Prostitution resource help please

[Mooncupdotcom]

I'm supervising a sixth form essay (EPQ, like a mini dissertation) on the theme of selling sex and asking if a law that prohibits prostitution protects or infringes their rights. I've got my own very clear and FWR influenced view on this (!) but need to find a wide range of useful organisations or articles to help and I guess to balance my own view too... Could anyone offer me some links? Thanks

So we do know a fair amount which groups are the biggest or smallest police in various areas do have an idea of numbers in street prostitution and this is much smaller than those working indoors (in massage parlours, saunas, agenicies or independently etc). Other sources are information are the numbers who engage with support services here also information from counting prostitutes advertisements here and here, plus we do have estimates of the number of clients of prostitutes from NATSAL surveys here.

Thank you for the links. They are all PDF files and for safety sake I never download PDFs and always view them via the archive.

Your first link is to a PDF file located at
eprints.bbk.ac.uk/17962/1/17962.pdf
It does not work in the wayback machine or at the archive. I am not sure why. Can you C&P the relevant text here?

Your second link is to this document
Project Acumen
Setting the Record:The Trafficking of Migrant Women in England and Wales off-street prostitution sector
August 2010
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200422110020/kidnap.bz.cn/UserImages/00001892.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20200422110020/kidnap.bz.cn/UserImages/00001892.pdf

I have not read it all but noticed the caveat on page 10, which I did read and which explains that "in some areas it [the report] may deviate from conventional academic research methods and standards. The report utilises statistics in a variety of ways throughout, but should not be viewed as a statistical report in the classical sense; rather as an inessential analysis which draws on statistics where appropriate.”

Further caveats follow

It may very well be a valuable document that can provide some insights into some aspects of what it calls “off-street prostitution”, however the report includes, quite correctly, caveats as to the limited and provisional nature of the data and conclusions published. I will sit down and read it all carefully when i have a moment and report back.

Your 3rd link is a duplicate of the 2nd
Your 4th link is to a BMJ paper titled "
The prevalence of, and factors associated with, paying for sex among men resident in Britain: findings from the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3)"

source (via the archive)
archive.is/m3o2A

I am a little confused as to what the relevance of the paper is to our current discussion. I skim read it and while it reported interesting data in relation to men who pay for sex (MPS) one of the most interesting findings (for me at least) was that the majority of MPS reported paying for sex in foreign territories, as sex tourists, rather than in the UK, thus somewhat compromising the ability of the paper to report on trends within the UK sex industry.

Your 5th link looks interesting and the conclusions drawn seem entirely reasonable. Anyone with even the most rudimentary and provisional understanding of how sex workers market themselves appreciates that photos, descriptions, ages, and all manner of other information used to market the sex worker are more often than not wildly inaccurate. Researchers posing as customers or harvesting data from websites advertising sexual services are unlikely to harvest useful data for this reason.

I admit I have not sat down for a few hours to study all the material in your links I have skim read the ones I could access.

The conclusions I have gained from doing so are that, while some researchers can provide some provisional conclusions some of the time, there are many unhelpful rabbit holes researchers can fall into if they are not careful that are likely to result in wildly inaccurate reporting.

This makes sense to me and I would not disagree with it. I will take another look at the documents when i have a moment, however it seems to me that none of these documents claim to provide authoritative data or conclusions as to the exact numbers of people working in any particular aspect of the sex industry.

Having said this I suspect that your claim that there are far more people working off-street than on a typical prostitution “beat" is likely to be correct, however there are further difficulties and complexities that render it pretty much impossible to gain accurate data regarding numbers.

Some of these challenges have been noted in your links.

There is an additional difficulty inasmuch as there are various kinds of transactional sex that may or may not be considered to be sex work by either the parties involved or by outside observers. Sugar daddies, sugar mummy, sugar babies, mistresses, courtesans, “arrangements”, sex in exchange for rent, survival sex, there are many varied and complex forms of transactional sex that are unlikely to be included in any research.

Some are at the more privileged end of the continuum, e.g. courtesans, some, survival sex are at the most disempowered. However, regardless of the level of financial remuneration the power imbalance between the person providing renumeration and the person receiving it I think a centrally important factor in determining the likelihood of abuse and exploitation.

One additional difficulty, relevant to my research into cults, is that there is a growing population of people who claim to combine sex work (they would usually refer to it as "sexological bodywork” “Reichian / Neo-Reichian therapy" or some other euphemism) with psychotherapy.
To be specific there is a growing number of people who massage people’s genitals (anuses too) and some even have sexual intercourse with clients and who claim that this is a valid method of psychotherapy. Increasing numbers of such people are accredited with the UKCP, BACP and with various dodgy accrediting organisations that they and their friends set up themselves to make themselves look more professional than they are (the Independent Practitioners Network comes to mind, although there are many others).

Of course there have always been therapists who have violated their clients sexually. There is a long and horrible history of therapists who operate as cult leaders, Derek Gale, Vanessa Clark, Palace Gate Counselling and Beechy Colclough being amongst the most notorious, albeit only the tip of the Iceberg.

My point is, in relation to identifying the numbers of people working “off-street” in the sex industry, there are a number of caveats and problems, some are well documented in the links you provided, as to why any data on this subject is provisional.

In addition to this there is a liminal category of people who claim to be sex / intimacy coaches, practitioners of psychosexual medicine, Dakas, Dakinins, love coaches, tantric healers, sacred sexual healers, tantric educators, sexological bodyworkers, body psychotherapists, the list is endless, many of whom provide services that are identical or very similar to those of sex workers but who claim that they are not sex workers.

The liminal nature of the category these people occupy is just one complicating feature of why this is a difficult thing to subject to data analysis.

Another difficulty is that of intent. There is a continuum of intent within this category upon which, at one end, operate ruthless criminals, blackmailers, child abusers and worse. At the other end there are extremely vulnerable people, often with mental illnesses or learning difficulties, who genuinely believe that they are channelling Shakti, manifesting a goddess or working as a lightworker to heal the planet through "sacred sexual healing”.

This issue is further complicated by the fact that people in the latter category are not infrequently controlled, manipulated and exploited by people in the former category. Possibly the largest category of people on this continuum (speaking from personal real life experience) are people who are narcissistic, fairly sociopathic, greedy and would likely be diagnosed with one of the B cluster personality disorders. Such people tend to be evangelical about their spiritual beliefs, which are often bizarre in many ways, ruthless about making money and dissociated from the harm they do to others, even when such harm is easy to see.

In my experience of researching cults it is impossible for the detached observer to determine exactly where on the continuum of intent and culpability a particular “sacred sexual healer” exists.

So, to conclude, I am saying that this category of “off-street” sex work is vast, difficult to measure quantitively and fully of liminal “fuzzy edges”.

Nowhere in these figures or any of the information does your cultish “flirty fishing” appear so if it exists at all it must be a very minor component of the sex industry

Given that flirty fishing was practiced decades ago it would be astonishing if they did find any instances of it wouldn’t it?

I included flirty fishing because, for anyone interested in researching cultic sex trafficking there is a huge resource of archival material available, much of it via the xfamily website. It demonstrates in a chilling and disturbing manner a highly efficient, bureaucratic system for exploiting vulnerable women through sex work. It is also an early indication of things to come.

I love my archival material, I collect ephemera and archival material and always have done. I was rather hoping that there might be other readers out there who share my passion for researching and collecting.

Additionally much of my research is in relation to yoga cults, pseudo-shamanic cults, psychotherapy cults, human potential / personal development cults and new age cults.

The Children of God was a pseudo-Christian cult and I included it out of a sense of appreciating diversity and not wishing to stigmatise any one religious or spiritual practice. Sexual abuse and exploitation can happen in any spiritual / religious organisation.

The other reason for including it was that the archival material available demonstrates that the CoG was a cult that operated a highly organised and well structured prostitution business. It is not the only cult to do this of course, but it is one of the most notorious and well documented, so anyone interested in the subject needs to be aware of it.

Back to your comment. Just because a particular element of the sex business such as cultic sex trafficking or sex cults involved in prostitution do not feature in your links does not, of course, imply that it is therefore minor or inconsequential.

A stripper recently told me that many of the strippers working in Spain were giving their money to yoga cults. Given what I know about sex trafficking and yoga cults I suspect that her report was accurate. I spoke to an erotic dancer a few years back who worked at a certain high profile pole dancing club in the UK. She reported that many of her colleagues were involved in a certain notorious tantric yoga cult.

Of course these reports are only anecdotal and need to be validated with evidence. I can do this.

I would like to ask you, as someone who claims to be knowedgeable about the sex industry, about the prevelance of the following categories within the UK and international sex industries (there are in fact multiple businesses, some masquerading as religious / spiritual organisations, some as therapy organisations / some in other ways, but all are concerned with £££££ and $$$$$$)

self definied "Dakas" / "Dakinis" offering all manner of intimate massage and sexual encounters (usually with a proviso on their website that they do not offer sexual services and that orgasm is just a byproduct of the healing treatment)

various yoni / lingam massagers

various "priestesses" / "goddesses" / "sacred sexual healers" / "holy whores" / "sexual shamans" (there are many euphemisms) offering genital / anal massage and other intimate services (typically with the same proviso as the above category)

various "sexological bodyworkers", "deep bodyworkers" "Reichian therapists" "neo-Reichian massagers", "pelvic heart integration therapists" and other neo-Reichian bodyworkers who claim to clear blockages and recover repressed memories of trauma via intimate massage (same proviso as the above categories)

various "Shaktis" working as pole dancers, erotic dancers, escorts, honey traps, blackmailers and on live sex cams who use their sexual skills (which are considerable - they receive intensive training) to recruit people into their cult and generate revenue for their pimping gurus/ cult leaders. This latter category has a tendency to target people of influence including judges, senior police officers and politicians.

You must be aware of people working within these categories surely?

There are multiple network links between various sex workers organisations and these cults. I would find it difficult to believe that you would not know about the activities of some of these cults, even if you were only aware of the benevolent, spiritual, nourishing, caring camouflage that they use to disguise their activites.

I am curious to know what the Sex Worker Open University is doing at this event?

I could not get the page to archive via the Wayback machine so please be careful about clicking links within the link

archive.is/x5XDS