Women of the Street: How the Criminal Justice-Social Services Alliance Fails Women in Prostitution
Feb 2017 · NYU Press
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About this ebook
Explores encounters between those who make their living by engaging in street-based prostitution and the criminal justice and social service workers who try to curtail it
Working together every day, the lives of sex workers, police officers, public defenders, and social service providers are profoundly intertwined, yet their relationships are often adversarial and rooted in fundamentally false assumptions. The criminal justice-social services alliance operates on the general belief that the women they police and otherwise regulate choose sex work as a result of traumatization, rather than acknowledging the fact that socioeconomic realities often inform their choices.
Drawing on extraordinarily rich ethnographic research, including interviews with over one hundred street-involved women and dozens of criminal justice and social service professionals, Women of the Street argues that despite the intimate knowledge these groups have about each other, measures designed to help these women consistently fail because they do not take into account false assumptions about street life, homelessness, drug use and sex trading. Reaching beyond disciplinary silos by combining the analysis of an anthropologist and a legal scholar, the book offers an evidence-based argument for the decriminalization of prostitution.
Working together every day, the lives of sex workers, police officers, public defenders, and social service providers are profoundly intertwined, yet their relationships are often adversarial and rooted in fundamentally false assumptions. The criminal justice-social services alliance operates on the general belief that the women they police and otherwise regulate choose sex work as a result of traumatization, rather than acknowledging the fact that socioeconomic realities often inform their choices.
Drawing on extraordinarily rich ethnographic research, including interviews with over one hundred street-involved women and dozens of criminal justice and social service professionals, Women of the Street argues that despite the intimate knowledge these groups have about each other, measures designed to help these women consistently fail because they do not take into account false assumptions about street life, homelessness, drug use and sex trading. Reaching beyond disciplinary silos by combining the analysis of an anthropologist and a legal scholar, the book offers an evidence-based argument for the decriminalization of prostitution.
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About the author
Susan Dewey is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at University of Alabama. She is the author and editor of many books, including Women of the Street: How the Criminal Justice-Social Services Alliance Fails Women in Prostitution.
Tonia St. Germain, JD, is retired Director of Women’s and Gender Studies, Eastern Oregon University. She is the co-editor, with Susan Dewey, of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence: International Law, Local Responses.
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