NYU Press Leaving Prostitution: Getting Out and Staying Out of Sex Work

While street prostitutes comprise only a small minority of sex workers, they have the highest rates of physical and sexual abuse, arrest and incarceration, drug addiction, and stigmatization, which stem from both their public visibility and their dangerous work settings. Exiting the trade can be a daunting task for street prostitutes; despite this, many do try at some point to leave sex work behind. Focusing on four different organizations based in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Hartford that help prostitutes get off the streets, Sharon S. Oselin’s Leaving Prostitution explores the difficulties, rewards, and public responses to female street prostitutes’ transition out of sex work.   Through in-depth interviews and field research with street-level sex workers, Oselin illuminates their pathways into the trade and their experiences while in it, and the host of organizational, social, and individual factors that influence whether they are able to stop working as prostitutes altogether. She also speaks to staff at organizations that aid street prostitutes, and assesses the techniques they use to help these women develop self-esteem, healthy relationships with family and community, and workplace skills. Oselin paints a full picture of the difficulties these women face in moving away from sex work and the approaches that do and do not work to help them transform their lives. Further, she offers recommendations to help improve the quality of life for these women. A powerful ethnographic account, Leaving Prostitution provides an essential understanding of getting out and staying out of sex work. Review Leaving Prostitution is a major contribution to our understanding of sex work. Through an in-depth examination of organizations that help women transition out of street prostitution, Sharon Oselin sheds light on a dimension of sex work that has rarely been researched. The book illuminates both the organizational dynamics of different agencies and the conditions involved in the process of exiting prostitution. No other book examines this topic in such depth.--Ronald Weitzer, author of Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business Leaving Prostitutionchallenges us to notice the vulnerability women experience as street prostitutes but also to honor the choices women make and the strength and commitment they demonstrate as they create new lives away from the street.-- "PsycCRITQUES" Oselins book is an all too rare, wide angled look at organizations helping individuals exit stigmatized and illegal subcultures and the conditions that determine success. What she finds is shocking despite the vast attention devoted to & saving prostitutes, the long term, often expensive residential programs most successful in countering the stigmatizing, criminalized world of the streets, are rare. Troubling all easy narratives about prostitution, this book will be an eye opener for policy makers and service providers hoping to help those who want to leave the streets/exit stigmatizing and illegal subcultures.--Barbara Brents, co-author of The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex, and Sin in the New American Heartland About the Author Sharon S. Oselin is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside.