413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

Chapter 8
Changes in the UCSE from the Perspectives
of Sex Workers
Introduction
Sex work is a global phenomenon that varies across geographic areas and historical periods. This chapter
focuses on the structure, operation, and condition of the underground, street-based commercial sex
economy in the United States from the 1970s to the present day (2013). It was during this approximately
forty year period that the street-based sex market underwent a significant transformation, in large part
due to the dramatic effects of the crack cocaine epidemic in the mid-1980s through the 1990s. The
concomitant influences of widespread crack use, changing law enforcement approaches to sex work, and
the increasing use of the Internet to solicit sex work have shaped the modern-day sex market.
This study is one of the first to analyze the experiences of street-based sex workers, ages 18–56, who
worked in a number of cities across the United States. This study also incorporates the experiences of sex
workers who identified as transgender females, 66 although the majority of respondents in this study
identified as cisgender women. Most of the 36 sex workers interviewed for this study had been in the trade
for several years—and even decades—between the 1970s and the present day and worked in different
regional markets. Although chapters 5–7 describe the women and girls that pimps targeted for
recruitment and employment, the individuals interviewed for this chapter entered the commercial sex
market in a variety of ways and only a small percentage worked for a pimp at some point during their
involvement in the UCSE. This chapter documents a narrative of sex work that depicts how the market
changed over the course of approximately four decades. Cross-time and cross-city comparisons allow for
an understanding of how the current commercial sex market is operating in cities across the country.
66 As other researchers have found (see Thukral and Ditmore 2003), the experiences of transgender individuals in the street-based
sex market are similar to those of cisgender individuals in many ways. For this reason, responses are weaved into this report without
gender identifiers. However, certain aspects of this population’s work differ from those of cisgender sex workers; gender identities
are stated in those cases.
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