A report (pdf) from the Urban Institute looks at the sex work economy in eight major US cities. Emily Badger recaps the findings:
Urban’s researchers estimate that, in 2007, the entire illegal sex economy in Atlanta – including brothels, escort services and dubious massage parlors –was valued at $290 million. In Miami, it was $205 million (that’s more than twice the size of the market there for illegal drugs). In Washington, it was $103 million. On the low end, in Denver it was about $40 million.
Between 2003 and 2007, Washington’s market shrunk. Seattle’s boomed. Meanwhile, the mean weekly income for a pimp in Denver, post-2005, was $31,200.
The report is the first of its kind to affix hard numbers like this to the shadowy market for sex work. The findings are based in part on 260 interviews with convicted pimps and sex workers, prosecutors, law enforcement officials and other experts in San Diego, Seattle, Dallas, Denver, Washington, Kansas City, Atlanta, and Miami (cities selected, among other things, for being part of “known ‘pimp circuits’ in the United States”).
Derek Thompson, who passes along the above chart, pulls some highlights from the report, which also covered illegal drug and gun markets:
1. Atlanta has the biggest sex economy among the studied cities, by far. Dallas has the largest market for drugs or guns. …
2. As a share of each city’s cash economy (i.e.: doesn’t include the vast majority of commercial activity with credit) Atlanta has both the biggest sex and guns trade. San Diego has the biggest underground drug economy. If you add all the underground economies together, you’ll see the largest combined black markets (by city) are: Atlanta, Miami, San Diego, and Dallas. Across the studied cities, the largest underground market is sex, followed by drugs, then guns.
Kyle Chayka focuses on how pimps and sex workers employ social media marketing, including on the mostly defunct MySpace:
[P]imps set up profiles for their workers with codewords like “girlfriend experience” and wait for the customers to inquire. “Friend them, once you make a connection, you let them know what the deal is. It’s [sex] for sale,” one former sex worker interviewed in the study explained. “Myspace, all that, it’s just a disguise.”
The report shows even Twitter being used to advertise job openings. “Believe it or not, people still use [social networks], and the ones that are using them are usually younger, and pimps are on there like crazy,” a Dallas police official said.
And Amanda Hess takes note of how the pimps interviewed for the report represented themselves:
Many of the convicted pimps didn’t identify as pimps because they claimed not to engage in some of the behavior typically associated with the profession, like confiscating money, beating sex workers, or trafficking women. The madam insisted that she took smaller cuts of her workers’ fees than many assumed. And a male manager said: “The old school cats would talk about how the girls would hide money, not give it all up, and in the old days they would beat the girls if they didn’t get it all. Now, I know the girls come to me and will stash some around the corner before they come in, but I’m just as happy if they give me any of it, as long as they bring me something, because they’re the ones doing all the work.”
Update from a skeptical reader:
The Urban Institute numbers seem a tad bit farfetched; the entire Denver area illicit sex market is valued at $40 million USD, even though the average pimp is making somewhere in the neighborhood of $31,000 * 52 = ~$1.6 million USD a year? Are there only twenty pimps in charge of “brothels, escort services and dubious massage parlors” in Denver?
Another is even more skeptical:
I would take that Urban Institute study of prostitution with several massive helpings of salt. It represents everything that is wrong with how sex work is studied in this country. The researchers interviewed a grand total of 36 actual sex workers. In three cities, they interviewed none. And all the interviews were of sex workers in prison, which is a known massive bias in studies of sex work (80-90% of sex workers are not street walkers, but most jailed sex workers are). They interviewed twice as many pimps and almost five times as many law enforcement personnel. In effect, this “study” amounts to taking the boasts of convicted pimps and the speculations of law enforcement and putting a very thin scientific veneer on it. Massive parts of the study consist of lurid anecdotes from law enforcement personnel speculating on what sex work is really like.
I’ll also point you to Maggie McNeill’s discussion of pimps, where she argues that they are actually rare in sex work. So this study is looking at a tiny sliver of the sex industry. It’s not representative at all.
The Dish 