary representations of hyper-visibility is conducted through representations of Black women's bodies. We conclude with specific implications as Black feminism provides a culturally congruent epistemology to advance the field and augment third wave feminism.
... Commenting, the Irish Council of Civil Liberties pointed out that its opposition to the requirement focused on singling out one group by requiring it to sign an affidavit promising not to break Irish marriage law, or, indeed, any other aspect of Irish law (Coulter, 2004). Nelson, 1993) n 23 July 2004 a badly decomposed body, described by the media as that of 'a black non-national woman', was discovered in a black plastic bag on a river bank in Co Kilkenny. Because she arrived as an asylum seeker in 2000, she, like all asylum seekers, had been fingerprinted. ...
... The effects of the destruction of the African American family remain to this day, evidenced by the low percentage of dual parent families (Hill, 2009), high crime rates for African American men (Roberts, 2004), higher than the national average illicit drug use among African American women (Stevens-Watkins, Perry, Harp, & Oser, 2012) and out of wedlock teenage pregnancy for girls (Wright, 1999) and is reported by participants as a factor of their vulnerability to recruitment into the sex trade. These findings are congruent with the literature, as many researchers argue that the historical elements outlined above put African America women at a significantly higher risk for forced prostitution, victimization, and criminalization than their Caucasian counterparts (Carter, 2004;Nelson, 1993;Valandra, 2007). Interestingly, in regard to the African American culture and several familial factors highlighted above, Stevenson and Renard (1993) have suggested the concept of racial socialization as a means of transmitting cultural awareness, pride, and values from one generation to the next. ...
To date, little empirical data exists examining the psychological experience of survivors of child sex trafficking in the form of prostitution, nor does current scientific data suggest how American women and children are recruited into the sex trade and sold for sex within the United States. This qualitative research study analyzed the narratives of interviews with 6 survivors of child and adolescent sex trafficking to assess factors that influenced their ability to survive, leave the sex trade, and reintegrate back into the community. Data were analyzed with an ecological systems model and a number of patterns emerged within participants' microsystems, mesosystems, and macrosystems. In the survivor microsystem, participants' insecure attachments led to their vulnerability to recruitment; within the mesosystem unsafe relationships contributed to increased emotional insecurities; in the macrosystem, participants were raised in environments that desensitized them to prostitution. In regard to escape and resilience, in the survivor microsystem participants left the sex trade because of pregnancy or mental health symptoms; in this mesosystem, participants needed safe relationships and increased self-worth; at the level of the macrosystem, once participants left the industry they began processing their traumatic experiences through the mental health system. These data provide unprecedented insights into the psychological effects that the sex trade has on the individuals involved, shedding light on an unexplored issue that has a profound, yet furtive presence in the United States.
... Pines, 1982a, 1982bSilbert, Pines, & Lynch, 1982;Stark and Hodgson, 2003;Vanwesenbeeck, 1994.) Nelson (1993) has described the racism which is intrinsic to all forms of prostitution. ...
... The women in this study described their experiences in prostitution using more problematic terms, such as bondage, madness, insanity, and sickness, and used more empowering terms, such as freedom, surrender, recognition of choice, releasing, and letting go when describing the process of breaking free and healing from prostitution. Nelson (1993) recognized that support within African American communities is essential to African American women's recovery. The Afrocentric perspective conceptualizes the individual as part of a collective identity (Schiele, 1996), emphasizing the need to build bridges, cooperation, and sharing among African American women survivors within the context of their collective communities as a strategy for support. ...
Little research has examined the specific healing needs of prostituted African American women. In this qualitative research study, eight African American women who were receiving culturally specific services at an Afrocentric agency participated in a focus group and in-depth semistructured interviews.. The analysis revealed seven categories of experience: (1) a legacy of violence and underreporting, (2) family and self-preservation, (3) kinship support and spirituality, (4) hitting rock bottom, (5) barriers to recovery, (6) helpful and harmful services, and (7) a prism of oppression. Implications for social workers, policy makers, advocates, and further research are discussed.
... The most frequent destinations for transnationally trafficked women are Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and the Gulf States. Domestic trafficking and prostitution in the United States involves high numbers of African American and other U.S. minority women, as well as economically marginalized white women (Nelson, 1993). ...
... The feminist polarization is primarily focused on sex vs. class inequalities, ignoring the part race has in understanding inequality and prostitution. This is surprising given the fact that women of color tend to enter prostitution earlier and stay longer as compared to White women (McClanahan, McClelland, Abram, & Teplin, 1999;Nixon, Tutty, Downe, Gorkoff, & Ursel, 2002) and that numerous studies report a disproportionate percentage of African-American women arrested and incarcerated for prostitution (Nelson, 1993). Both radical and socialist feminists have been criticized by Africana women for failing to incorporate the concerns and issues of women of color because they primarily focus on sexism (radical) and class inequality (socialist). ...
Throughout history, prostitution has been controversial. Ambivalent attitudes towards prostitution have been part of the feminist discussion for over a century. While feminist scholars agree that inequality within patriarchal hierarchy is the core problem in prostitution, they have been polarized about whether classist or sexist inequality is the primary issue and consequently, on viewing the prostitute as either a coerced victim or an entrepreneur. This article reviews the feminist critique of prostitution and current issues in feminist literature. Changes in policies and social practices are discussed as well as clinical considerations for family therapists working with this vulnerable population.
... Women and girls are actively recruited by pimps and are harassed by johns driving through their neighborhoods. There is a similarity between the abduction into prostitution of African women by slavers and today's cruising of African American neighborhoods by johns searching for women to buy (Nelson, 1993). ...
The harm of prostitution is socially invisible, and it is also invisible in the law, in public health, and in psychology. This article addresses origins of this invisibility, how words in current usage promote the invisibility of prostitution's harm, and how public health perspectives and psychological theory tend to ignore the harm done by men to women in prostitution. Literature which documents the overwhelming physical and psychological harm to those in prostitution is summarized here. The interconnectedness of racism, colonialism, and child sexual assault with prostitution is discussed.
... En EEUU, por ejemplo, la mujer negra es la más prostituida. Es especialmente llamativo el caso de Mineapolis, una ciudad con un 96% de blancos, donde más de la mitad de las prostitutas son de color (Nelson, 1993). En España, un estudio con una muestra de100 prostitutas apuntó que el 60% eran inmigrantes (Asociación Mujer Emancipada, 2004). ...
En este artículo se analiza la violencia de género perpetrada sobre mujeres inmigrantes en España desde un marco psicosocial. Se persiguen fundamentalmente tres objetivos globales. Primero, revisar algunos de los datos estadísticos más significativos de los que disponemos en nuestro país. Segundo, describir los factores psicológicos y sociales relacionados con el problema, la especial vulnerabilidad de este colectivo, así como las barreras a las que sistemáticamente tiene que enfrentarse. Y, tercero, ofrecer una visión de la prostitución como un ejemplo evidente de violencia de género, del que son víctimas un importante número de mujeres inmigrantes. Finalmente, se discuten las aportaciones más importantes realizadas desde las ciencias sociales y del comportamiento en general, y de la Psicología en particular, proponiendo posibles iniciativas investigadoras para el futuro.
... En EEUU, por ejemplo, la mujer negra es la más prostituida. Es especialmente llamativo el caso de Mineapolis, una ciudad con un 96% de blancos, donde más de la mitad de las prostitutas son de color (Nelson, 1993). En España, un estudio con una muestra de100 prostitutas apuntó que el 60% eran inmigrantes (Asociación Mujer Emancipada, 2004). ...
En este artículo se analiza la violencia de género perpetrada sobre mujeres inmigrantes
en España desde un marco psicosocial. Se persiguen fundamentalmente tres objetivos
globales. Primero, revisar algunos de los datos estadísticos más significativos de los que
disponemos en nuestro país. Segundo, describir los factores psicológicos y sociales
relacionados con el problema, la especial vulnerabilidad de este colectivo, así como las
barreras a las que sistemáticamente tiene que enfrentarse. Y, tercero, ofrecer una visión
de la prostitución como un ejemplo evidente de violencia de género, del que son víctimas
un importante número de mujeres inmigrantes. Finalmente, se discuten las aportaciones
más importantes realizadas desde las ciencias sociales y del comportamiento en general,
y de la Psicología en particular, proponiendo posibles iniciativas investigadoras para el
futuro
The federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) includes children who are sexually exploited for commercial purposes in its definition of human trafficking victims. However, most states criminalize sex trafficked minors for prostitution. Despite this tension, little research exists on variation in state-level child sex trafficking statutes. Studying this legislation is necessary because state-level statutes often determine if children are treated as criminals or victims. Local law enforcement and service providers interact with this population more often than federal officials. This mixed methods study uses Event History Analysis and interviews with anti-criminalization advocates, state legislators, state legislative aides, and state prosecutors to examine social, economic, and political factors associated with legislative decisions prohibiting the arrest and/or prosecution of sexually exploited minors for prostitution. Statistical analyses suggest that states with a higher prevalence of concentrated disadvantage are more likely to criminalize this population. Similarly, participants in qualitative interviews describe conditions of structural economic inequality as a primary risk factor for child sex trafficking. For that reason, addressing socio-economic factors such as jobs, wages, and housing are essential for preventing minors from being commercially sexually exploited, and, as a result, being criminalized. Theoretical implications and policy recommendations are also discussed.
Pornography has been perceived as existing separate from prostitution and trafficking. We suggest that pornography, prostitution, and trafficking overlap conceptually and empirically. We discuss similarities between pornography and other arms of the sex trade such as escort, street, or massage prostitution via a review of survivor testimony and existing research. Women used in the production of pornography suffer the same adverse antecedents as those in other prostitution including poverty, childhood sexual abuse, racism, domestic violence, and the cultural mainstreaming of sexism. These factors groom and channel women into pornography, with pornographers using the same controlling tactics employed by other pimps. In pornography, women are subject to physical and psychological harms that are the same as those harms in other prostitution. We offer recommendations for holding those who perpetrate sex trade harms - pimps, traffickers, and sex buyers - legally accountable. We conclude that pornography should be legally and conceptually understood as one variant of prostitution and trafficking.
This paper proposes to critically reassess Maya Angelou’s second autobiographical work,
Gather together in my name (2004 [1974]). In her literary representation of herself, Angelou chronicles her life journey as a young black woman with a fatherless child struggling to survive with freedom in the markedly racist and sexist American society of the 1940s. A close reading of the sinuosity of the narrative fragments reveals that Angelou composes a variety of womanist prose, according to Alice Walker (1983), identified as poetics of her autobiographical truth, through which the writer examines her inner life, disturbs preconceived cultural conceptions of women of African descent, and redresses omission of this historical subject who regenerates herself.
From Compton to Cairo, Bahia to Brixton, black women have been disproportionally affected by poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, discrimination and violence. Despite being one of the largest and geographically dispersed groups in the world, they are rarely referenced or considered as a subject of analysis in international law literature. Thus, it is vital that scholars refashion global discourse by re-conceptualizing international law and relations from their unique experiences and perspectives. This collection covers a broad range of topics and issues that examine the complex interactions - as subjects and objects - between black women and international law. The book critically explores the manifold relationship between them with a view toward highlighting the historic and contemporary ways in which they have influenced and been influenced by transnational law, doctrine, norms, jurisprudence, public policy, public discourse and global governance. It purports to unearth old law and fashion new paradigms born out of the experiences of black women.
In this chapter, the term “Black/s” is used to refer to people of African descent. In the U.S., this term is typically used interchangeably with African-American in academic and non-academic literatures. This interchangeability is captured in the U.S. Census data where Black or African American forms a racial category that encompasses African-Americans and immigrant Blacks from Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere, who self-identify as Black or African-American. It is then estimated that this racial group make up 12.6% of the U.S. population based on the 2010 census (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011). The racial monolithic character of these data fails to account for ethnic variations in the racial composition of the U.S. population. The same data limitation applies to crime data, so that arrest and incarceration figures specific to Black Africans and Caribbeans (etc.) are not recorded, but instead are subsumed in the general information for Black or African-American. In reading this chapter, it is important to be cautious of this anomaly.
Working with Female Offenders is the first book to combine the research and theory from social work,
counseling, and criminology to create a framework specific to correctional counseling with this population. The gender-sensitive approach incorporates motivational enhancement from psychology, a strengths perspective from social work, and restorative justice from criminal justice into its framework. van Wormer uses the lenses of race, class, and gender to add further depth to this approach.
Featuring examples of successful, innovative programs for female offenders from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and New Zealand, this practical book creates a strengths, empowerment, and restorative model for counseling female offenders on anger management, communication, stress management, and other issues.
In addition, this unique resource is filled with case examples, stories, and anecdotes from female prisoners and correctional counselors, as well as sidebars on controversial topics about female offenders. Working with Female Offenders contains easy-to-follow guidelines and evidence-based research on treatment intervention protocols.
Most Americans assume that the United States provides a gold standard for human rights-a 2007 survey found that 80 percent of U.S. adults believed that "the U.S. does a better job than most countries when it comes to protecting human rights." As well, discussions among scholars and public officials in the United States frame human rights issues as concerning people, policies, or practices "over there." By contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that many of the greatest immediate and structural threats to human rights, and some of the most significant efforts to realize human rights in practice, can be found in our own backyard. Human Rights in Our Own Backyard examines the state of human rights and responses to human rights issues, drawing on sociological literature and perspectives to interrogate assumptions of American exceptionalism. How do people in the U.S. address human rights issues? What strategies have they adopted, and how successful have they been? Essays are organized around key conventions of human rights, focusing on the relationships between human rights and justice, the state and the individual, civil rights and human rights, and group rights versus individual rights. The contributors are united by a common conception of the human rights enterprise as a process involving not only state-defined and implemented rights but also human rights from below as promoted by activists. Copyright
This article describes the history and dynamics of African/African American women in prostitution beginning with the arrival of the African woman to America, her life and the obstacles she faced living in America. We discuss treatment philosophy and services offered by Breaking Free, a Minneapolis organization offering services to African American prostituted women.
In 1999, Sweden passed a law criminalizing the purchase of sex and decriminalizing the prostituted person. The law was part of an omnibus bill against violence against women, recognizing prostitution as related to such violence. This article analyzes the reasons for the Swedish law and documents the law’s impact, concluding that the law has significantly reduced the occurrence of prostitution in Sweden compared to neighboring countries. In addition, it addresses some important remaining obstacles to the law’s effective implementation and responds to various common critiques of (and misinformation about) the law and its effects. Finally, this article argues that, in order to realize the law’s full potential to support escape from prostitution, the civil rights of prostituted persons under current law should be strengthened to enable them to claim damages directly from the tricks/johns for the harm to which they have contributed.
Previous research has established a link between childhood sexual abuse and engaging in prostitution as an adult. The purpose of this study was to extend this literature by exploring whether being raped as an adult is associated with exchanging sex for money. Interviews with 102 rape survivors in a major metropolitan area revealed that 23.5% had engaged in prostitution post-rape. Those who had exchanged sex for money were more likely to be women of color, to have a high school education or less, to be unemployed, and to have children to support, than those who had not engaged in prostitution post-assault. The prostitution subsample also had significantly higher levels of psychological distress, physical health symptomatology, and substance use. Survivors were asked whether and how the rape was associated with engaging in prostitution: most (75%) stated that they felt it was related to the assault. The most commonly cited reason for engaging in prostitution by these survivors was that they were trying to regain some control over their lives and their bodies; exchanging sex for money was seen as one way to control men's access to them. Implications for future research on victimization and prostitution are discussed.
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