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Transitional Housing Facilities for Women Leaving the Sex Industry: Informed by Evidence or Ideology?

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Abstract

This article juxtaposes the results of descriptive and inferential statistical analysis, derived from 125 client case files at a Denver transitional housing facility for women leaving the sex industry, with the results of a content analysis that examined how all 34 similar U.S. facilities represent themselves, their clients, and their services on their websites. Content analysis results ascertained four primary findings with respect to transitional housing facilities for women leaving the sex industry, including their conflation of sex trading with sex trafficking, dominance by Christian faith-based organizations, race-neutral approach, and depiction of their clients as uneducated and socially isolated. Yet our statistical analysis revealed that significant differences exist between women’s sex industry experiences in ways that are strongly determined by ethno-racial identity, age, marital status, and exposure to abuse throughout the life course. Juxtaposing the results of these analyses highlights some rather glaring disconnects between the ways that facility websites depict their clients and the meaningful differences between women seeking services at the Denver transitional housing facility. These findings raise significant concerns regarding approaches that ignore ethno-racial differences, collapse the sex industry’s complexity, make assumptions about the women’s educational or other needs, and neglect the importance of women’s community and relational ties. Taken together, these troubling realities suggest a need for evidenced-based, rather than ideology-based, alternatives for women who wish to leave the sex industry.

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Notes

  1. The 34 organizations the research team located using this method are: Amirah (Wenham, MA), Arbor (Charlottesville, VA), Aspire (New York, NY), Created Women (Tampa, FL), Dawn’s Place Residence (Las Vegas, NV), Destiny House (Las Vegas, NV) Eden House (New Orleans, LA), Esther House (Denver, CO), Generate Hope (San Diego, CA), Hope House (Baton Rouge, LA), LifeWay Network Safe Housing (New York, NY), Magdalene House (Nashville, TN, St. Louis, MO. & Charleston, SC), Magdalene KC (Kansas City, Kansas), Mariposa House (Denver, CO), New Life for Women (Chicago, IL), P.R.E.S.S. On/Extraordinary Living (Springfield, IL), Purchased: Not for Sale (Shreveport, LA), Refuge for Women (Lexington, KY), Refuge for Women- Las Vegas (Las Vegas, NV), Renewed Hope House/Independent Living Program (Atlanta, GA), Restore NYC Safehome (New York, NY), RockStarr Ministries Safe House (Orem, UT), Safe House San Francisco (San Francisco, CA), Samaritan Women (Baltimore, MD), Selah Freedom (Sarasota, FL), Sparrow House (Houston, TX), Street’s Hope (Denver, CO), The Dream Center Human Trafficking Program (Los Angeles, CA), The Homestead (Manhattan, KS), The Monarch (San Francisco, CA), The Sanctuary (Orlando, FL), The Well House (Leeds, AL).

  2. The team did not receive results by searching the combinations of those key terms along with the words “diversion,” “court,” “feminist,” “pornography,” and “escort(ing).”

  3. Admittedly, a more nuanced insight into agencies’ understandings of their clients may be found in speaking with program staff or systematically investigating their portfolio of promotional materials, both of which are potentially fruitful areas for future research.

  4. One transitional housing facility did link to their interfaith efforts involving Protestant Christian organizations and a Rabbi associated with a synagogue.

  5. The research team opted to use the word “pimp” in quotes because of its widespread cultural salience among both street-involved women and the dominant culture in which they and many readers of this article both live; nonetheless, the co-authors of this paper remain troubled by the lack of scholarly and popular cultural attention paid to the racialized connotations of this word.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA

    Susan Dewey & Kyria Brown

  2. Denver, CO, USA

    Jennifer Hankel

Authors
  1. Susan Dewey
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  2. Jennifer Hankel
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  3. Kyria Brown
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Correspondence to Susan Dewey.

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This study did not receive funding, and all procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Dewey, S., Hankel, J. & Brown, K. Transitional Housing Facilities for Women Leaving the Sex Industry: Informed by Evidence or Ideology?. Sexuality & Culture 21, 74–95 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-016-9379-5

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