Red Light, Blue Light

Prostitutes, Punters and the Police

Karen Sharpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351906104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

Based on extensive interviews with forty women working as prostitutes, Red Light, Blue Light examines a variety of personal developmental experiences and socio-situational factors that can combine to make prostitution neither an inevitable nor inescapable circumstance but a rational occupational choice. This book attempts to analyze why women enter the world of prostitution, how the skills and values of the business are transmitted and how the individuals themselves subjectively define, perceive and rationalise their activity. As opposed to the traditional stereotypical depiction of prostitutes as hopeless, downtrodden victims of male exploitation living lives of poverty, misery and wretchedness, the picture that emerges in this study is of an independent occupational group organizing and controlling the business in which they work. The book also presents a profile of clients of prostitutes and discusses the role of the police. Written in accessible style, the resulting monograph presents a fascinating, unique and comprehensive account of street prostitution in a northern city.

1 The Research Methodology: Theory, Process and Reality

Methodological issues: putting theory into practice

The aim of this study was to examine female prostitution; the primary objective being to facilitate an understanding of the particular situation of women involved in the profession. The central part of the research was based on first-hand and lengthy observation and contact with female prostitutes in their ‘natural setting’ and with the police unit responsible for policing prostitution offences (soliciting and kerb crawling), behaviour and offences which are ostensibly offences against public order. Underpinning the research was the commitment to the idea that social research should be ‘respondent sensitive’, that is, that adequate knowledge of human social behaviour cannot be fully grasped without observing and at least attempting to understand the symbolic world and key events in the life of the group

From the outset, it was decided that the only practical method of conducting the study of this group whose activities and behaviour were largely perceived to be both covert and deviant, was going to be through observation. Moreover, it was felt that observation would be the only way to obtain data that would be both rich in detail and which could be related to the context in which it was occuring. Observation provided a means of studying the whole system with its many interrelationships in great detail (McCall & Simmons, 1969:1; Jorgensen, 1989:12). Furthermore it was hoped that utilising a case study approach would enable the different life experiences of the group, and particularly their ‘deviance’ to be located within the more specific context of the individuals life (Plummer, 1983:69).

Soliciting information: the interviews

Interviews are a complex social process; they cannot be regarded as merely a means of extracting and recording information. They are ‘the art of sociological sociability’ (Benney & Hughes, 1978:176), a ‘peculiar type of human interaction’ (Denzin, 1970:142); they constitute a ‘conversation with a purpose’ (Kahn & Cannell, 1962: 530) specifically the pupose of information gathering. Interviewing skills are something that have to be learned through the hard reality of interviewing itself. In essence, the interviewing ‘technique’ adopted for this research was developed, learned and adapted during the course of the fieldwork.

The prostitute interviews

For the interviews with the prostitutes, because the subject was highly complex and sensitive, it was felt that the greater flexibility of the unstructured (informal) interview would be better suited for getting to the heart of the matter. The overall aim was to play a ‘passive and adaptive role’ (Smith, 1975:170) so that the respondent would feel free to cover an area in depth relatively unrestricted. They were ‘informer friendly conversations’ (Denzin, 1970:126). However, the questions were relatively ‘directive’ in that they provided a definite frame of reference. Although there were particular topics on the schedule there were few pre-set questions (see appendix Ai). This allowed me to vary the sequence of the questions, change the wording, probe unclear and ambiguous responses and, more importantly, to adapt the phrasing of questions to fit the unique characteristics of each respondent. For example, it was important to record the ‘history’ of their involvement in prostitution. As such, questions were asked about the circumstances surrounding their initial involvement in prostitution and their personal motivations and influences at the time.

Having established motivation, it was easier to develop questions aimed at eliciting personal opinions, attitudes and reactions to their experiences. The questions needed to be as simple and straightforward as possible. Ambiguity, technical expressions and particularly academic jargon had to be avoided. The final questionnaire schedule represented a compromise between formulating questions that satisfied the information gathering purpose of the interview, and finding a common vocabulary with which to express the question.

The ordering of the questions was, as I was to discover, to be of crucial importance; decisions had to be made about the topics that were to be covered and the language that was to be employed, not only because of the necessity of gaining the interest of the respondent but because it appeared obvious that fundamental problems could arise when researching this potentially ‘delicate’ area - a problem that would be compounded if the respondents were suspicious of, and generally unwelcoming to, outside interest. Advice on how to handle the hostile respondent is sadly lacking in the literature. Experience eventually taught me that highly sensitive or potentially threatening questions were best placed near (or at) the end of the interview. In this way, if the respondent became disgruntled with the questions or hostile to me (the researcher) and decided to terminate the interview, most of the interview was at least completed (Denzin, 1970:124).

It was hoped that this approach would provide a more rounded picture than would be attainable by more formal methods. The problem is that whilst this data may be more valid, the kind of response elicited may be more difficult to classify and quantify. The unstructured approach was invaluable for researching this complex phenomena. It provided the opportunity to dig deep and elicit a more personal and value laden response, it facilitated unhindered expression and the discovery of what the respondent ‘really felt’ and ‘really meant’. For this more complex data, the greater flexibility of the unstructured approach actually served to strengthen the material. It became clear that the difficulties of quantifying the data, particularly summarizing the results, were not insurmountable.

Some commentators have suggested that one way to check the validity of the answers is to re-interview the respondents (Denzin, 1970:129). This is a complex procedure mainly because the further cooperation of respondents is difficult to secure. It is a strategy further complicated by the practical problem confronting the researcher of having to recall each interview. Many of the interviews in this study were opportunistic (agreed and arranged on the spur of the moment) and it was impractical to carry a huge dossier of notes of each respondent around when doing the fieldwork. It therefore became imperative to endeavour to remember absolutely everything otherwise they (the respondents) began to think that there was a general lack of interest or attention being paid to their particular story. This could have had potentially disastrous consequences. However, whilst recalling the minute details of an individual’s life history is relatively easy when you only have a couple of them to recall, trying to remember twenty, thirty or forty is rather more problematic!

In this study, because of the lengthy and on-going nature of the research, most of the women did quite happily put up with my incessant questioning. Denzin (1970) suggests that if there is a possibility of the respondent lying or fabricating, care should be taken to include questions which ‘catch’ the respondent out or reveal that previous answers have been incorrect (Denzin, 1970:129). On the whole, I decided that this would not be a good strategy to pursue. The respondents in this study were exceptionally alert to everything that was said; any attempt to infer that they were stupid (by trying to catch them out) would have been both patronizing and foolhardy. The capacity of the women for remembering detail was staggering; they could remember what I had been wearing the previous week, they could reel off car licence plates with consumate ease. They have to. The women in this study spend a fair percentage of their life attempting to avoid ‘entrapment’ questions posed by the police; dodging double-barrelled questions from a university researcher was hardly likely to fool them.

The police interviews

For the interviews with the police, a semi-structured interview schedule was devised (see appendix Aii). The rationale behind this choice was the desire to present the police respondents with the same stimuli so that they were responding to the same research instrument (Smith, 1971:70). This comparability meant that when variations did appear they could be attributed to actual differences in response. However, the usual classification of results into statistical aggregates was neither possible (given the small number of police officers interviewed), n...