Vulnerability and involvement in drug use and ... - Sex Work Europe

Vulnerability and involvement in drug use and sex work
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● These participants were all girls.
● All of them described being ‘pimped’ and/or supporting at least one boyfriend’s
problematic drug use.
● F o u rteen (78%) of them had been ‘looked after’ by their local authorities. Of
these, ten (71%) were living in or running from local authority care when they
first pro s t i t u t e d .
● Thirteen (72%) had experienced homelessness or insecure housing and of these,
nine (69%) described this as a reason for them selling sex.
I met him when I run away from the children's home. Took me to his house and
started smoking. After a while he just put me on the street.
The ‘exiters’
(Participant 37)
On the basis of the trapping factors it was predicted that the remaining 44 part i c i p a n t s
might become trapped in the mutually reinforcing aspects of problematic drug use and sex
work. Of these, nine participants were immediately set aside who had never developed a
problem with drugs, to be returned to later. The other 35 participants had experience of
both sex work and problematic drug use. These participants are of particular intere s t
because at interview they had made some progress in exiting despite sharing similar risk
p rofiles for becoming ‘trapped’ to those participants discussed above. The search for
d i ff e rences between these two groups is the search for what works to break the links
between sex work and problematic drug use. Recommendations for policy development,
aimed at breaking the links between problematic drug use and sex work, are derived from
these differences: ‘what the ‘exiters’ did’.
Those who had continued to use drugs problematically but stopped selling sex
T h e re were six participants in this group. Analyses of these interviews show that sex
work can be started and stopped opportunistically or in response to fluctuating
c i rcumstances or disorganised lifestyles. Sex work could be done either in the good
times or in the bad times. For these participants, problematic drug use continued
re g a rdless of fluctuations in their sex work careers. Lack of separation of private and
c o m m e rcial sex was an important factor in this opportunistic pattern of non-strategic
sex work.