This volume is a compilation of new original qualitative and ethnographic research on pimps and other third party facilitators of commercial sex from the developed and developing world. From African-American pimps in the United States and Eastern European migrants in Germany to Brazilian cafetãos and cafetinas this volume features the lives and voices of the men and women who enable diverse and culturally distinct sex markets around the world. In scholarly, popular, and policy-making discourses, such individuals are typically viewed as larger-than-life hustlers, violent predators, and brutal exploiters. However, there is actually very little empirical research-based knowledge about how pimps and third party facilitators actually live, labor, and make meaning in their everyday lives. Nearly all previous knowledge derives from hearsay and post-hoc reporting from ex-sex-workers, customers, police and government agents, neighbors, and self-aggrandizing fictionalized memoirs. This volume is the first published compilation of empirically researched data and analysis about pimps and third parties working in the sex trade across the globe. Situated in an age of highly punitive and ubiquitous global anti-trafficking law, it challenges highly charged public policy stereotypes that conflate pimping and sex trafficking, in order to understand the lived experience of pimps and the men and women whose work they facilitate.

This anthology of original research studies focuses on why and how sex workers and pimps quit the sex trade. There is an extensive literature on ‘desistance’ with different theories explaining why people quit crime. However, with a few notable exceptions, researchers to date have not focused on desistance among pimps and sex workers. These studies explore a spectrum of quitting the sex trade from voluntarily stopping, ‘drifting,’ and retiring; to intervention-based or coerced stopping due to influences and impositions by programs and/or by specialized courts. This book provides insight into the meaning of this work; how people in the sex trade view their engagement in licit/illicit spheres; and it will inform providers who interface with people from these communities regarding how to support desistance. Further this book may help those engaged in emerging topics related to the sex trade, including: (1) global trends in sex trade decriminalization and/or human trafficking criminalization, (2) the recent emergence of human trafficking intervention courts in the USA, and (3) the development (and impact) of new laws, policies, and intervention programs designed to reduce human trafficking (globally, regionally, country level) and/or more localized efforts to support desistance among participants in the sex trade. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers and advanced students of Criminology, Sociology, Law, Policy, and Psychology. It was originally published as a special issue in the journal Victims & Offenders.

Getting Past 'the Pimp' makes a compelling case for rethinking Canada's response to sex work by highlighting the limits of criminal justice solutions and drawing our attention to the experiences and perspectives of those targeted.

This anthology of original research studies focuses on why and how sex workers and pimps quit the sex trade. There is an extensive literature on 'desistance' with different theories explaining why people quit crime. However, with a few notable exceptions, researchers to date have not focused on desistance among pimps and sex workers. These studies explore a spectrum of quitting the sex trade from voluntarily stopping, 'drifting, ' and retiring; to intervention-based or coerced stopping due to influences and impositions by programs and/or by specialized courts. This book provides insight into the meaning of this work; how people in the sex trade view their engagement in licit/illicit spheres; and it will inform providers who interface with people from these communities regarding how to support desistance. Further this book may help those engaged in emerging topics related to the sex trade, including: (1) global trends in sex trade decriminalization and/or human trafficking criminalization, (2) the recent emergence of human trafficking intervention courts in the USA, and (3) the development (and impact) of new laws, policies, and intervention programs designed to reduce human trafficking (globally, regionally, country level) and/or more localized efforts to support desistance among participants in the sex trade. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers and advanced students of Criminology, Sociology, Law, Policy, and Psychology. It was originally published as a special issue in the journal Victims & Offenders.

In the United States of America there exists a subculture of men and women who participate in the oldest profession known to man. We are of course talking about the lucrative underworld of the professional gentlemen of leisure and the ladies of the night.. Since the beginning of time women have been using their bodies and their feminine appeal to create revenues streams for themselves and for their families. They capitalize on the fact that men (and sometimes even other women) are willing to pay generously for a few minutes of a working girls high-priced time and affection. So where does a pimp fit in to this equation? What does he do? Why is he needed? This ebook provides a detailed look into a rarely talked about lifestyle that has been the subject matter of movies, books, music and countless state and federal court proceedings. In a country where human trafficking is quickly becoming the number one headline on all the news media outlets, this information can be used as a resource to provide a brief look into an otherwise impenetrable economic and domestic ecosystem that is generating millions of dollars of revenue and thousands of years of prison time to its risk-taking participants.

While sex work has long been controversial, it has become even more contested over the past decade as laws, policies, and enforcement practices have become more repressive in many nations, partly as a result of the ascendancy of interest groups committed to the total abolition of the sex industry. At the same time, however, several other nations have recently decriminalized prostitution. Legalizing Prostitution maps out the current terrain. Using America as a backdrop, Weitzer draws on extensive field research in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany to illustrate alternatives to American-style criminalization of sex workers. These cases are then used to develop a roster of “best practices” that can serve as a model for other nations considering legalization. Legalizing Prostitution provides a theoretically grounded comparative analysis of political dynamics, policy outcomes, and red-light landscapes in nations where prostitution has been legalized and regulated by the government, presenting a rich and novel portrait of the multifaceted world of legal sex for sale.

They are America's forgotten children, the hundreds of thousands of child prostitutes who walk the Las Vegas Strip, the casinos of Atlantic City, the truck stops on interstates, and the street corners of our cities. Many people wrongly believe sex trafficking involves young women from foreign lands. In reality, the majority of teens caught in the sex trade are American girls--runaways and throwaways who become victims of ruthless pimps. In Somebody's Daughter: The Hidden Story of America's Prostituted Children and the Battle to Save Them, meet the girls who are fighting for their dignity, the cops who are trying to rescue them, and the community activists battling to protect the nation's most forsaken children. Author Julian Sher takes you behind the scenes to expose one of America's most underreported crimes: A girl from New Jersey gets arrested in Las Vegas and, at great risk to her own life, helps the FBI take down a million-dollar pimping empire. An abused teenager in Texas has the courage to take the stand in a grueling trial that sends her pimp away for 75 years. Survivors of the sex trade in New York, Phoenix, and Minneapolis set up shelters and rescue centers that offer young girls a chance to break free from the streets. &“The sex trade is the new drug trade,&” says one FBI special agent, and Somebody's Daughter is a call to action, shining a light on America's dirty little secret.