The Prostitution of Women and Girls In Metropolitan Chicago: A Preliminary Prevalence Report

"The Prostitution of Women and Girls In Metropolitan Chicago" Review
Posted by: aljenkin on Sun, 10 Aug 08 23:18:26 +0000
This is a fantastic preliminary report on prostitution in Chicago. The authors access every avenue they (and I) could think of for getting at this information and putting together a prevalence number. The information is both fascinating and alarming for a number of reasons. The basic number that they come up with is 16,000 female participants in prostitution in Chicago as of the end of the 1990s and the start of the new millennium. This number is one that comes overwhelmingly (just under 12,000) from the intimate client-based knowledge of professionals in drug treatment spaces with very few actual participants in the kind of street prostitution that has been the focus of media attention. Through this report, researchers, service-providers, and policy-makers can begin to see where the roots of prostitution are so that they can begin to address the issue as a symptom of something in addition to being a creator of other societal issues.

My only two questions/concerns are:

1) Why does the final count of 16,000 not seem to allow for overlap between participants in various categories of prostitution? It seems highly possible that women who have traded sex for drugs may have also participated in forms of prostitution that are more clearly classified as such, like street walking.

2) Although it was not the immediate purpose of this report, I think it would be worthwhile to know how this kind of problem-oriented research on prostitution (i.e. it is inherently a problem and has all these repercussions) compares to work done on the sex workers' rights movement, for example, and their efforts to make sex work safer.

5 stars!

~ALJ