HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Some of the women thrown into prostitution come from human trafficking. The criminals take men, women, and children from all over the world and sell them for various reasons. Little girls ranging from 11 to 14 years old are kidnapped and forced into prostitution. There have even been cases of girls as young as five years old being trafficked throughout the world. The issue with human trafficking is there is a degree of it being a "culture of tolerance." What this translates into is that human trafficking will always exist because there is a supply and demand for it. As long as there are people who want these young women, there will always be those kidnapping these little girls and selling them into the sex trade. There are even websites out there for these people to buy and sell women. These traffickers use different social media websites, such as Facebook or instagram, to find potential women to kidnap and sell into the trade.
UNDERCOVER POLICE OFFICERS:
Recently law enforcements method for
eliminating prostitution shifted from targeting the women selling sex to the
men buying it. They realized that there is an endless supply of women and
arresting prostitutes has no effect on the occurrence of prostitution. This led
to the the use of undercover female police posing as prostitutes rather than
undercover males trying to solicit them (Dodge, 2005).
FIELD STUDY ON PROSTITUTION
Claire Sterk is an anthropologist who had an interest in prostitution. She had this dream to write a book on the topic. Because of that, she did a long term study of prostitutes on the streets in New York City as well as Atlanta, Georgia. Her goal was to figure out what exactly the prostitutes went through and endured. In her study, she learned of the exact places the prostitutes hung out from local police officers, taxi drivers, local health clinics, and even bartenders. Once she finally figured out where these women were located she then had to gain their trust. It was hard because they thought she was an undercover police officer. She did that by babysitting their kids, taking them grocery shopping, and just listening to them vent whole heartedly. While she gained much of her information through interviews, she got the majority of it from actual observations. She had in depth interviews with 180 prostitutes who ranged from the ages of 18-59. The average age was about 35, though. Sterk says there were times when the customers would think that she was a prostitute herself. In fact, one day one guy honked at her trying to get her to come to his car. She ignored his advances and because of that he called degrading names. Sterk talked about a pimp that tried taking control of her. He owned 3 crack houses, and wouldn't let others near her. Sterk witnessed many things during her field study. She witnessed a pimp abuse one of the women, she witnessed a pimp try to force a woman to have sex with a customer even when the woman didn't want to, and she also saw women who were HIV positive have sex without using condoms. During the study, there were times when Sterk had to take breaks because she got too close to the women that she actually started to hurt for them. When talking with other prostitutes whom had left the business, she said they had a hard time initially doing it. There were also challenges that they faced after leaving. One of them told her it was hard to get past the negative stigma that they had been labeled with and developing a new identity afterwards. They also had problems trying to settle down to actually be with someone intimately due to their past.