Melissa Farley
Violence Against Women (2005) 11:950
This article describes the social invisibility of indoor prostitution, the lack of evidence suggesting that indoor prostitution is “safe,” and summarizes testimony of women who reported violence in strip club prostitution and warnings about violence from groups promoting indoor prostitution.
Farley outlines the main issues that those who promote indoor prostitution bring up as criticism of the abolitionist perspective on prostitution. The abolitionist perspective reflects an understanding that all prostitution is harmful, regardless of its physical location, and that while people selling sex should be decriminalized, those who buy and sell others should be strongly criminalized.
Reply to Weitzer
I cannot avoid expressing my deepest grief in learning of the efforts of pro-prostitution organizations to decriminalize the act of purchasing a person for sex. It is simply not possible for me to convey in words the intense pain and struggle I have endured as a result of my experience in prostitution.
I chose to work as a prostitute because I believed I had no other options. I entered prostitution due to extreme emotional and financial stress and a lack of a supportive family system.
Because I was white and not exhibiting obvious signs of a serious drug addiction, I was able to work in “upscale” massage parlors in [California]. While street walking was extremely dangerous, it is completely erroneous to assume that the brothels were immune to violence. There were incidents of attempted strangulation and forceful restraint. Customers would intentionally remove condoms against the prostitute’s wishes. They often requested bondage and acts of sadism. If the managers (madams or pimps) felt that the customer’s request was reasonable, the prostitute was obligated to comply, or find another house to work in.
I now choose to be an advocate for the right of prostitutes to be free of the forces that restrict their escape. I . . . urge all compassionate people to consult the data and research that has been conducted regarding the demographics and desires of the women, men, children, and transgendered who are in prostitution. This . . . research illustrates that those involved in prostitution advocacy represent a very small minority of the prostitute population.
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON PROSTITUTION
All science is infused with values, whether it’s stem cell research, research on the psychological effects of colonization of one people by another, or research on the effects of incest or rape or prostitution. The issue is not whether research is permeated with values—it always is—but whether those values are made explicit as opposed to being vaguely stated or deliberately concealed. Baral, Kiremire, Sezgin, and I wrote,
We initiated this research in order to address some of the issues that have arisen in discussions about the nature of prostitution. In particular: is prostitution just a job or is it a violation of human rights? From the authors’ perspective, prostitution is an act of violence against women: it is an act which is intrinsically traumatizing to the person being prostituted. (Farley, Baral, Kiremire, & Sezgin, 1998, p. 405)
We made our perspective and hypotheses transparent. We then made our procedures and the ways in which those hypotheses were tested sufficiently explicit for others to replicate the study. As Weitzer noted, our results were not always as we had predicted.
After a decade of research on prostitution that includes more than 854 interviews with people in nine countries, I wrote an article in Violence Against Women (Farley, 2004) that was, as Weitzer (2005 [this issue]) said, a “wide-ranging” (p. 940) discussion about prostitution legalization and decriminalization (Weitzer, 2005). Along with many others, I concluded that prostitution is multitraumatic with extremely high rates of physical and sexual violence perpetrated against people who are vulnerable usually as a result of gender, poverty, previous history of sexual assault, marginalization because of race or ethnicity, or a combination of these factors. My coauthors and I stated,
Our findings contradict common myths about prostitution: the assumption that street prostitution is the worst type of prostitution, that prostitution of men and boys is different from prostitution of women and girls, that most of those in prostitution freely consent to it, that most people are in prostitution because of drug addiction, that prostitution is qualitatively different from trafficking, and that legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution would decrease its harm. (Farley et al., 2003)
Weitzer, on the other hand, failed to make his perspective transparent. In fact, he is a supporter of indoor prostitution. In his writings, Weitzer has focused on the community disruption caused by outdoor (street or car) prostitution and has supported indoor prostitution. Indoor prostitution includes massage parlors and saunas, brothels, strip clubs, and escort prostitution. Escort prostitution simply means that an ad is placed online or in a newspaper, that she or her pimp has a cell phone, and that there is access to a home or hotel room or car. “High-class-call-girl” prostitution means that more money passes through several people’s hands in escort prostitution. In a 1994 collection of articles titled In Defense of Prostitution, Weitzer published an article about community resistance to street prostitution. This special issue of The Gauntlet was edited by COYOTE member Carol Leigh who also promotes decriminalization of prostitution. Weitzer views prostitution from the community’s perspective. He decries the mess created by used condoms and discarded syringes, the loss of business revenue as a result of a neighborhood’s “seedy ambiance,” and the verbal harassment of nonprostituting women by customers of prostitutes (Weitzer, 1994, p. 122).
Dutch researcher Ine Vanwesenbeeck wrote the following: “Researchers seem to identify more easily with clients than with prostitutes” (Vanwesenbeeck, 1994, p. 33). Weitzer does not consider prostitution from the perspective of the prostitute. Rather, he tends to view prostitution either from the perspective of the trick or from the perspective of the nonprostitute community (Adams & Riley, 2004).
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY USED BY THE AUTHOR AND COLLEAGUES
Weitzer charges that research exploring the harms of prostitution is riddled with methodological flaws. In fact, our research is methodologically sound and has been replicated. For example, we used a standardized and validated test of post-traumatic stress disorder. We also asked about respondents’ histories and demographics with a number of true-false questions. In peer-reviewed psychology journals, questionnaires are rarely included in their entirety, although the lead author’s contact information is publicized. I have been contacted by numerous researchers, some of whom have independently replicated the methodology I used and subsequently published the results (Baral et al., 1998; Valera, Sawyer, & Schiraldi, 2001; Zumbeck, Teegen, Dahme, & Farley, 2003).
Weitzer bemoans our lack of a random sample. As other researchers of prostitution have noted, it is not possible to obtain a random sample of people currently prostituting (McKeganey & Barnard, 1996). Investigators, therefore, use a variety of techniques to learn about the experience of prostitution for those in it. Generally, smaller numbers of interviewees limit the generalizability of results. We have reported data from a large number of respondents in different countries and in different types of prostitution.
We described in detail where and how we located respondents. We attempted to reach as diverse a range of people in prostitution as we could, including people of diverse races, cultures, ages, locations of prostitution, and genders. We observed, as others have, that those who were the most harmed or the most vulnerable were not available to us to interview (Vanwesenbeeck, 1994). They are either imprisoned or kept indoors and out of public view.
But there are additional difficulties in conducting research on prostitution. Although it is likely that funding will be more accessible in the next decade, at this moment in time it is extremely difficult to obtain funding that would permit the expense of adequate sampling of either women in prostitution or their tricks. Therefore, one must interview whomever one can access.
Adam Ruiz, Odette Levy, Barbara Strachan, and I have conducted research interviews with tricks and have faced problems with obtaining representative samples. Although some U.S. research on customers of prostitutes interviewed men in diversion programs who solicited prostitutes (Monto & Hotaling, 1998), we interviewed men who had not been arrested, in part because we wished to interview men who bought women in indoor prostitution. Customers who are not in a police-sponsored program tend to exhibit more “john-like” behaviors. All four interviewers encountered verbal sexual harassment from the nonarrested johns while conducting the interviews.
