According to evidence submitted to the UK Government (Home Office, 2004), between 50-75% of women entered prostitution before they were 18, with 15 years being the average age of entry. In addition, Paying the Price (Home Office, 2004) noted that 75% of children abused through prostitution had been missing from school. Cusick and colleagues (2002) found that a majority of British women in prostitution had begun prostitution as minors. The average age at entry into prostitution is adolescence (Spangenberg, 2001; Boyer, Chapman and Marshall, 1993; Nadon, Koverola and Schludermann, 1998).
... an overwhelming majority of women in all forms of prostitution have been sexually abused as children (Silbert and Pines, 1982a; Nadon et al., 1998). Some estimates are as high as 90%. As one woman explained, ?Through childhood sexual abuse, many prostituted women have become conditioned into thinking that this is their choice? It normalises this kind of behaviour and causes many to enter into the trade? (Aumord, 2009).
Research has shown that there is a 75% rate of current or past homelessness among those prostituted in nine countries (Farley et al., 2003).
There is extensive literature documenting that prostitution causes profound emotional damage (Baldwin, 1992; Barry, 1995; Dworkin, 1997; Herman, 2003; Hoigard and Finstad, 1986; Farley et al., 2003; Raymond et al., 2002).
A majority of women who sell sex have pimps who may be called by other names, such as friend or husband. Nonetheless they function as pimps (McLeod, 1982; Farley, 2007).
Watts and Zimmerman (2002) at the Department of Public Health and Policy of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine noted that trafficking for prostitution and violence against prostitutes was one of the most common and severe forms of violence against women in the world (2002). A study of 240 women prostituted in Leeds, Edinburgh, and Glasgow found that 26% of women in indoor prostitution had experienced some form of serious violence from the men who had bought them in the past six months (Church et al., 2001).
Only 9% of the women in Kramer?s (2003) study indicated that they had any positive feelings at all during acts of prostitution. More commonly, Kramer?s interviewees described feeling sad, detached, angry or anxious when prostituting. Kramer?s study ... found that 77% of the time the women experienced a negative emotional state.
Generally, the literature indicates that women are not sexually aroused by prostitution, and that after extended periods of time servicing hundreds of men, prostitution damages or destroys much of their own sexuality (Barry, 1995; Funari, 1997; Giobbe, 1991; Hoigard and Finstad, 1986; Raymond et al., 2002).
From the Eaves study - Men Who Buy Sex