of Political and Social Science The ANNALS of the American Academy

5 downloads 2302 Views 429KB Size Report
Mar 29, 2014 - Email Alerts: .... ies such as Miami, where at least 75 percent of the minors engaged in prostitution have a pimp.”3 Law ..... tion services typically expected of pimps (e.g., marketing, security, financial ser- vices), these ...
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science http://ann.sagepub.com/

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps: A Closer Look at Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Anthony Marcus, Amber Horning, Ric Curtis, Jo Sanson and Efram Thompson The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2014 653: 225 DOI: 10.1177/0002716214521993 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ann.sagepub.com/content/653/1/225

Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

American Academy of Political and Social Science

Additional services and information for The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ann.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

>> Version of Record - Mar 28, 2014 What is This?

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

521993ANN research-article2014

The Annals of the American AcademyYoung Sex Worker/Pimp Relations

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps: A Closer Look at Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking

By Anthony Marcus, Amber Horning, Ric Curtis, Jo Sanson, and Efram Thompson

The dominant understanding in the United States of the relationship between pimps and minors involved in commercial sex is that it is one of “child sex trafficking,” in which pimps lure girls into prostitution, then control, exploit, and brutalize them. Such narratives of oppression typically depend on postarrest testimonials by former prostitutes and pimps in punishment and rescue institutions. In contrast, this article presents data collected from active pimps, underage prostitutes, and young adult sex workers to demonstrate the complexity of pimp-prostitute dyads and interrogate conventional stereotypes about teenage prostitution. A holistic understanding of the factors that push minors into sex work and keep them there is needed to design and implement effective policy and services for this population. Keywords: pimp; human trafficking; teenage prostitution; sex work; captivity narratives

T

he dominant understanding of the relationship between pimps and minors involved in commercial sex is that it is one of “child sex trafficking,” also known as the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). This narrative has become familiar through claims by antitrafficking activists that pimps lure girls into prostitution, then control, exploit, and brutalize them in a manner that renders them akin to slaves (Lloyd 2011; Reid 2010). Some have Anthony Marcus is an associate professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His current projects examine intergenerational conflict over marital choice and migration in the United States; the violent victimization of undocumented migrants in Long Island; and gender, development, and Islam in the Republic of Maldives. Amber Horning is a PhD candidate in criminology at the City University of New York. She studies pimps, masculinities, and the social construction of human trafficking. Prior to doctoral research her scholarly publications focused on offender psychology, crime scene behavior, and homicide in the United States and South Africa. DOI: 10.1177/0002716214521993

ANNALS, AAPSS, 653, May 2014 225 Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

226

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

argued that adolescent girls “appear to be enticed by pimps into a life on the streets through five powerful forces: love, debt, addiction, physical might, and authority” (Kennedy et al. 2007, 4). While this approach privileges the moment of recruitment, as a “fall” from which full recovery is difficult if not impossible, few studies have focused on the recruitment part of the CSEC/trafficking narrative. One such study presents a model in which sex work is inherently violent and degrading to women, who would only enter such a life if they were enticed, controlled, and “convinced to exploit themselves for the financial benefit of someone else” (Kennedy et al. 2007, 15). This study drew information from a few vice officers and social service providers, three parents of prostitutes, ten former prostitutes, and thirty-two women residing at a safe house. Another study presents a quantitative analysis of violence rates for one hundred “pimp controlled girls” (Raphael, Reichert, and Powers 2010). Concluding from their data that pimp violence is endemic, the authors demand increased use of antitrafficking laws to make more arrests of pimps. Although their conclusions are based on unrepresentative samples, they justify their findings based on three grounds: (1) “those under the control of pimps are unable to speak safely with researchers”; (2) because of the clandestine nature of prostitution, “it is difficult to know how a representative sample would actually look”; and (3) “the sample may be large and varied enough to illustrate the challenges faced by these young women” (Raphael, Reichert, and Powers 2010, 90, 102). Neither study addresses the bias involved in studying hidden populations ex situ within the confines of law enforcement or “rescue” institutions (safe houses, jails, mental hospitals, rehabilitation programs), and both studies draw conclusions from retrospective accounts by individuals for whom renunciation of their previous experiences is the precondition for their current survival. Research that depends on such narratives likely paints a skewed picture of the complex environment of prostitution. This ex situ approach does not allow researchers to independently verify data, understand relevant contexts, observe behavior, or Ric Curtis is a professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who has been researching illicit drug use and advocating for harm minimization for three decades. He is currently working on a project designed to address the question of peer influence in adolescent development outcomes. Jo Sanson has worked in international aid and development for over a decade and has published on gender, poverty, and civil society. Her current research focuses on attempts to scale up livelihoods strengthening programs for the extreme poor in Africa, Central America, and India. Efram Thompson has worked on numerous urban research projects focusing on hidden, stigmatized, and vulnerable populations. His current research focuses on identity and unreported incidents of violent victimization among African American males in Brooklyn, New York. NOTE: This research was made possible through grants from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the U.S. Department of Justice, the National Institute of Justice, and the CUNY Graduate Center Doctoral Students Fund. The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in the article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of any of the funding institutions.

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

227

identify changes in subjects’ views over time. Such elements are important for understanding prostitution and for developing appropriate policies related to it. In contrast to these two studies, this article draws on a much larger set of studies: (1) a statistically valid sample from a CSEC census in New York City in 2008—the largest dataset ever collected in situ in the United States on minors working in the sex trade; (2) participant-observation and an intensive community study that holistically explored Atlantic City street prostitution markets between 2010 and 2012, which included pimps, street hustlers, sex workers, customers, local businessmen, and various third parties; and (3) a snowball sample of eightyfive male pimps in New York City, some of whom worked exclusively with minors. Our multiple data sources provide a fuller picture than has been painted up to this point of the contours and dynamics of recruitment of minors into prostitution. The findings challenge conventional wisdom and popular accounts about the recruitment of minors into sexual commerce. We argue that the narrative of pimp trickery and coercion distorts reality in three ways: it (1) overestimates the role of pimps in street sex markets, (2) overemphasizes the impact of the initial recruitment stage on subsequent practices, and (3) masks or simplifies the difficult and complex choices and contingencies faced by minors who sell sex. Dominant accounts draw on and contribute to misleading stereotypes about how individuals enter prostitution and what they experience once they are “in the life.” Such misrepresentations mask the real-world needs of what we believe are the majority of underage prostitutes in the United States, whose difficult and complex lives require more nuanced and holistic documentation and solutions than simple rescue from a pimp-trafficker.

Pimping under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act Early studies and portraits of pimps in the United States centered on stereotyped, typically African American, “parasites,” who were alternately glorified and derogated (Beck 1967; Goines 1972; Heard 1968; Milner and Milner 1972). Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, pimps received far less attention in prostitution research than the sex workers themselves (Alexander 1987; McKeganey and Barnard 1996; Miller 1995; Scambler 2004) specifically sex workers’ drug use and other risk behaviors (Inciardi, Lockwood, and Pottieger 1993; Maher 1997; Maher and Curtis 1992; Miller 1995; Ratner 1993; Shedlin 1990). However, the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000 gave new life to the issue of pimping. Under the TVPA, all individuals under the age of eighteen who trade sex for money are defined as victims of human trafficking. Instead of the traditional view of pimps as simply criminal operators, the TVPA redefined all adults who aid, abet, or benefit from a relationship with an underage sex worker as human traffickers. This has led to a heightened interest by law enforcement, social service providers, and nonprofit groups in arresting and punishing pimps, who

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

228

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

under the TVPA face 15 years to life in prison if convicted.1 Almost one-half of all trafficking prosecutions conducted in the United States between 2008 and 2010 involved allegations of sexual exploitation of a minor (Banks and Kyckelhahn 2011). Popular media and “girl advocates” present narratives about pimp trickery, seduction, captivity, and brutality as the dominant or sole mode of recruitment and management, and cite dramatic statistics about the scope of the problem. Kristi House, an antitrafficking nonprofit, for instance, warns on its website2 that “among children who are living on the streets, a third are lured into prostitution within forty-eight hours of leaving home. Most of these cases occur in major cities such as Miami, where at least 75 percent of the minors engaged in prostitution have a pimp.”3 Law enforcement officials put forth pimp tattoos on “rescued” sex workers (illustrating “ownership”) and other extreme (and possibly rare) versions of pimp brutality as the norm in presentations to news media (see Kennelly 2013; Ovalle 2013), and antitrafficking activists and popular psychology writers endow pimps with remarkable mind-control powers (see Schwartz, Williams, and Farley 2007). In the decade after passage of the TVPA, several studies have called into question the stereotypical oppressive images of prostitution as well as the nature of pimp-prostitute relationships. Weitzer (2007, 2011) has challenged the methodological and evidential basis for antitrafficking literature, describing it as a moral crusade; McDonald (2004) draws comparisons with past moral panics about sex; and investigative journalists (Pinto 2011; Thrupkaew 2009) have called into question the discourse and policy demands of the movement against trafficking in the United States. Diverse and complex relationships between sex workers and various third parties have been documented in recent research (Blanchette and da Silva 2012; Curtis et al. 2008; Hoang 2011; Horning 2013; Marcus et al. 2012; May, Harocopos, and Hough 2000; Morselli and SavoieGargiso, this volume; Parreñas 2011; Snajdr 2013; Zhang 2011). This body of research offers empirical evidence that stands in contrast to the dominant sextrafficking victimization discourse (Bernstein 2010; Thrupkaew 2009; Weitzer 2007, 2011). This article seeks to contribute to this emerging body of knowledge that calls this discourse into question, by providing a holistic understanding of the nature of teenage prostitution and the role of pimps in U.S. street sex markets. The findings may help to inform public policies that will enhance support and protection of vulnerable youth.

Research Methods This article draws on research involving (1) a statistically valid survey of underage sex workers in New York City, (2) an ethnographic study of street prostitution in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and (3) a study of pimps in New York City. The three studies collected data from more than 600 individuals, including 372 active sex workers (204 female, 149 male, and 19 transgender) of whom 262 were minors

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

229

and 70 had exchanged sex for money before their eighteenth birthday, making them underage trafficking victims according to the TVPA. The first study (referred to here as the New York CSEC Study) was completed over three months in 2008.4 Our research team used respondent-driven sampling (RDS)5 to identify interviewees for what we believe is a representative sample of street sex workers under the age of eighteen. Respondents were paid $20 for their participation, plus the possibility of up to $30 for three referrals to other informants. Six RDS referral waves were created, totaling more than four hundred interviews with 329 youth (some interviewed twice), of whom eighty were excluded due to suspicion by the research team that they did not meet the eligibility criteria—being under eighteen years of age and having participated in prostitution—leaving a final sample of 249 (119 female, 111 male, 19 transgender). This sample is the basis for the statistics presented here. Hispanics comprised 31 percent of the sample, African Americans 25 percent, and Caucasians 24 percent.6 The second study involved participant-observation research among pimps, young sex workers, customers, and third parties in street sex markets in Atlantic City, New Jersey, between January 2010 and January 2012 (referred to here as the Atlantic City Study).7 A team of anthropologists spent more than one thousand hours on the streets, in bars, restaurants, and on the boardwalk observing, interviewing, and developing research relationships with more than 150 sex workers 16 to 24 years old, five active professional pimps, more than a dozen part-time, commission-based “spot pimps” (street hustlers and drug dealers who refer walk-up customers to sex workers for tips, but have no exclusive relationship), small businessmen, and others connected to the city’s street-sex market. One researcher lived in several boarding houses that were the residence for teenage sex workers, pimps, drug dealers, and others present in street sex markets. This enabled him to observe the private lives of some of the subjects of the study. Statistical data from this study are still being analyzed, but findings from the ethnographic component are reported below. The third study involved extended and open-ended interviewing of a nonprobability snowball sample of eighty-five male pimps—some working exclusively with minors—in New York City from 2011 to 2012 (referred to here as the New York Pimp Study).8 Interviews took place in Harlem and El Barrio in Manhattan. The goal was to initiate engagement with pimps in their own life worlds to fully describe third-party facilitation of sexual commerce.

Data verification and the generalizability of samples Our findings in both New York and Atlantic City suggest that a smaller number of teenage sex workers than expected had pimps. It was therefore particularly important to verify whether respondents denied that they had pimps or discounted the trickery and coercion of recruitment out of shame or because they imagined that they had a genuine companionate relationship with somebody who was taking advantage of them. The ethnographic methodology used in Atlantic Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

230

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

City allowed for cross-examination of self-reporting by young sex workers and pimps. In Atlantic City, the small resident population, compact geography, and limited street sex market allowed for the production of a near complete ethnographic census. Field research enabled us to independently verify self-reporting by young sex worker respondents through multiple sources of community-based triangulation. Some of these sources were street hustlers, drug dealers, neighbors, and part-time “spot pimps” who had a financial interest in monitoring which sex workers had pimps, what type of relationship they had, and how much they were charging and earning. Careful analysis and individual and group cross-checking revealed little variance between self-reporting by young sex workers on the presence or absence of a pimp in their lives and reporting by the other informants, which provided a high degree of confidence in the reliability of results. Similar cross-examination of claims by pimps about the number of women who were working for them proved accurate. However, we found significant variance between many of the accounts by pimps of their control and domination over women and reporting by spotpimps, friends, neighbors, and the women themselves, who typically described the pimps’ accounts as “pimp talk.” Curry (2002) observes that male boasting about sexual domination over women sometimes reflects competitive relations between men more than the actuality of their relations with women, suggesting the need for some skepticism about untriangulated claims by pimps of nearly untrammeled control over the women in their lives. Another potential concern was the possibility that the sample would be skewed toward only those sex workers who did not have a pimp or whose pimp permitted them to be interviewed, thus missing pimp-controlled captives. This concern proved less significant than anticipated, given the ease with which most pimps talked about their lives and colleagues. Typically, even the most controlling pimps allowed access to “employees,” if approached through the right intermediaries and with a respectful interest in their life stories. We did encounter two instances in which pimps forbade interviews with young sex workers. In the first, the woman agreed to an interview in defiance of her pimp. In the second (discussed below), we interviewed two young sex workers while their pimp was out of town. In both cases we knew about the respondents through networks of informants who helped us to actively seek the sex workers in question. More generally, the sex trade depends on openness and accessibility to connect buyers and sellers. If a market in pimp-recruited captives had existed on a significant scale, it is very likely that the hundreds of sex workers, pimps, and street hustlers who made up our research network would have known about the competition. Our informants had a broad and deep knowledge of illegal activities in Atlantic City, most were interested in our project, trusted that we were not involved with the police, received financial incentives from us, and some shared housing with a member of the research team. We can speculate with confidence that had they known about such a market in captive, trafficked women, they would have informed us about it.

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

231

Finally, in an attempt to generalize on the structural relationship among pimps, young sex workers, and TVPA institutions, we note both geographic and sectorial limitations to our data. Geographically, we have investigated only two urban sex markets. However, one is the largest and wealthiest city in the United States and the other is the nation’s second largest gambling market, making both cities potentially desirable destinations for child sex traffickers, due to the size of the sex markets and the anonymity provided by a highly transient population. Our sectorial focus has been on street sex markets, giving us no data on higherend escort services. However, such services are not of principal concern to antitrafficking activists and scholars, as suggested by their web literature and the two scholarly articles critiqued here, which also focus on street-based markets. Finally, we do not have data on sex workers who obtained customers solely through the Internet. However, we found some crossover between street work and Internet advertising with 23 percent of our New York sample and 15–20 percent in Atlantic City.

Findings Overall, our findings suggest that stereotypical pimps are far less common and important to street sex markets than would be expected, given the popular discourse and the priorities of contemporary antitrafficking institutions.9 In the New York CSEC Study, only 10 percent of our sample of minors (n = 249) had a pimp at the time of research (14 percent for women, 6 percent for men) and 1.6 percent lived with a pimp. In addition, 47 percent (34.7 percent of women, 61 percent of men, 66.7 percent of transgender) said that they did not know a single pimp, suggesting low pimp prevalence. Pimps were responsible for initiating into sex work 16 percent of the females, 1 percent of the males, and none of those who were transgendered. At 8.1 percent overall, pimp initiation was far less common than peer initiation by a friend (47 percent) or customer initiation (23 percent). In Atlantic City where we interviewed sex workers who were 16 to 24 years old, we found that those who first entered when over 18 years of age reported being approached by a pimp at nearly twice the rate of those whose entry occurred when they were minors, and “selfinitiation” was roughly twice as common among minors as those who entered after 18 years of age. The vast majority of New York CSEC respondents reported wanting to leave sex work: 87.2 percent. However, not one of these individuals identified a controlling pimp as an obstacle to leaving. Changes in employment options, educational opportunities, and housing were the most cited “necessary changes” (60.2, 51.4, and 41.4 percent, respectively). With 61.4 percent self-described as homeless, economic vulnerability was the central concern for most respondents.10 In Atlantic City we found that full-time professional pimps were involved in a small and typically high-end section of the market. In the lower tiers of the market—the sector in which most minors worked—the vast majority of the

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

232

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

pimping services were provided by spot pimps. They generally made their primary living selling illegal drugs, but competed with each other for commissions from sex workers to whom they had referred customers. Full-time pimps who viewed their activities as a business generally avoided minors, claiming it was not worth the time, energy, and resources because young sex workers were unreliable and did not have the sexual performativity or education to charge high prices and attract affluent regulars. Only about 10 percent of sex workers 16 to 24 years of age in Atlantic City were minors, of whom only two had a professional pimp. The others used spot pimps, household members, and others to assist them in their work. Many of the young women and men whom we interviewed claimed to live at home with parents in Atlantic City, its suburbs, or nearby counties in New Jersey or Pennsylvania. Despite the transient population in Atlantic City, we found surprisingly few runaways from other parts of the United States. The majority of the sex workers in both Atlantic City and New York City who reported having a pimp had experienced some form of violence from that individual. However, violence rarely seemed to define these relationships, which were diverse and complex. Less violence was reported by youths who were using sex work to contribute to domestic units shared with individuals they described as a “roommate,” “partner,” “husband,” “best friend,” or “girlfriend.” Given that these relationships often involved an adult who was providing the type of facilitation services typically expected of pimps (e.g., marketing, security, financial services), these relationships were definable under the TVPA framework as human trafficking. What is important, and contrary to what Raphael, Reichert, and Powers (2010) found in a postarrest sample, is that nearly all sex workers in both Atlantic City and New York City described experiencing increasing, rather than decreasing, agency and control over their work over time, regardless of whether they had pimps. In all three studies, we found a range of stories of young women and men who had left pimps because they were violent, mentally abusive, lazy, poor business associates, unable to protect them, extracting too much money, or no longer fun to be around.11 When they left such pimps, they typically aligned with a new pimp, worked and lived alone or in cooperative arrangements with peers, or joined an escort service. Such agency and mobility poses a challenge to popular discourse and some academic treatments of prostitute-pimp relations as being largely based on enticement and entrapment through “love, debt, addiction, physical might, and authority” (Kennedy et al. 2007), followed by an inevitable increase in pimp exploitation, control, and violence (Raphael, Reichert, and Powers 2010). This kind of relationship may be rarer than has been claimed, and our findings suggest that such depictions are not the norm. Below we further document key findings with qualitative data that illustrates a continuum of agency in minors’ relationships with pimps. We present a spectrum of recruitment narratives based on three types: pimp-recruited workers, mutual recruitment, and worker-recruited pimps. Contrary to much of the ex situ reporting that has characterized the literature on pimps, we found that there is Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

233

no one type of pimp, teenage prostitute, or standard pimp operating procedure that can be divided into stages such as “recruitment,” “breaking in,” and “controlling.” There are different types of relationships and each party may behave differently in different contexts and at different points in the relationship. For this reason, we present some individuals more than once, in different situations or at different times, to illustrate this continuum of agency. We have used the five categories of recruitment, coercion, and control presented in Kennedy et al. (2007)—love, debt, addiction, physical might, and authority—as the structure for the first discussion: pimp recruitment of sex workers. We do this because such characterizations of “what pimps do” are ubiquitous in antitrafficking scholarship and popular literature, and in need of interrogation and contextualization.

Routes of Recruitment: Conflict and Agency Contrary to the dominant representations, sex worker respondents in both cities were matter-of-fact when asked about “the first time.” Questions about initiation included when they had first “received something in exchange for sex” and “received money in exchange for sex.” Female respondents did not use the term recruitment and most seemed to attach little narrative significance to who had been involved in their initiation. This is in contrast to highly charged descriptions of their histories of childhood abuse, fights with parents, dropping out of school, first sexual experiences, growing up in poverty, and plans for leaving “the life” that our interviews elicited. Young male sex workers typically placed more significance on initiation, especially if they were heterosexual or had not yet been sure that they were gay. They sometimes told highly emotional stories that ended in tears, while others articulated empowerment narratives about their identity and ability to earn a livelihood. However, the group for whom recruitment was clearly most significant was pimps, some of whom delighted in competitive boasting and self-conscious comparison with pimps they had learned about in movies and memoirs.

Pimp recruitment of sex workers The category of pimps who had clearly recruited minors into prostitution is the most important one for assessing the oppression narrative presented by antitrafficking activists and scholars (see Weitzer 2011). These are the relationships that are most important to contemporary TVPA-inspired discussions of child sex trafficking. At this end of the continuum of agency, we did encounter all five forces— love, debt, addiction, physical might, and authority—identified by Kennedy et al. (2007) as central to pimp recruitment. However, many of our sex worker respondents who were recruited by pimps had gone into the situation knowing that they were trading an oppressive situation in a shelter, group home, or natal family for a pimp who might prove violent, abusive, or exploitative. In such situations, pimps offered an alternative and little enticement seemed necessary.

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

234

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

In one such case, an African American 17-year-old female in the New York CSEC Study described her recruitment by a pimp: He found me at Franklin Shelter in the Bronx. We was outside. It’s a lotta pimps out there. I know a whole lot of ’em. So one day, I was in a bad situation because I was gettin’ kicked out because I got into a fight, so he offered to let me stay in a hotel with him. So, I packed my stuff and I left wit’ him.

This pimp did not use enticement to lure her into “the life,” but rather to differentiate himself from other pimps she might have chosen who did not have a hotel room. Sometimes, the line between enticement and necessity was more blurred. A black female sex worker in New York recalled her recruitment by a pimp at age 15: I was in a group home, and I was sittin’ on my steps and I was cryin’ because they’re givin’ you allowance—$20 a week—and then you’re not allowed to do certain types of jobs because you have a curfew. And if you miss curfew, they ship you somewhere else. So I was just at my rope’s end. The things that he was sayin’ to me, it sounded good. So, it was like, maybe I can do this. But once I started seein’ certain things and certain actions, I might as well have stayed in the hell I was in.

She hated selling sex, felt tricked by the pimp, and left him after living in his room for a few weeks. However, if selling sex had proven less distasteful to her, the narrative might have had a different conclusion, as was the case with Paula, a 17-year-old African American female from Atlantic City. When she was 16 years old, a pimp had convinced her to try sex work. She found it tolerable and continued doing it, but refused any further services from the pimp soon after the first time. “I’d rather work for myself. It’s more money,” she asserted. Even when Kennedy’s pentad was central, recruitment appears very different in the changing context of real life than in static retrospective narratives often recorded in rescue or punishment institutions. Furthermore, recruitment seems to have far less weight in determining personal outcomes than experiences with poverty, abusive families, and life in “the system”—foster families, group homes, and juvenile facilities. For the roughly 15 percent of teenage sex workers who had been recruited by pimps (across both sex worker studies), even unpleasant recruitment experiences were rarely their biggest problem. Love.  Love was the most common of Kennedy’s five forces of enticement in both our Atlantic City and New York data. A 17-year-old female in New York described her recruitment at the age of 12 by a boyfriend: “I gave him everything. He talked a good game to me and, being a jackass, I fell for it.” However, like most of the women we met in this situation, she soon concluded that she was being used, her pimp could not protect her from clients, and she could do better working independently. She left him in less than a year and began to work independently.

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

235

A young white woman who seemed to have an intellectual disability told us that she had turned 18 years old a week before our first interview with her. She had been living in Atlantic City since the day before her birthday when she had a fight with her parents and was told “not to come back to their house.” She found her way to housing services for youth, where she met her pimp—who was around 20 years old, she told us. They had sex under the boardwalk and when the staff discovered this, they evicted the couple. They were homeless and sleeping under the boardwalk. Their only source of income was the money she made through sex work. She said that he had been negotiating prices and collecting the proceeds from her labor, which he spent mostly on marijuana and cigarettes. She described their relationship: “I follow him wherever he goes. … I love him to death … he proposed to me.” We first interviewed her in early June and saw the two of them together frequently during the summer. When they were not sleeping under the boardwalk, they stayed in motel rooms that customers had used. In early September, we witnessed an incident in which her grandparents came to get her. A couple in their early 60s in a new blue minivan drove into the parking lot of a motel about 10 minutes outside of Atlantic City, where she had been staying; they walked into her room with resolve, and the grandmother led her out by the hand. There was no way to interview those involved, but as they drove away, her pimp told us that “sometimes it all gets too much for her and her grandparents come to get her.” Perhaps the most enduring example of love, or the promise of an affective relationship as a tool in recruitment, that we encountered involved Stephanie,12 a 19-year-old Latina who we interviewed late one night in a pizzeria. She shared a pimp with Ayana, a 16-year-old African American girl whom we interviewed at the same time. Stephanie had been thrown out of her family home at 17 for being “pregnant and trouble.” Her boyfriend, an older man with a respectable day job, had let her move into his house after they started sleeping together. When her baby was born, he began pressuring her to have sex with his “friends” for money to pay her way. She found that it paid well and was flexible enough to enable her to stay home with her son. She gave the impression that she was disappointed to have discovered that the man she lived with was a pimp, but described him as “decent” and said that he spent most of the money she made on her and her son. While she described their relationship in overall positive terms, it is worth noting that the pimp had forbidden the two women to be interviewed, but they had come because they needed the money. “He is out of town,” Stephanie told us, “I needed some cigarettes and diapers, and there ain’t no money around the house.” She told us that she planned to leave “the life,” with or without her pimp’s agreement, when her son was school aged. For most sex worker respondents, love, as a means of recruitment, made for particularly weak and short-term bonds, owing to the distance between expectations that the pimp had created and the reality of the relationship. Most respondents from both New York City and Atlantic City who had been recruited in this fashion, regardless of age, reported leaving the relationship, usually in days or Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

236

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

weeks. They typically claimed that they made the decision shortly after realizing that the man they were working for was more interested in acting in a pimp-like role than that of a boyfriend. Coercion and authority. Less common, but more enduring and abusive, were instances of recruitment and ongoing control through physical means. We encountered a few respondents in the New York Pimp Study who referred to themselves as “gorillas”: pimps who routinely resort to violence. Sonny Boy grew up in Georgia and learned pimping from his father, who ran a brothel. When he moved to New York, he started the “money house” (a pimp-cooperative party space) with a few friends who targeted runaway girls at shelters and at the Port Authority bus station. He boasted that he would ask the girls to come and party uptown, and eventually get them to work for the “money house.” Sonny Boy’s self-description fits the conventional narrative of pimp domination and sex worker subordination. However, given the lack of independent verification, we cannot determine exactly how much power Sonny Boy really had, what his percentage of these sex workers’ income was, or how long they typically stayed. Based on cross-examined accounts from the other studies and our experience with pimps exaggerating their profits and impunity in dealings with sex workers, we question whether Sonny Boy’s claims may be overstated. Regardless of the veracity of Sonny Boy’s boasts of physical dominance, such “gorilla” pimps do exist, and there is ample evidence in the literature on sex work that they are generally the most difficult to leave and afford sex workers the least agency. A 14-year-old mixed-race female in New York described being raped after leaving such a pimp. Her description fits well with conventional accounts of pimp brutality and control: He saw me with my friend and he told me to get in the car or he’ll kill me in front of my friend. So I got in the car and he took me to his house. … I told him that I had to see my probation officer in the morning, and he said, “No, you’re not going nowhere.” So that night, he forced me to have sex with him. … I told him to put on a condom, but he didn’t.

In the four other cases we encountered where a sex worker reported being kept in “the life” through direct coercion, the pimp was an informal or legal guardian, or a friend or intimate companion of a parent. This type of pimping (parental) accounted for some of the youngest ages of initiation into sex work, and was the most coercive type of relationship. A 17-year-old Latina in New York had been initiated at age 11 by her mother’s ex-boyfriend, who was in his 40s: “I go get the money and then I try and stay away from him after that. Some days we get along, some days we don’t. I’ve tried to leave him, but he always finds me.” Ayana (mentioned above) presented a more complex situation involving force and parental authority. Ayana was an obese African American 16-year-old who told us that the pimp was her foster father, and that she had been having sex for Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

237

money since she was 13. She did not like it, but informed us matter-of-factly that her foster father expected her to contribute to the household. She described sex with his “friends” as “nasty,” although insisted that he never touched her sexually, did not let her stay out late on school nights, and made sure that she had nice clothes to wear. When asked if she ever thought about leaving (or if she wanted help finding the proper social service providers or authorities to address the situation), she argued that he was more caring than her biological parents or other previous foster parents, and that “he’s thinking about my future.” While the recruitment of Ayana and Stephanie fit the classic CSEC narrative of love and coercion, both girls seemed to be staying with their pimp more out of a lack of perceived alternatives than out of love, debt, addiction, physical might, or authority. Addiction and trickery.  Addiction sometimes drove initiation into sex work, but we did not identify it as a part of pimp control. Illegal drugs were readily available from multiple sources in all our field sites, making it impossible for a pimp to hold even a temporary monopoly on the drug supply. Similarly, the unpredictable nature of sex markets, especially for minors who typically did not have regulars, prevented any one pimp from holding a monopoly on demand for commercial sex. Pimps sometimes recounted incidents in which they had succeeded in exploiting a girl’s drug addiction to make extra money or get her to do something she normally would not have done, but no sex workers or pimps provided the type of ultradependency drug narrative that is common in popular depictions of prostitution. While we did encounter much drug use in our fieldwork, in general the professional pimps whom we met were wary of depending on addicts whose expensive habit and unreliability could endanger their business. Similarly, at the low end of the market, we once sat on a porch in Atlantic City, listening to spot pimps complain and exchange stories about the dangers of working with addicts who were prone to absconding without paying their commission and later denying that they owed it. A spot pimp asserted, “You’re never going to get your money from those skinny drug addicted white girls who don’t give a fuck if they live or die.” Finally, some of the teenage pimps in New York used a recruitment technique based on trickery. A “swindler” was a young man, typically in his last years in high school, who convinced a female classmate to have sex with somebody, typically a fellow high school student. He would introduce the customer in exchange for money, but not usually inform the woman that he was receiving money from the other boy. Peanut, a 17-year-old described his experience as a swindler: I met her in school my freshman year. She was fealin’ [liking] me and it was gonna turn into a relationship, but I didn’t want to be in a relationship with her because I felt that all she wanted was sex from me. … She came over to my house a couple of times, chillin’ with my friends and digging a couple of them. I told her my friends is fealin’ you and “do you want to do it with them.” She didn’t know I was getting paid for it when she first started. I told her a month into it. Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

238

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

This model does involve deception and dilute a young woman’s agency. But with no significant coercion or mutually beneficial arrangement, swindlers struggle to make consistent income over time without endangering the arrangement they have with these women, by raising questions in the minds of the young women involved. This all suggests that “swindling” situations are not enduring, and do not represent a “fall” from innocence.

Mutual recruitment The “mutual recruitment” scenario typically involved contested claims about pride, success, power, and gender performativity. For this reason, the mutual recruitment scenarios presented here all derive from the Atlantic City Study, where our embedded ethnography enabled us to gain multiple perspectives from both principals and their friends to triangulate results. Daniel was highly professional and successful at pimping and had a gift for recruiting women. We often discussed studies of prostitution and trafficking with him, and he agreed with some of these studies, believing that pimps need to act as a “catalyst” and “entice” women into the life. He had many stories of winning over reluctant “good girls” who he believed “wanted to be bad.” He even tried to recruit the female members of our research team, some of whom he believed were susceptible. He claimed that he had recruited the three women in his life by breaking down their inhibitions and bringing out an inner bad girl who never would have emerged without his influence. The three women in his life presented us with a conflicting narrative. They described him as a good pimp who could protect them and help them “make lots of money and never feel alone in the life.” However, they claimed that they had enticed him into recruiting them and let him believe that it was he who had “enticed” them. His “innocence” about “who they really were” seemed to be part of what they liked about him. They all claimed that this generous naiveté was part of his charm. Diamond, an African American female part-time sex worker in her mid-20s, who was also a part-time pimp, worked with midlevel clientele, largely on the Pacific Avenue stroll in Atlantic City. She claimed to be saving money to start an escort service, as her mother had done some 20 years earlier. She had begun sex work in her late teens at an escort service (possibly her mother’s), but left to work for a pimp, asserting, “I’d rather work for a pimp than a madam. A good pimp finds you the right customers and takes less money.” Diamond claimed that she “did not like to fuck,” never fell for any “pimp-talk,” and had “recruited” her pimp by convincing him that she was a vulnerable young girl. She was no longer with this pimp, who was in prison. A street hustler who knew them both contested her account, “He played her and brought her in because she makes money, not because she was sweet and innocent. Lots of times she gets her money without even giving up the pussy. She’s pure hustler, there ain’t no real pimp who’s dumb enough to take Diamond as an innocent flat-backer.” He believed that Diamond and her pimp had had an unstated agreement to share the narrative of pimp hypermasculine enticement and feminine vulnerability. Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

239

Owen was a white man in his early 30s who had recently been released from prison and was living in his parents’ empty condominium. He made money from two white female sex workers who were habitual heroin users: a 17-year-old named Alma and an 18-year-old named Janet. Owen’s pimping was far less systematic and professional than that of either Diamond or Daniel, and most people on the scene viewed him with disdain. He used his apartment as a “shooting gallery” for heroin users and often attached himself to drug addicted homeless youth at the economic bottom of local sex markets. Owen told us that he had initiated Alma into sex work when she was 16, but claimed her previous boyfriend had introduced her to heroin. Alma rejected Owen’s claim that he had introduced her to sex work. She reported that she had turned tricks at 16, when she was with her previous boyfriend. “I was the one who went up to him in the casino, asking for heroin, not candy,” she observed. While Owen was in prison, Alma had become best friends with Janet, introducing her to sex work through Owen’s friends. Owen claimed responsibility for Janet’s recruitment, despite being in prison at the time, and believed she should share her income with him. Janet found Owen’s claims absurd, but Alma supported his interpretation, since they had used Owen’s apartment and contacts. The two women eventually started using the basement of the building for their sex work and found another pimp who they claimed was “more like a friend than a pimp.” The new pimp was young, good-looking, self-identified as bisexual, and claimed to have no previous experience pimping. “Owen is demanding and never listens to anybody. They aren’t working for me; we are all in it together, one for all and all for one,” this new pimp explained. While mutual recruitment was the least common scenario found in our research, the give and take debates over engagement, complementarity, and separation that we witnessed are typical of mutual relationships involving emotional and material claims tied to personal histories.

Pimps recruited by sex workers Narratives by pimps of their first time pimping are not central to determining the amount of agency that exists in the lives of young sex workers. However, they can be of significance for what they say about the different types of relationships that develop between sex workers and third parties who identify or act as pimps. Published accounts of pimps’ lives typically describe the first time that the pimp made money from pimping as dependent on their sexual power over women— their use of love, trickery, force, or drugs to get women to make money for them. Such narratives are consistent with Kennedy’s model (love, debt, addiction, physical might, authority) and share implicitly or explicitly an assumption that no rational woman would engage in sex work unless a powerful man had manipulated her. Despite this pressure to claim masculine power as a pimp, in Atlantic City three out of five of the professional pimps whom we interviewed and nearly all of the part-time pimps stated that they had been recruited into pimping by an experienced female sex worker. In the New York Pimp Study (N = 85 males) we Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

240

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

found only a few pimps who made such an admission. This difference may reflect variations in the street sex markets in these two cities or the fact that we were unable to independently verify the self-reporting data for the pimps in New York. In New York we used a snowball sample that sought only those individuals who identified themselves as pimps, whereas in Atlantic City we studied the entire street sex scene, by focusing primarily on young sex workers. This brought five professional pimps into our orbit, but they were incidental to the research, making comparison between the two locales difficult. The most common narrative presented by pimps who claimed to have been recruited by sex workers was that of a woman or group of women approaching someone to take on the role and tasks of a pimp. In the New York Pimp Study, Albert, a Puerto Rican man in his early 40s, described his first time pimping: I became a pimp by accident. I was selling drugs out of a big apartment I had in the Bronx. … A couple of girls who were working Jerome Avenue bought a bag off me, and asked me if I wanted to make a few hundred dollars quickly. I said sure, and the next thing I knew we were out there on the street and all I had to do was stand there and watch some guy pick them up in a car, then wait until he brought them back. They asked if they could sleep at my house. I had so many rooms, I said sure. They gave me $500 and told me it was my share of the profits. I couldn’t believe it; $500 for doing nothing. I felt sorry for guys who couldn’t live like that. Of course, I didn’t know then that they were pulling me into the game, by pumping me up. Five hundred dollars wasn’t my share of the profits. It was everything they made that night. … I found I liked taking care of them.

He went on to describe a successful 15-year career as a pimp, in which his connection to the drug market, spacious apartment, honesty in distributing money, and enjoyment of cooking Sunday brunches for women enabled him to be a pimp for between three to seven women. “I never actually recruited anybody. When the house got empty, the girls would bring their friends,” he told us. Most of these women had been in their 20s, a few in their late teens. All had been working on streets in the Bronx—on the relatively low end of the sex market—and Albert believed that he had provided some sense of support and stability to these women. His career as a pimp finally ended when the police arrested him for drugs and seized his apartment. His favorite girl got married while he was in prison, and he never went back to pimping after his release. Of the three professional pimps who admitted that female sex workers had recruited them to pimping in the Atlantic City Study, one became quite successful. Daniel (mentioned above) was an African American man in his 30s who had grown up in a brothel and had been recruited by a sex worker friend of his mother. Unlike Albert, who seemed genuinely surprised that anybody wanted him to be a pimp, Daniel took the role very seriously and was well liked and successful. Daniel dressed in a flashy way, actively cultivated a network of regular customers, and built a Facebook page around his work. He demanded respect and worked hard to recruit new women when the old ones left. He had little interest in working with minors, because, in his opinion, they were unreliable and could

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

241

not bring in enough money to warrant the investment in time, clothing, and emotional energy. Daniel frequently pointed out when discussing our study, that pimps who “manage” 16- and 17-year-olds are traveling in the wrong circles and presenting the wrong image to attract the women who can win high-paying regulars. “Pimp suicide” is how he described it. He went to prison on drug charges during our fieldwork, but he continued to remain a part of the lives of the women who worked for him. One of these women still manages his Facebook page, remains in touch with clients, and keeps the other two women “part of the family.” The other two “recruited pimps” whom we met in Atlantic City languished in the role, like employees in a dead-end job. Fred, an African American pimp in his 30s, who lived with two sex workers—both white, one 17 and the other in her early 20s—had been recruited and trained by the woman in her 20s. The older woman then met the 17-year-old, who became her lover, moved in with them and started sex work at her urging. The three of them lived together and Fred worked to steer customers to the two women, provided protection, and ran errands. In exchange, they shared their housing and money, and the older one provided Fred with sex. While the two women referred to him as their pimp, some combination of his temperament and the intense bond between the two women seemed to make him more like an errand boy than a pimp. He often complained about this and street hustlers sometimes ridiculed him for it. Finally, in the New York City Pimp Study we met several teenage pimps who described recruitment scenarios involving women of a similar age who were already in “the life.” Reno, a 17-year-old male, met a girl at a bar who was also 17. They spent the night together and afterward she asked him if he had any friends who might be interested in paying for sex. While still in high school, he made money marketing her services to his 20- to 30-year-old friends in the music industry. It is worth noting that New York State typically charges 16- and 17-yearolds as adults in criminal cases, potentially making Reno a human trafficker and the woman his child victim.

Conclusion In all three studies we found that recruitment into sex work by pimps is far less common than is presupposed by TVPA institutions and current popular concerns. Pimps played a small role in both initiation and more generally in the operations of street prostitution markets in both New York and Atlantic City. This was particularly the case for minors, who generally earned less than sex workers over 18, and were therefore less interesting to pimps. The conventional narrative of deception, force, or the captive slave—recruited and tied to a pimp through love, debt, addiction, authority, or coercion—did reflect the experiences of some individuals, but for the vast majority this narrative did not resonate. Roughly half of our respondents in New York and the vast majority in Atlantic City did not

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

242

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

know a full-time pimp at the time of their interview. Those who self-identified as having a pimp typically described relationships that were more mutual and easier to leave than the stereotypes suggest. Furthermore, we would argue that regardless of whether third parties are perceived by others, or self-identified, as pimps, their relationships with underage sex workers encompass a wide spectrum of behaviors, power balances, and mutual compromises. There are, of course, violent and otherwise abusive pimps: approximately 5 percent of the pimps whom we interviewed in the New York City Pimp Study described such an approach to pimping. Among the 14 percent of female sex workers in the New York CSEC Study who had pimps, we estimate that approximately 10–15 percent of those faced such systematic abuse. In our census of street markets in Atlantic City we were able to identify three such relationships between a young sex worker and a pimp. These findings suggest that roughly 2 percent of all the sex workers whom we interviewed, across both cities, were in a relationship with a violent pimp. It is important to note that a majority of these relationships involved individuals in a formal or informal parental role over the sex worker. With the exception of these parental situations, we found a clear pattern of increasing, rather than decreasing, levels of control over working conditions over time for young sex workers. As the sex workers in our survey became more experienced, more mature, and more accustomed to the dangers of customers and law enforcement, their pimp’s authority typically receded and a more equal relationship developed, or the sex worker simply left the pimp. Similarly, most of the pimps whom we met were realistic about the limits of their authority and did not want to lose the source of their livelihood. Unlike familial relations, nonparental pimps could rarely count on the other’s economic dependence on them or emotional and social pressure to keep their relationships intact. At all levels, pimps were constantly faced with the danger of being abandoned for another pimp, an escort agency, or independent work, and we heard many stories from both parties about abandonment. We recognize that situations of oppression and captivity do exist among this population, and we have identified a few and included them in our findings. However, they were rare enough in a statistically representative sample in New York City and an intensive ethnographic census in Atlantic City to question the degree to which the dominant narratives of underage sex trafficking and resultant policies can protect the majority of vulnerable youth engaged in commercial sex markets. The TVPA legal framework, and its rescue and punishment institutions, was seen as highly problematic by the vast majority of the teenagers whom we studied. In the New York CSEC Study, only 2 percent of respondents reported that they would ever go to a service organization if they were in trouble. From their perspectives, the antitrafficking discourses and practices that they would encounter in these organizations threaten to criminalize their adult support networks, imprison friends and loved ones, prevent them from earning a living, and return them to the dependencies of youth. The TVPA-inspired institutions and discourses appear to have created an environment in which many young people in Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

243

trouble are unwilling to access the resources necessary to gain control over their lives and make informed choices about leaving sex work. The research presented here leads us to conclude that the TVPA’s decriminalization of minors involved in sex work is wholly positive. However, the logical premise of victimhood upon which this decriminalization rests is too narrowly construed to adequately respond to the realities these minors confront. We did not encounter one TVPA-defined sex trafficking victim who came to engage in sex work out of what one might call a fully realized choice: in every case their agency was constrained. But in very few of these cases was a “trafficker” responsible for that constraint, rather it was a complex set of life crises or near-crisis points that compelled them into the sex trade. Clearly, it is crucial that appropriate services be available to the young people whose lives fit the TVPA scenario of captivity and oppression. However, we fear that TVPA may undermine itself by creating a chasm between social service and law enforcement authorities and the many young sex workers and their third parties who could be the eyes and ears of antitrafficking in illicit and semiclandestine sex markets. In our experience, most of these young people and their third parties have a strong interest in improving the overall conditions of street sex markets and a genuine sense of decency and concern for one another. The captivity or oppression narratives of the antitrafficking movement do not appear to help the majority of vulnerable youth. By presenting renunciation narratives taken ex situ and ideologically driven accounts of the nature of pimping, prostitution, and adolescence, antitrafficking activists may be contributing to the creation of a policy apparatus divorced from the reality of what leads young women and men into sex work, what keeps them doing this work, and what might help them exit. We argue for a holistic approach when exploring the social dynamics of youth participation in commercial sex markets; one that accounts for the experiences, vulnerabilities, and needs of young sex workers. We believe that this requires careful and respectful research, done in situ among those whom the TVPA has defined as domestic child sex trafficking victims and their social networks. Our findings suggest that effective policy for the majority of this group must recognize their dignity and autonomy; help them fight addiction, continue their education, obtain stable housing, build marketable skills; and address abusive parental relationships, rather than focus obsessively on their sex lives. Such solutions may appear obvious. However, the far more difficult questions are how to design and deliver such solutions. Our research is exploratory, but we believe there is enough consistency in findings across three different studies to question the value of the current TVPA antitrafficking framework and its associated institutions. More research and rigorous discussion in varied sites is needed to address the challenge of designing and implementing appropriate and effective policy for minors involved in sex work. We argue that the precondition for such research is setting aside ideological positions about sex work and seeking a deeper, broader, and more dynamic understanding of the being and becoming experienced by young people in commercial sex markets. Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

244

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

Notes 1. None of the active pimps whom we interviewed expressed concern about antitrafficking laws, perhaps because they were unaware of the enhanced sentences they would receive if convicted of trafficking instead of pimping. 2. See www.kristihouse.org. 3. As with most antitrafficking organizations, Kristi House provides no source for its claims and does not explain how these statistics were obtained or what their limitations are. See www.kristihouse.org/csec .html (accessed 1 June 2011). 4. Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice. New York was chosen because the U.S. Department of Justice believes it to be a major hub for street CSEC activity. 5. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) recruits statistically representative samples of hard-to-reach groups through intragroup social connections. Three “seeds” are typically chosen from the target population and incentivized to recruit three individuals “like themselves.” When recruiters exhaust their immediate networks they must connect with more distant nodes that eventually eliminate the homophily that is endemic to most network sampling methods. Long sampling chains made possible by participant recruitment overcome bias because they mimic first order Markov chains, such that a degree of randomness enters the process at each iterative step. As recruitment chains go through several waves referral-biasing effects of initial seed selection are minimized, making the final stage independent of the initial one. 6. For a full discussion of the methods see Curtis et al. (2008). 7. Atlantic City was chosen as the pilot for an Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) study across six cities that sought to replicate the New York City CSEC Study. This is because it is the second-largest gambling market in the country and reputed to be a hub for CSEC. The ethnographic study that we are reporting was a self-funded side study done by researchers in the OJJDP study. 8. Funded by a CUNY Graduate Center Doctoral Students Research grant. 9. For the sake of clarity and fidelity to our respondents’ definitions, we restrict this discussion to the 10–15 percent of women who were active and habitual sex workers who identified their third-party facilitator as a pimp, rather than expanding the category to include the 40–60 percent who identified close friends, lovers, and siblings as providing third-party facilitation. For this majority, the notion of “pimp” probably would be meaningless. 10. Among female respondents, 28.6 percent reported that they resided in their “family home” (16.2 percent for males), raising questions about the generalizability of TVPA narratives of captive runaways. 11. The exception to this rule was pimps who assumed a parental role, whom respondents described as very difficult to leave. 12. All names used here are pseudonyms.

References Alexander, Priscilla. 1987. Prostitution: A difficult issue for feminists. In Sex work: Writings by women in the sex industry, eds. Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander, 184–214. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press. Banks, Duren, and Tracey Kyckelhahn. 2011. Characteristics of suspected human trafficking incidents, 2008–2010. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. Available from http: //bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/ content/pub/pdf/cshti0810.pdf (accessed 7 August 2013). Beck, Robert. 1967. Pimp: The story of my life by Iceberg Slim. Los Angeles, CA: Holloway House. Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2010. Militarized humanitarianism meets carceral feminism: The politics of sex, rights, and freedom in contemporary antitrafficking campaigns. Signs 36 (1): 45–71. Blanchette, Thaddeus Gregory, and Ana Paula da Silva. 2012. On bullshit and the trafficking of women: Moral entrepreneurs and the invention of trafficking of persons in Brazil. Dialectical Anthropology 36 (1–2): 1–19. Curtis, Ric, Karen Terry, Meredith Dank, Kirk Dombrowski, and Bilal Khan. 2008. The commercial sexual exploitation of children in New York City. Final report submitted to the National Institute of Justice (NCJ 225083). Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps

245

Curry, Timothy. 2002. Fraternal bonding in the locker room: A profeminist analysis of talk about competition and women. In Gender and sport: A reader, eds. Sheila Scraton and Anne Flintoff, 169–187. London: Routledge. Goines, Donald. 1972. Whoreson. Los Angeles, CA: Holloway House. Heard, Nathan. 1968. Howard Street. New York, NY: Signet. Hoang, Kimberly. 2011. “She’s not a low-class dirty girl!” Sex work in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40 (4): 367–96. Horning, Amber. 2013. Peeling the onion: Domestically trafficked minors and other sex work involved youth. Dialectical Anthropology 36 (2): 56–67. Inciardi, James, Dorothy Lockwood, and Anne Pottieger. 1993. Women and crack-cocaine. New York, NY: Prentice Hall. Kennedy, Alexis, Carolin Klein, Jessica Bristowe, Barry Cooper, and John Yuille. 2007. Routes of recruitment: Pimps’ techniques and other circumstances that lead to street prostitution. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, and Trauma 15 (2): 1–19. Kennelly, S. 2013. Pimps as predators. Richmond Confidential. Available from http://richmondconfidential.org. Lloyd, Rachel. 2011. Girls like us: Fighting for a world where girls are not for sale, an activist finds her calling and heals herself. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Maher, Lisa. 1997. Sexed work: Gender, race, and resistance in a Brooklyn drug market. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maher, Lisa, and Richard Curtis. 1992. Women on the edge of crime: Crack cocaine and the changing contexts of street-level sex work in New York City. Crime, Law, and Social Change 18 (3): 221–58. Marcus, Anthony, Robert Riggs, Amber Horning, Sarah Rivera, Ric Curtis, and Efram Thompson. 2012. Is child to adult as victim is to criminal? Social policy and street-based sex work in the USA. Sexuality Research and Social Policy 9 (2): 153–66. May, Tiggey, Alex Harocopos, and Michael Hough. 2000. For love or money: Pimps and the management of sex work. London: Home Office. McDonald, William. 2004. Traffic counts, symbols, and agendas: A critique of the campaign against trafficking of human beings. International Review of Victimology 11 (1): 143–76. McKeganey, Neil, and Marina Barnard. 1996. Sex work on the streets: Prostitutes and their clients. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Miller, Jody. 1995. Gender and power on the streets: Street prostitution in the era of crack cocaine. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 23 (4): 427–52. Milner, Christina, and Richard Milner. 1972. Black players: The secret world of black pimps. New York, NY: Bantam. Morselli, Carlo, and Isa Savoie-Gargiso. 2014. Coercion, control, and cooperation in a prostitution ring. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, this volume. Ovalle, David. 28 March 2013. Police: Miami pimp forced teen to tattoo his name on her eyelids. Miami Herald. Parreñas, Rhacel. 2011. Illicit flirtations: Labor, migration, and sex trafficking in Tokyo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pinto, Nick. 23 March 2011. Women’s funding network sex trafficking study is junk science. The Village Voice. Raphael, Jody, Jessica Reichert, and Mark Powers. 2010. Pimp control and violence: Domestic sex trafficking of Chicago women and girls. Women & Criminal Justice 20 (1–2): 89–104. Ratner, Mitchell, ed. 1993. Crack pipe as pimp: An ethnographic investigation of sex-for-crack exchanges. New York, NY: Lexington Books. Reid, Joan. 2010. Doors wide shut: Barriers to the successful delivery of victim services for domestically trafficked minors in a southern U.S. metropolitan area. Women & Criminal Justice 20 (1–2): 147–66. Scambler, Graham, and Annette Scambler, eds. 2004 Rethinking prostitution: Purchasing sex in the 1990s. New York, NY: Routledge. Schwartz, Harvey, Jody Williams, and Melissa Farley. 2007. Pimp subjugation of women by mind control. In Prostitution and trafficking in Nevada: Making the connections, ed. Melissa Farley, 49–84. San Francisco, CA: Prostitution Research and Education. Shedlin, Michelle. 1990. An ethnographic approach to understanding HIV high-risk behaviors: Prostitution and drug abuse. NIDA Research monographs 9:134–49. Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014

246

THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

Snajdr, Edward. 2013. Beneath the master narrative: Human trafficking, myths of sexual slavery, and ethnographic realities. Dialectical Anthropology 37:14–37. Thrupkaew, Noy. 2009. The crusade against sex trafficking. The Nation 289 (10): 11–20. Weitzer, Ronald. 2007. The social construction of sex trafficking: Ideology and institutionalization of a moral crusade. Politics & Society 35:447–75. Weitzer, Ronald. 2011. Sex trafficking and the sex industry: The need for evidence-based theory and legislation. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 101:1337–70. Zhang, Sheldon. 2011. Woman pullers: Pimping and sex trafficking in a Mexican border city. Crime, Law, and Social Change 56:1–20.

Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at JOHN JAY COLLEGE on March 29, 2014