413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

Chapter Summary
Pimps built their businesses by developing relationships with multiple actors, including employees
engaged in sex work, non-sex worker employees, other pimps, legal businesses, lawyers, and law
enforcement.
Extant research has emphasized the role of violence in pimping to recruit and control employees.
However, respondents stressed the central role of coercion, manipulation, and the exploitation of
vulnerabilities to control employees and compel them to engage in sex work. Respondents reported
multiple forms of coercion, fraud, and manipulation, including feigning romantic interest, emphasizing
mutual dependency between pimp and employee, discouraging women from “having sex for free,”
promises of material comforts, and establishing a reputation as a “good” pimp. Sixty-one percent of
respondents further exerted control over employees by enforcing their demands as business rules. If rules
were broken, pimps enforced different forms of discipline, ranging from physical violence to isolation to
dismissal.
Pimps also established relationships with other pimps within the UCSE. While some pimps were highly
networked, business relationships between pimps were largely informal and social. Networks helped
pimps recruit employees, travel to new business destinations, identify law enforcement activity, and even
advertise services.
Finally, lucrative relationships with legal businesses and the complicity of participating law enforcement
helped some pimps maintain underground businesses. Despite the underground nature of sex work and
its related economy, respondents reported that employees at legal businesses were supportive of or
complicit with their underground activities. Pimps also reported that their clientele included law
enforcement officers, a fact that made some pimps feel immune to prosecution.
189