Prostitution - Social Attribution And The Construction Of Prostitution As A Social Problem, Transaction-cost Approaches To Prostitution: From Repression To Regulation
crime aspects especially rape
Prostitution as a legal category and as a social problem has undergone a reexamination in scholarly and policy debates since the 1970s. This rethinking of prostitution has relied upon a variety of historical and cross-cultural studies. Policy initiatives have increasingly turned to economic approaches, especially to transaction-cost analyses. New attention has been paid to the social position of the prostitute, especially to public health and other aspects of participation in prostitution, as well as to the gender politics of prostitution law and its enforcement. As a result of these studies, the earlier view that prostitution is a unitary and universal feature of human social life is no longer empirically or theoretically tenable. Rather, prostitution as we know it is a function of multiple sociocultural and historical processes, institutional structures, and interactional dynamics.
Additional Topics
Prostitution as a category of crime and social identity is located at the intersection of sexuality and economics. Georg Simmel linked the "essence of prostitution" to the "nature of money itself" (p. 414). A more contemporary study has characterized prostitution as a business transaction understood as such by the parties involved and in the nature of a short-term contr…
Along with many other domains of social life in Western societies, prostitution has increasingly been approached through the lenses of transaction cost economic analysis and risk management. The application of legal economic reasoning has been extended from the regulation of established markets to "informal" economies and, ultimately, to the "economics of crime." (The w…
The usual taxonomy of "types" of prostitute thus becomes differently interpretable as a socially stratified array of sexual-market consumption niches. These "market segments" can be distinguished from one another by place, by manner of solicitation, and by price level (Reynolds). It is instructive that many of the most commonly identified markets for sexual services are…
The 1980s and 1990s saw different faces of prostitution presented in American media. The 1980s case of Sydney Biddle Barrows, the "Mayflower Madam," and the 1990s case of Heidi Fleiss, the "Hollywood Madam," brought public scrutiny, even celebrity, to the world of elite call girls who earn thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars per day for their services. Over th…
The fundamental problem of how to conceptualize prostitution—as sin, as crime, as enslavement, as productive work, as disease vector, as social risk profile—and of how to approach it in policy and practice became more acute in the 1980s and 1990s (Davis). The trends toward globalization in communications and the economy, in migrant labor flows, in international "sextourism,&#x…
——. Sex, Money, and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia. London: Zed Books, 1990. …
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments