Prostitution in the Community

Attitudes, Action and Resistance

Sarah Kingston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134664818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Prostitution often causes significant anxiety for communities. These communities have been known to campaign against its presence in 'their' neighbourhoods, seeking the removal of street sex workers and their male clients. Although research and literature has begun to explore prostitution from the standpoint of the community, there is no comprehensive text which brings together some of the current literature in this area. This book aspires to cast light on some of this work by exploring the nature, extent and visibility of prostitution in residential communities and business areas, considering the legal and social context in which it is situated, and the community responses of those who live and work in areas of sex work.

This book aims to examine current literature on the impacts of prostitution in residential areas and considers how different policy approaches employed by the police and local authorities have mediated and shaped the nature of sex work in different communities. It explores what communities think about prostitution and those involved, as well as studies the techniques and strategies communities have utilized to take action against prostitution in their neighbourhoods. This book will also demonstrate the diversity of public attitudes, action and reaction to prostitution in the community.

This book is a useful contribution for academics and researchers in the fields of Criminology and Sociology who wish to understand current policy initiatives surrounding the issue of prostitution in local, national and international community settings.

1 Introduction

Traditionally, United Kingdom (UK) research on prostitution has focused on female sex workers and not the managers of sex businesses or those who live near the spaces where sex is bought and sold. This ‘fundamental flaw in sex work research’ has resulted in the marginalization of the experiences and perceptions of those who live and work in areas of street sex work (Sanders 2008b: vii). This has occurred despite the safety and well-being of the local community frequently being cited as a justification for changes to the laws surrounding prostitution (Home Office 2006), with often punitive forms of policing being deployed in response to community complaints about sex work in their neighbourhoods (Matthews 2008).

In redressing this absence, research has sought to engage the wider community in determining which approaches are effective in reducing the level of street prostitution (Carter et al. 2003; Hester and Westmarland 2004). Further research has endeavoured to determine whether residential streets could exist as shared spaces for sex workers and residents (Pitcher et al. 2006) and has identified attempts by communities to tackle street prostitution through community activism (Hubbard 1998; Sagar 2005; Williams 2005). This research has highlighted a number of issues from people who live and work in areas of street sex work, such as concerns over environmental debris, the visibility of street sex workers and increases in traffic.

Although research and literature has begun to explore prostitution from the standpoint of the community, there is no comprehensive text that brings together the current literature in this area. This book aspires to cast light on some of this literature by exploring the nature, extent and visibility of sex work in residential communities and business areas, considering the legal and social context in which it is situated and the community responses of those who live and work in areas of prostitution. It will explore how sex work is managed by local stakeholders, both in national and international contexts, drawing on literature that considers the existence of prostitution in the community. The book aims to examine the current literature on the impacts of prostitution in residential areas and consider how different policy approaches have mediated and shaped the impacts of sex work in different communities and across a variety of national contexts. Finally, this book will utilize my Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) research, which explored community perceptions of prostitution and highlighted a number of important issues that have significant implications for criminal justice and policing. By doing so, this book will demonstrate the diversity of public attitudes, actions and reactions to prostitution in the community.

This book will, hence, be a useful resource for policymakers who wish to understand current policy initiatives in other local, national and international community settings, consider what communities think about the sex industry, how they have responded to it and what strategies they believe are best to deal with local concerns. This book will also be a useful resource for academics, students and researchers and will be a useful addition to existing knowledge on the impact of prostitution on local communities.

Why explore ‘the community’?

Traditionally, the focus of prostitution research has centred on the figure of the female sex worker (Sanders 2008b). Academic literature has explored the experiences and practices of sex workers (Sanders 2005), their clients (Hammond 2010; Sanders 2008b) and, more recently, male and transgender sex workers (Whowell 2010), lap dancers (Hubbard 2012; Sanders and Hardy 2010; Billie 2012), transsexuals and transgendered individuals, fetish work and dominatrix services in the UK (Bloor et al. 1992; Brents and Hausbeck 2007; Elifson et al. 1993a; Elifson et al. 1993b; Harcourt et al. 2001; Kulick 1998; Valleroy et al. 2000). Yet, there has been an absence in UK research on prostitution, in that it has largely ignored the experiences and perceptions of those who live and work in areas of street sex work (Sanders 2008b).

This lack of research has occurred, despite ‘the community’ often being cited as a key factor in international policy approaches to prostitution, which, in the UK, has sought to criminalize activities associated with prostitution. As Crawford explains:

‘Community’ has become a policy buzz word. In the field of crime and criminal justice this emphasis upon ‘community’ has been particularly acute, as witnessed by the various initiatives in ‘community policing’, ‘community based crime prevention’, ‘community mediation’ and ‘punishments in the community’. The attraction of the notion of ‘community’ transcends the established British political parties.

(Crawford 1997: 44)

This focus on ‘the community’ is evident in recent UK policy documents. For instance, the political party in office at the time that the most recent UK prostitution policy documents were created, New Labour, emphasized the need to involve the community in developing local responses to prostitution. The Home Office consultation paper Paying the Price included a chapter, ‘Protecting Communities’, in which it explored the impact of prostitution on communities, community engagement and community solutions to tackling street prostitution (Home Office 2004). Within the Coordinated Prostitution Strategy document, which, at the time of writing, was the UK strategy for dealing with prostitution, the Home Office identifies that:

The community has a significant role to play in the development of an effective local response to prostitution. It will be important to ensure that residents are involved at a consultative stage so that their concerns are articulated and properly understood, and community representatives are involved in the development of the different strands of the strategy.

(Home Office 2006: 15)

The problems identified by the Home Office included communities’ serious concerns ‘about the existence of local street-based prostitution…. Prostitute users will often mistakenly focus their attention on other women passing by’ (Home Office 2004: 62). As a result, the government classified that ‘the focus of enforcement will be on kerb-crawling to respond to community concerns and to reduce the demand for a sex market’ (Home Office 2006: 9). Although the impact of street prostitution on local communities has been the main focus of political concern, the impact of indoor sex markets will also be considered in this book, due to an increase in indoor sex establishments throughout the UK and increasing legislative interventions in indoor sex markets (Sanders 2006a). Furthermore, research has identified community resistance and outrage towards the indoor sex industry (Hubbard 1998; Sanders 2005c), as well as more recent research that has explored people’s attitudes to lap-dance and striptease clubs in towns and cities throughout England and Wales, which found that most people are only concerned by them if they are situated too near their own homes or local schools (Hubbard 2012).

Political focus on local communities is considered to be a core constituent of attempts to forge a new political agenda (Calder 2005). As Imrie and Raco (2003: 5) explain: ‘discourses of community are pivotal in framing the policy agenda for cities, and at the core of New Labour’s approach to the revitalization of cities is the revival of citizenship and the activation of communities to spearhead urban change’. Consulting communities is seen as ‘vital in terms of identifying problems and finding solutions’ (Home Office 2004: 63). The appeal to community partnerships, community policing and community consultations are nothing new and have evolved over the past few decades. As Crawford describes, when he explores the work of Beck (1992), Rose (1999) and Rhodes (1996), there has been:

A pattern of shifting relations which involve: the fusion of, and changing relations between, the state, the market, and civil society; a move from ‘the social’ to ‘community’; greater individual and group responsibility for the management of local risks and security; and the emergence of new forms of management of public services and structures for policy formation and implementation.… In contemporary appeals to ‘community’ and ‘partnerships’, crime control is no longer conceived as the sole duty of the professional police officer or other criminal justice agents. Rather, it is becoming more fragmented and dispersed through state institutions, private organizations, and the public. Responsibility for the crime problem, according to current governmental strategies, is now everyone’s. It is shared property.

(Crawford 1997: 25)

The UK Government has been keen to encourage shared responsibility to prevent crime such as prostitution, in order to provide assistance to local police. The engagement in partnerships between the police and the community and the encouragement of ‘multi-agency approaches’ is supported within legislation and prostitution policy (Home Office 1998, 2004). In particular, the Coordinated Prostitution Strategy argues that ‘strong partnerships’ are needed to eradicate street prostitution from residential neighbourhoods (Home Office 2006). Such partnerships can be observed in Sagar (2005) and Williams’ (2005) research, both of which explored how members of the community voluntarily patrolled their streets in small groups and reported their findings to the local police. The Street Watch schemes that they observed in Cardiff and a large city in the north of England were identified as being ‘very much in line with current ideologies with regard to the future of policing … particularly … in the form of “active citizenship”’ (Williams 2005: 527).

In this sense, ‘the community’ are sometimes able to shape local politics and inform how local police deal with prostitution in the community. As a result, ‘the community’ can often influence and inform how, when and where the sex industry operates, by shaping governmental policy through consultations, protest and activism. This book will explore how attitudes can inform policy and how community protests and activism can displace prostitution to other areas. Yet, it is important that this new emphasis on encouraging the community to take action in terms of crime prevention considers the implications that this may have in terms of legitimacy, accountability and justice, as Crawford describes:

New patterns of local governance … evoke key questions about the legitimate responsibilities of individuals, organizations and the state; the regulation of social conflicts; the nature of organizational and democratic accountability; and notions of social justice.

(Crawford 1997: 6)

Key questions, therefore, need to be asked about those individuals and groups who take to the streets to protest against prostitution. For instance, how are these protests being monitored? Who are involved and why? And what will be done to those who go beyond protest and commit acts of violence or act in a threatening way? Furthermore, these strong partnerships are generally only locally based and often do not extend beyond the geographical boundaries of a ‘community’.

Therefore, only certain individuals are considered to be part of ‘the community’, and it is often assumed that sex workers and their clients are not part of this group.

Locating the ‘community’

With an increased emphasis on community engagement and collaboration, an understanding of what constitutes a community is needed, in order to direct services and intervention where appropriate (MacQueen et al. 2001). The lack of an accepted definition can result in ‘different collaborators forming contradictory or incompatible assumptions about community and can undermine our ability to evaluate the contribution of community collaborations’ (MacQueen et al. 2001: 1929).

The notion of what constitutes a ‘community’ is arguably ‘somewhat of a chameleon concept’, due to the diversity of explanations (Fielding 2005: 460). As a concept or ideological assumption, determining what constitutes a community is problematic, due to the difficulty in specifying its definition precisely (Cohen 1985; Young 1995). Its use ‘has become so pervasive in our everyday language that its meaning is overlaid with a host of associations and emotions’ (Hawtin et al. 1994: 38). Despite this diversity, the term has been widely utilized as a tool of social policy (Bentley et al. 2003; Rose 1999) and linked to notions of active citizenship, mutual obligation, self-discipline and individual responsibilities (McLaughlin et al. 2001; Worley 2005). Yet, use of the term has often been undertaken without asking: ‘what do we mean by our community?’ (Partington 2005: 241).

Bellah et al. define community as:

A group of people who are socially interdependent, who participate together in discussion and decision making, and who share certain practices that both define the community and are nurtured by it. Such a community is not quickly formed. It almost always has a history and so is also a community of memory, defined in part by its past and its memory of the past.

(Bellah et al. 1985: 333)

A common definition of community is a group, section of the population or participants, who have a constituted set of social relationships based on something they have in common (Hawtin et al. 1994; MacQueen et al. 2001; Marshall 1994). Additionally, McMillan and Chavis (1986: 9) define community as ‘a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together’. Social responsibility, personal development and shared experience have all also been identified as characteristics of a community (Abu-Lughob 1995). Others have defined community as the result of interaction between people that are brought together by similar interests and common goals (Westheimer 1998). According to Rovai (2002), definitions such as these suggest that the most essential elements of community include mutual interdependence among members, a sense of belonging, connectedness, spirit, trust, interactivity, common expectations, shared values and goals, and overlapping histories among members.

Common characteristics may also form the basis of a sense of community, such as gender, age, ethnicity, nationality or religious beliefs. These characteristics may be seen as part of the collective identity of the community members and create a sense of belonging from common bonds, such as the sharing of a social problem (Hawtin et al. 1994). Communities may, therefore, be based upon a collective gain to remove street prostitution from a specific area. This has been observed in parts of the UK where community activists and vigilante groups have been united in their desire to remove street sex workers from residential streets, with campaigns hailing: ‘prostitutes out’ (Haslam 2004: 1); ‘No hookers here please’ (Asian News 2005: 1). However, sex workers often live in the areas in which they work, and previous research has engaged with sex workers in light of their criticism of Home Office recommendations for community conferencing (Hubbard et al. 2007).¹

Yet, when a community is considered to be what people do together, rather than the means in which they come together, the notion of what constitutes a community is separated from geography and the physical environment (Wellman 1999). As Friedman argues, however:

It must also be remembered that nonvoluntary communities of place are not without value. Most lives contain mixtures of relationships and communities, some given/found/discovered and some chosen/created. Most people probably are ineradicably constituted, to some extent, by their communities of place, their original families, neighborhoods, schools, churches and nations.

(Friedman 1995: 203)

This sense of commonality may be based on geographical locations that range in size, such as a single street, villages, districts, parishes, counties and nations (Hawtin et al. 1994; Mullan et al. 2004). Those who work in the community, but do not necessarily live in the area, may also be seen to be part of a community; for example, doctors, nurses and teachers that work in the locality of the community, but do not live in the area. Therefore, under this definition of a community, street sex workers may be seen as part of a community, as often sex workers operate within a specific geographical location. However, the notions of community implied by the Home Office (2004, 2006), and the characteristics that determine what a community constitutes, do not appear to involve street sex workers, their clients, pimps or drug dealers.

For the purposes of this book, when I discuss my empirical research, ‘the community’ is defined as including residents, businesses, local authority officials and the police from two separate geographical sites in Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK. My research sought to identify key stakeholder groups, who were seen to represent ‘the community’. Although their social position and status may change – i.e. the police or business employees may be identified as residents in different contexts – people were identified as being from one particular group, according to the location of the research and their role/status within the geographical boundaries of the research location: Area 1 or Area 2. This, as will be shown, has important implications for our understanding of attitudes, action and impact, because geography and its relationship to identity influences how people perceive and respond to prostitution.

Social obligations of ‘the community’

Concerns about the community must be situated within a context of the rise and popularity of communitarianism, as it is widely accepted that political thinking has been somewhat underpinned by communitarian ideas (Calder 2005; Fremeaux 2005; Prideaux 2005).² Much discussion around communitarian values has highlighted the work of Amatai Etzioni, whose definition of a community emphasizes social interaction as a means of social control:

Communities are social webs of people who know one another as persons and have a moral voice. Communities draw on interpersonal bonds to encourage members to abide by certain values…. Communities gently chastise those who violate shared moral norms and express approbation for those who abide by them.

(Etzioni 1995: ix)

Communitarianism is said to represent ‘a tradition concerned with the revival of social structures that will enable strong bonds to be forged between individuals and broader collectives’ (Imrie and Raco 2003: 7).³ The com...