Male Prostitution

Donald West J

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781560230229
• eBook ISBN: 9781136584732
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Professional Responsibility in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

Here is the most comprehensive empirical study ever published about male prostitutes and their clients. Written by one of the most distinguished international scholars in psychiatry and criminal justice, this book provides a carefully designed presentation of in-depth interviews with several hundred London "rent boys." The interviews included a large sample of one-to-one conversations in a private room tape-recorded with the consent of the interviewees. Dr. West and his colleague, Mr. de Villiers, bring you squarely into the everyday lives of male prostitutes and cover little known details of their lives, such as:

• the drift into homelessness
• sexual orientation
• entry into prostitution
• sexual orientation
• threats of blackmail, violence, and murder by male prostitutes or their clients
• attitudes and intentions of the male prostitutes
• post-prostitution careers, legal and criminology issues
• personal fears, desires, and interests of male prostitutesEncyclopedic in scope and depth, Male Prostitution never strays from combining high-level research presented in a readily understandable and often entertaining style and incisive insights and issues critical for both the informed layperson and researchers in human sexuality. Dr. West and his colleague provide is a source of unbiased, detailed information on the male sex industry and their clients which is unavailable in any other book published to date.

Part I

Street Workers

1

Composition of the Main Sample

The 50 young men who were interviewed were all current, prospective or former clients of Streetwise Youth and were contacted at the agency’s Day Centre in West London. Whoever was first available when either D.J. West or Buz de Villiers was at hand was asked if he would be willing to be interviewed and was offered a modest fee for his trouble. In preparation, a notice had been put up at the centre which read as follows:

So that we can work properly and raise money to help people we must be able to show that we know about their needs and difficulties. For this reason we would like members to help in a research survey.

Each of you will be asked to have a confidential interview with Dr Donald West and tell him as fully and truthfully as you can about your experiences. Donald is chairman of our management committee, so it will be a chance to tell him what you think about Streetwise.

There is a small fee (£10) for giving your time to this.

The workers at the centre encouraged people to take part and only one request for an interview was met with a firm but polite refusal. The sample was therefore fairly representative of the young men in touch with the agency at the time, that is over a period of one year commencing in June 1988. A helping agency might be expected to attract those in difficulties of one sort and another, so this sample is not necessarily representative of street prostitutes in general, but, as described later, a sample drawn from elsewhere displayed much the same characteristics. All of the sample were or had been contacting clients in public places such as streets, stations and gay bars and could be fairly described as street workers.

The interviews were guided by a structured schedule of questions, some of them open-ended, some calling for categorical answers, which were put as systematically as was practical to every participant. A sample schedule is given in the Appendix. The forms were used as prompts and the interviewers could vary the wording or add questions for further clarification in the interest of ease of communication. This will be evident from the extracts quoted later. Open-ended questions were used to encourage interviewees to express themselves in their own way. The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed later so that it was unnecessary to interrupt the flow of information by making extensive notes on the spot. It was explained that this saved time and none of the interviewees objected.

The choice of topics had been decided after discussion with several experienced colleagues, study of previous published reports and scrutiny of questions used in a previous exercise with Streetwise Youth by Richie McMullen. Some interviews with former street prostitutes had already been carried out and observations from these also influenced what was included.

The interviews took place on a one-to-one basis in a private room, usually in the Streetwise office headquarters situated in a building near but separate from the busy, crowded Day Centre. They began with an assurance of strict confidentiality and a promise that identifying particulars would not be divulged to anyone other than the Streetwise staff. This was particularly important to one or two of the young men who had heard of newsworthy stories about rent boys being disseminated by the media in such a way that friends and relatives could recognise them.

The great majority cooperated well, being frank and confiding and volunteering details that might have been thought embarrassing or compromising. The information given could not be checked directly, but it was possible to look for inconsistencies. By accident, one man was seen by both interviewers, and seven others were re-interviewed later to get more information about specific topics. No serious discrepancies emerged between the information volunteered on different occasions. The interviewers got the impression that, except on certain topics – such as amounts earned from punters, where there may have been boastful exaggeration, or the extent of homosexual feelings, which may have been under-played – the information was reliable. After all, many of the participants had known and confided in the Streetwise staff over long periods. Buz de Villiers, who did almost half the interviews, was working as a volunteer at the Day Centre at the time and was seen by the young men as one of the staff who already ‘knew’ them. It could be argued that the offer of payment, by encouraging otherwise unmotivated participation, increased the likelihood of untruthful responses. Indeed one interviewee was reported to have remarked later: ‘I was paid, so I just told lies.’ If he really did so persistently that was probably exceptional. On most issues deception would have served no obvious purpose and might have risked annoying questions being asked should discrepancies be noticed between information disclosed on other occasions or at different stages during the interview. Survey research has to balance risk of bias from the refusal of a significant proportion to cooperate with risk of bias from the offer of inducements. In view of their often impecunious circumstances it was thought appropriate to offer all the same small sum for the service they were giving. Although many claimed to be making substantial, if erratic, profits from their activities, it was quickly spent and nearly all were eager to get their £10 fee. One of the Streetwise workers expressed doubts on the grounds that the money was encouraging a form of prostitution, but we thought it fair to offer a small fee.

The last man to be interviewed by D.J.W. had seemed forthcoming and quite happy to talk, and the taped record did not show otherwise, but he complained to the staff afterwards that he had been upset by the questions and suspected the researcher’s motives. The staff, who it must be said were admirably protective of their clients, did not want D.J.W. to continue interviewing, but as the sample of 50 was by then complete this did not interfere seriously with the research plan. At this point, Buz de Villiers, having taken up other work, secured the help of a young American psychology graduate, John Friend, who re-interviewed seven of the original sample of 50 and carried out supplementary interviews with eleven other attenders at the Centre. These less structured interviews were intended to explore in greater detail matters of special interest, such as dealings with the police and experiences with difficult or violent clients. Except where otherwise stated, from now on the statistics and quotes concerning street workers refer to the main sample of 50.

The sample ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-five, with a majority of 27 aged eighteen to twenty, thirteen aged twenty-one to twenty-three and four aged twenty-four or five. The agency was intended to serve the under twenty-ones; the older participants were former clients still visiting the Centre. The majority were unexceptional in dress and physical appearance, their casual attire, mostly jeans and T shirts, being no different from what might be seen in any youth club. Their wardrobes were often very limited and a few had to be interviewed wearing dressing gowns while their only set of clothes was being washed in the Centre’s machine. A minority sported specialised dress codes, some in skinhead style with visible tattoos, metal-studded leather accessories, heavy boots and other symbols of an aggressively macho stance. A contrasting group wore cosmetics and large earrings and flaunted effeminate mannerisms and camp expressions.

2

Early Backgrounds

As in previous surveys of street workers, questions about childhood yielded abundant evidence that many in the sample had suffered early social and emotional deprivation and some had been exposed to appalling conditions. Parental squabbling, desertions, drunkenness, emotional coldness or violence meant that few had received consistent and stable parenting during their formative years. In some cases their own difficult behaviour had alienated boys from parents or parent substitutes. Only a fifth of the sample had lived with both their natural parents up to the age of fifteen. A majority, 66 per cent, had spent at least part of their childhood in children’s homes. As many as 40 out of the 50 interviewees had been childhood runaways and these included nine out of the ten who came from intact, two-parent homes. A majority, 56 per cent, rated their childhood as having been unhappy or very unhappy, and some of those who said they had been ‘OK’ reported details that sounded more than enough to have justified a rating of ‘unhappy’. Since only a minority of boys from adverse backgrounds take to prostitution, this cannot be the only reason for these particular individuals having done so. Nevertheless, the finding is important in highlighting the unhappy antecedents of many male street prostitutes and demonstrating the challenge they present to helping agencies. The examples which follow are quoted in some detail to show the extent of family pathology revealed by these 50 young men.

Case 001 said he was very unhappy at home. He never got on with his father who had turned against him after his only sister’s death in infancy. She had been left in a cupboard and suffocated. He was frequently beaten by his father who ‘just came in drunk and just sort of started on me’. He loved his mother, but she was dominated by his father. When he was nine he was sent away to boarding school. He came home for a few months at the age of eleven, but ran away on account of his father’s beatings.

Q. You say you ran away from home?

A. I just ran out of the house and never went back.

Q. Yes, so who did you go to?

A. I went to a hostel.

Q. How did you know about a hostel?

A. It was there in the centre of the town and it said so. I knew about day centres and I just went in and it was a hostel and they kept me for a couple of days and then rang the police. The police took me home and my mother said they didn’t want me. So I got put in a training school…

Q. And how old were you when you left this school?

A. Fifteen.

Q. And since leaving have you attended any sort of college?

A. When I left I went to college, but it only lasted three weeks.

Q. What sort of college was that?

A. I was doing domestic science.

Q. What was the trouble?

A. I couldn’t handle it. I was actually paying them more than they were paying me.

Q. Where did you get the money to pay them?

A. From my parents. They gave me the money to keep me away.

Case 006 had run away from adoptive parents:

Well, as far as I know, just after I was born, I think I was one year old, I was put into a children’s home and between then and seven years old I had no contact with my parents. I still haven’t. Then I was adopted and my step-parents I have lived with until I was sixteen.

Q. So you don’t know much about your natural parents?

A. I know a bit. I was given a letter by my social worker and it gave me a rough outline. They don’t know where my parents are.

He went on to explain that his adoptive parents divorced when he was thirteen. Things seemed suddenly to have gone wrong and they had rows and actual fights ‘which I had to spilt up a couple of times’.

Q. So what happened to you then?

A. Well, I was upset, but I helped my Mum through it.

Q. You stayed with your Mum?

A. Yep. I helped my Mum through it and when I was fifteen things started to get a bit bitter between me and my Mum and I left home and I moved across with my Dad, and then, when I turned sixteen, I moved down to London …

Q. Did you ever run away from home?

A. Yes, numerous times.

Q. How old were you the first time?

A. Fourteen.

Q. What made you run away?

A. Scared … of my Mum and her new husband. I had started smoking and I started pinching cigarettes from my Mum’s husband. She found out and said, ‘He will give you a right battering when he comes back.’ So on the way back from school I hopped off the bus and hitch-hiked it back to Glasgow. The police picked me up …

Q. And did you run away again?

A. Yes. That was the day before I left my parents. I was fifteen.

Q. What happened?

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Street Workers
• Part II: Advertised Services
• Part III: Social Issues in Commercial Sex
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Appendix: sample interview schedule
• Indexes