Sex Trafficked by Cultural Norms
This article is part of WoLF’s Culturally Exploited: The Invisible Drivers of Prostitution series, focusing on women’s experiences in commercial sexual exploitation.
While research indicates that 92% of prostituted women want to exit their circumstances, no adult woman I knew wanted to engage in prostitution. Between 2012 and 2016, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with women engaged in street-level prostitution in South Bronx, NY, situated in the poorest Congressional district in the United States and in the police precinct with one of the highest rates of violent crime per capita in the New York City metropolitan area. Collectively, I spent thousands of hours interviewing and observing the circumstances of women between the ages of 15 and 62, tracing their lives as they moved between the streets, jail, court, family homes, hospitals, drug rehabilitation facilities, trap houses where drugs were sold and where prostitution sometimes took place.
What exactly was this neighborhood like where women were prostituted? Hunts Point is a community on a peninsula, cut off from the wider Bronx by a freeway that connect the suburbs to Manhattan. Every day, business people commute into Manhattan none the wiser to neighborhood life below, while still others seek out communities under the overpass for illicit purposes (drugs and sex). Traditionally, Hunts Point is the home of the largest wholesale produce market in the United States (ironic, when, while I was there, its sole grocery store burned down and was not replaced, leaving the neighborhood without available fresh food), and 18-wheelers dominate the sounds of the neighborhood. There were few functional businesses: a couple of corner and variety stores, a liquor store, auto mechanics, a McDonalds and a strip club. At night, the streets were dark and desolate, and the largely desolate industrial area was populated with slow-moving, window-tinted cars.
Hunts Point has been long known as NYC’s “red light district” to such a degree that HBO produced a 1998 documentary on the area and issue called “Hookers at the Point.” Across afternoon, twilight and nighttime hours, women could be seen standing on the street, sometimes clustered together (if they were younger), and sometimes in their own predictable spot (if they were older) every day of the year, in all weather. In summer days of unrelenting sun, women splashed their faces from open fire hydrants to keep cool, and in the depths of snowy winter, women held faux-fur-lined hoods tight to their faces and stood shivering in tights.
Over the course of this series, I will introduce and humanize the women prostituted here, share my cultural analysis and these women’s insights and experiences -- they wanted readers to hear them -- to spread awareness of the lived consequences of commercial sexual exploitation in one of the most privileged countries in the world. This introductory article is meant to situate this series in the larger topical landscape, the ways it may differ from news articles you may have read on commercial sexual exploitation before (though it will link to other research and resources), and to foreshadow the intimacy and depth of data I hope to offer.
It bears saying again: not one adult woman I worked with wanted to be a prostitute. They did so to afford addictions to illegal drugs that create physical dependency (namely, heroin); and to survive poverty and the circumstances around poverty. As I will show, these issues are cyclical: early life hardship led women to drug use, which led to addiction. Drug dependency led women to prostitution, which necessitated more drugs to get through. More drugs led to heightened addiction with increased costs -- sometimes hundreds of dollars per day were needed -- that, like other studies report, further tied women to prostitution. Other factors compound this feedback loop, such as dependent family members in poverty (these often being men who took advantage of women’s ability to do the ever-viable “work” of prostitution), mental illness, lack of formal education and/or job skills, few local employment opportunities (prior drug felony convictions a barrier to the few jobs available), and housing instability. Other women began the descent into street-based prostitution by working at the neighborhood strip club. In effort to make money in poverty -- either fed drugs by employers or involved parties, or taking drugs to bear exposing their bodies on stage -- eventually entering the cycle above.
Some teenage girls below the age of consent skirted the edges of prostitution, driven by cultural norms, familial dysfunction and adolescent sexual experimentation rituals into believing prostitution (what is, for them, child sexual abuse) was “sexy,” “cool” and a way to hang out with their girlfriends after school. I witnessed these beliefs and behaviors while working as a classroom teacher for two years in the neighborhood public school, and in noting the impact of prostitution on family through teaching the family members of prostituted adult women. I knew students who dropped out of school under the influence of male pimps who went by the term “boyfriends.” While I was there, a 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted, strangled, killed, covered in bleach and abandoned in the vestibule of her family’s apartment building.
The women I knew tried to exit again and again, and, statistically, prostituted women make over 5 attempts to leave their circumstances. I never knew a woman to completely escape this situation of commercial sexual exploitation, though some did vanish, sending ripples of hope and fear across women’s local social networks. Women spread daydreams of “happily ever afters” for their fellow women -- “maybe she met somebody and moved upstate to a nice house.” Competing rumors circulated of women’s bodies dumped in nearby bodies of water, and some women were documented to find final rest after addiction-related complications in NYC’s mass grave. Other women had been prostituting for decades, who told tales of community members having known them since childhood and their attempts, to the best degree that they could make them, to share with younger women how to stay safe.
The physical violence inherent to prostitution was physically apparent. Women bore physical scars from johns and pimps, including a pimp who infamously cut women’s faces and spoke to me about enjoying the feeling of “taking away something beautiful.” In online forums, men discussed where to find women, the level of behavior the men could get away with (the level of sexual abuse women would tolerate, including protection against STIs) as well as cost and women’s physical appearance.
Recent years saw prostitution as a class B misdemeanor for women in New York State, punishable with fines of up to $500 and/or up to 90 days of imprisonment. Now, New York legislature debates between two bills, one which would fully decriminalize prostitution and the other that would retain punishment for johns (or punters) and pimps but drop charges for prostituted women in the spirit of the Equality model that WoLF supports. As a researcher, I believe that full decriminalization, or legalization, signifies prostitution to be culturally permissible, which would 1) increase the demand, and thus the physical and psychological harm, that women suffer when forced, by cultural or economic mandate, into prostitution. It would 2) increase the likelihood that the most vulnerable young women, such as those described above, would see prostitution as “no big deal,” and would exacerbate sex trafficking by cultural norms in communities of poverty. Empirical evidence to support these views of policy, and the Equality Model more broadly, will be demonstrated across this series.
WoLF is a radical feminist agency that views prostitution and pornography as forms of sexual violence; WoLF has a long history of supporting survivors and demanding an end to commercial sexual exploitation. In the past, WoLF submitted testimony in opposition to full decriminalization of prostitution in Louisiana and Washington; educated the public about the impact of the Equality Model in Hawaii, New York and nationwide; publicly supported a teenage survivor of sex trafficking; and explained how pornography websites are a form of sexual exploitation. Learn more about WoLF’s work to end commercial sexual exploitation here.