Survival sex is a form of prostitution engaged in by a person because of their extreme need. It describes the practice of people who are homeless or otherwise disadvantaged in society, trading sex for food, a place to sleep, or other basic needs, or for drugs. The term is used by sex trade, poverty researchers, and aid workers.
Prevalence
Survival sex is common throughout the world, and has been extensively studied in many countries including Afghanistan, the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, New Zealand, Colombia, Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa.
Researchers estimate that of homeless youth in North America, one in three has engaged in survival sex. In one study of homeless youth in Los Angeles, about one-third of females and half of males said they had engaged in survival sex. Likelihood increases with the number of days the youth has been homeless, experience of being victimized, engaging in criminal behaviour, using illegal substances, attempting suicide, being pregnant, or having an STI.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender street children are three times likelier to engage in survival sex compared with their heterosexual counterparts, according to one study. Another found that transgender youth are most likely of all to engage in survival sex.
Survival sex is common in refugee camps. In internally displaced persons camps in northern Uganda, where 1.4 million civilians have been displaced by conflict between Ugandan government forces and the militant Lord's Resistance Army, Human Rights Watch reported in 2005 that displaced women and girls were engaging in survival sex with other camp residents, local defense personnel, and Ugandan government soldiers.
Motivations
Some researchers say that street children do not always see survival sex as exploitative: rather, they sometimes characterize it as the "beginning of a potential relationship." Given that one of the strongest predictors of engagement in survival sex is a prior history of sexual abuse by adult caregivers, some researchers theorize that rather than being driven to survival sex out of desperation, street children might be reproducing familiar behaviour and relationship patterns.
Outreach and law enforcement
US municipalities such as Boston and Dallas have noticed a sharp increase in runaways engaging in survival sex since 1999. Dallas established a special group home for counseling, from which 75% of the underage girls who receive treatment do not return to prostitution. Congress nearly approved a program for cities to create pilot programs modeled on the Dallas system in 2007, but never appropriated the necessary funds. The Department of Justice has yet to study the number of children involved in prostitution even though they were authorized by Congress to do so in 2005. However, the Center for Problem Oriented Policing claims, "there is no consensus on whether the practice is widespread," and recommends that runaways should be questioned about sexual abuse but not consensual sex, survival sex, or prostitution.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, outreach services to help sexually exploited youth should focus on the locations where they congregate and are approached by pimps for exploitation, including public spaces such as malls and schools, and the internet. Outreach workers need to develop a close professional relationship with law enforcement to learn about trends and locations, but should carefully avoid compromising their independence or the confidentiality of their clients. Local law enforcement should target pimps and customers (janes or johns) and not the victims (youth and young adult prostitutes) for prosecution to be effective. Partnerships between nonprofit programs and law enforcement can help offer survival sex worker victims community-based services and housing when they are picked up by police officers.
According to ECPAT International, when sex industry women and children victims are held in police custody or remand homes, denied freedom and access to information, or abused by police, they are encouraged to lie about their situation and try to escape, so community assistance services are substantially less useful. Similar failures occur when court procedures do not allow victim testimony or representation or, when they do, are neither victim-friendly nor children-friendly; or when decisions on children's futures seldom include the opinions of children, or when the right to privacy is violated by media reporting, or by stigmatization of and discrimination against children exploited in prostitution. Governments have the duty to provide services to children, but sharing that duty with nonprofits by coordination, monitoring, and support, especially with respect to periodic review of placement, is likely to have the best results. Protection measures for children at all stages of the legal process has not been sufficiently implemented through children-friendly courts, justice systems and law enforcement agencies. Decriminalization of children exploited in prostitution is a substantial gap in addressing survival sex worldwide. Successful law enforcement partnerships have included a campaign of brothel-based prostitutes who policed the recruitment of under-age girls in Bangladesh.
See also
Further reading
- Fitzpatrick-Lewis, D.; et al. (2011). "Effectiveness of interventions to improve the health and housing status of homeless people: a rapid systematic review". BMC Public Health. 11: 638. doi:10.1186/1471-2458-11-638. PMC 3171371. PMID 21831318.
- Rew, L (1996). "Health Risks of Homeless Adolescents". Journal of Holistic Nursing. 14 (4): 348–59. doi:10.1177/089801019601400407. PMID 9146191. S2CID 46227398. Archived from the original on 2012-03-25. Retrieved 2012-02-13.
- Wojcicki, J.M. (2008). "'She Drank His Money': Survival Sex and the Problem of Violence in Taverns in Gauteng Province, South Africa". Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 16 (3): 267–93. doi:10.1525/maq.2002.16.3.267. PMID 12227257.
- Shannon, Kate; Kerr, Thomas; Allinott, Shari; Chettiar, Jill; Shoveller, Jean; Tyndall, Mark W. (2008). "Social and structural violence and power relations in mitigating HIV risk of drug-using women in survival sex work". Social Science & Medicine. 66 (4): 911–921. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.11.008. PMID 18155336.
- Haley, N.; et al. (2004). "HIV risk profile of male street youth involved in survival sex". Sexually Transmitted Infections. 80 (6): 526–30. doi:10.1136/sti.2004.010728. PMC 1744937. PMID 15572629.
- Watson, J (2011). "Understanding survival sex: young women, homelessness and intimate relationships". Journal of Youth Studies. 14 (6): 639–55. doi:10.1080/13676261.2011.588945. S2CID 144641271.
- Chettiar, J.; et al. (2010). "Survival sex work involvement among street-involved youth who use drugs in a Canadian setting". Journal of Public Health. 32 (3): 322–7. doi:10.1093/pubmed/fdp126. PMC 2924786. PMID 20061578.
- Shannon, K.; et al. (2010). "Survival Sex Work Involvement as a Primary Risk Factor for Hepatitis C Virus Acquisition in Drug-Using Youths in a Canadian Setting". Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 164 (1): 61–5. doi:10.1001/archpediatrics.2009.241. PMC 4646708. PMID 20048243.
- Bahadur, G. (Summer 2008) "Survival Sex: in Syria, Iraqi refugees snared in prostitution" [full text] Archived 2019-02-03 at the Wayback Machine Ms. Magazine
- Walls, N.E.; Bell, S. (2011). "Correlates of Engaging in Survival Sex among Homeless Youth and Young Adults" (PDF). Journal of Sex Research. 48 (5): 423–36. doi:10.1080/00224499.2010.501916. PMID 20799134. S2CID 16074637. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-06-12.
- United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (May 2011) Driven by Desperation: Transactional Sex as a Survival Strategy in Port-au-Prince IDP Camps (Port-au-Prince, Haiti: United Nations)
- Fox, A.M. (2010) Survival Sex or Consumption Sex? Gender, Wealth and HIV Infection in 16 sub-Saharan African Countries [full text] Archived 2012-03-25 at the Wayback Machine (Princeton, New Jersey: Harvard Department of Global Health and Population) preprint
External links
- "Survival Sex" - Bodies for Sale seven video series (VJ Movement, 2007–2011)
- Rillos, L. (February 9, 2010) "'Survival sex' lures homeless teens into prostitution" KVAL News (Eugene, Oregon) video and text
