Research paperStreets, strolls and spots: Sex work, drug use and social space in detroit
Introduction
In this paper, we explore the complex interaction between the illicit drug economy of Detroit and localized markets of street sex work, as described by women who had recently exited the street environment. We consider the mobility of sex workers within these zones as compared to the multiple spaces of exclusion that they occupy within the larger moral geography. We focus on three categories of interconnected spaces or places that were consistently referenced by women in qualitative interviews: “the street”, “the stroll”, and “the spot.” These spaces are defined through the daily routines of those engaged in illicit activities, in conjunction with prevalent law enforcement practices and environmental or locational factors, such as the availability of abandoned houses, the proximity of political borders or commercial areas, and so on. Throughout our discussion, we emphasize the fluidity of these spaces, and the mobility of actors operating within them, while simultaneously drawing attention to the more rigid but often unstated aspects of the local geography, most notably the intersection of racial segregation patterns and gender hierarchies that play out in the street life.
Street sex work often overlaps with other highly stigmatized and illicit activities such as heroin and crack cocaine use, a fact long recognized by the harm reduction literature (Ditmore, 2013). We emphasize that both street sex work and local drug economies in Detroit are deeply structured by the social, moral and legal practices of the larger metropolitan area, which explicitly allows for the presence of bars, strip clubs, motel and rooming houses within particular geographic zones, but not within others. In Detroit, these zones may be quite extensive, given the physical size of the city and the lack of resources for policing and otherwise regulating space. Spaces within these zones are direct products of economic motivation pursued within a social structure defined largely by constraint. Nonetheless, the settings themselves are not determined in advance by structural forces—rather, they should be seen as assemblages of associations which themselves shape and mediate behaviors (Duff, 2011, Duff, 2013, Latour, 2005).
There is an abundance of research on the role of such interstitial or liminal spaces in the performance of illicit or stigmatized activities related to both sexual behavior and drug use (Bourgois and Schonberg, 2009, Dewey and Kelly, 2011, Dovey et al., 2001, Humphreys, 1970, Rhodes et al., 2005, Tyner, 2012). As Spillane (1998) has described in relation to early twentieth-century Chicago, drug marketplaces reflect the coalescence of moral, economic and political interests. Recent research on sex work markets in contexts as diverse as Belgium (Weitzer, 2014), South Africa (Needle et al., 2008), Serbia (Simic & Rhodes, 2009), Russia (Aral, St Lawrence, Dyatlov, & Kozlov, 2005, Odinokova et al., 2014) and Mexico (Goldenberg et al., 2011a, Goldenberg et al., 2011b) all emphasize specific local configurations of zoning, client behaviors and policing practices that interact with economic imperatives and cultural norms to produce the environments that sex workers inhabit.
Implicit in the placing of these illicit practices is the acknowledgment that they are not allowed in other places or areas (Cresswell, 1996). Interactions within informal, liminal spaces therefore reflect larger patterns of segregation and stratification. For the most part, we found that women engaged in street prostitution because it presented the best available means of addressing their immediate needs within the spaces where they found themselves. We hope to clarify the role of these spaces in perpetuating cycles of problematic and risky behavior, and to suggest policy approaches that might incorporate these insights in a useful and productive way.
Section snippets
Background: moral geographies
According to Hubbard (2012), sexual practices are distributed and constituted unevenly across urban space in ways that reflect the confluence of legal and moral norms, as well as racial, ethnic, gender and economic boundaries. He employs the concept of moral geography to refer to “…assumptions about what behavior belongs in which particular places” (Hubbard, 2012, p. 34). The geographical frame of analysis was employed by Cohen as early as 1980 to describe the local ecological factors
Methods and sample
This paper is based on 31 interviews conducted with street sex workers as part of a multiyear study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. All of these individuals were affiliated with a publicly funded Sex Worker Intervention Program (SWIP) that sought to remove sex workers from the street and engage them in intensive substance abuse treatment. Throughout the study, our recruiting process took place in a variety of contexts: within the county jail, through the residential programs,
Trajectories into sex work
In the same way that the spatial concentration of public prostitution is systematically produced by state policy, zoning laws and police practices, the social space of sex work is perpetuated by the confluence of dynamics surrounding gender and power in society (Cusick, 2006, Hubbard, 2012, Hubbard and Colosi, 2013). Research in contemporary settings as diverse as Kampala, Uganda (Mbonye et al., 2012), Tijuana, Mexico (Syvertsen et al., 2014) and Vancouver, Canada (Shannon et al., 2008)
Discussion
Our qualitative findings suggest that policies and programs might creatively engage vulnerable sex workers in Detroit through the place-and-network assemblages that surround them (Duff, 2012b). Risk of both violence and disease transmission may be lowered when women have more power over spaces of interaction (Krusi et al., 2012) and their situational vulnerability is reduced (Cusick, 2006). There is a spectrum of approaches that have been employed across the world: Weitzer (2014) has described
Conflict of interest statement
None declared.
References (52)
- et al.
Commercial sex work, drug use and sexually transmitted infections in St. Petersburg, Russia
Social Science & Medicine
(2005) Widening the harm reduction agenda: From drug use to sex work
International Journal of Drug Policy
(2006)- et al.
Safety becomes danger: Dilemmas of drug-use in public space
Health & Place
(2001) Reassembling (social) contexts: A new direction for a sociology of drugs
International Journal of Drug Policy
(2011)Exploring the role of ‘enabling places’ in promoting recovery from mental illness: A qualitative test of a relational model
Health & Place
(2012)The social life of drugs
International Journal of Drug Policy
(2013)- et al.
How important are venue-based HIV risks among male clients of female sex workers? A mixed methods analysis of the risk environment in nightlife venues in Tijuana, Mexico
Health & Place
(2011) - et al.
Over here, it's just drugs, women and all the madness: The HIV risk environment of clients of female sex workers in Tijuana, Mexico
Social Science & Medicine
(2011) - et al.
Sex, drugs and HIV: Rapid assessment of HIV risk behavior among street-based drug-using sex workers in Durban, South Africa
Social Science & Medicine
(2008) - et al.
Police sexual coercion and its association with risky sex work and substance use behaviors among female sex workers in St. Petersburg and Orenburg, Russia
The International Journal of Drug Policy
(2014)
The social structural production of HIV risk among injecting drug users
Social Science & Medicine
HIV prevention while the bulldozers roll: Exploring the effect of the demolition of Goa's red-light area
Social Science and Medicine
Social and structural violence and power relations in mitigating HIV risk of drug-using women in survival sex work
Social Science & Medicine
The war of places: Boundaries and liminalities in urban space
Theory, Culture & Society
A purposeful approach to the constant comparative method in the analysis of qualitative interviews
Quality & Quantity
Righteous dopefiend
Making work, making trouble: Prostitution as a social problem
Deviant street networks: Prostitution in New York city
In place/out of place: Geography, ideology, and transgression
The street in the making of popular geographic knowledge
Introduction: Sex work and the politics of public policy
In Calcutta sex workers organize
When sex work and drug use overlap: Considerations for advocacy and practice
Heroin mismatch in the Motor City: addiction, segregation and the geography of opportunity
Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse
Accounting for context: Exploring the role of objects and spaces in the consumption of alcohol and other drugs
Social & Cultural Geography
Geographies of regulation: Policing prostitution in nineteenth-century Britain and the empire
Cited by (14)
“You're friends until everybody runs out of dope”: A framework for understanding tie meaning, purpose, and value in social networks
2022, Social NetworksCitation Excerpt :These risk factors may overlap with individuals’ broader or more generalized desires for self-exploration and psychic or sensory pleasure which are more introspective in nature (Back et al., 2011; Peugh and Belenko, 2001; Sakakibara, 2020). Additionally, the built environment may facilitate or stymie access to drugs (Draus et al., 2015; Ezell et al., 2021; Mattson, 2021; Mazumdar et al., 2015; Muncan et al., 2020; C. B. R. Smith, 2010). Thus, the reasons for nonmedical/illegal opioid use and resultant medical consequences derive from multidimensional spectra of social, political, and bodily stimuli; these stimuli result from a complex fusion of both micro and macro-level dynamics.
How urban and rural built environments influence the health attitudes and behaviors of people who use drugs
2021, Health and PlaceCitation Excerpt :Space organizes social life (Neely and Samura, 2011) and facilitates, or precludes, exposure to social and environmental risks (P. Draus et al., 2015; Duff, 2011; Keene and Padilla, 2014).
Psychometrics of the “Self-Efficacy Consumption of Fruit and Vegetables Scale” in African American women
2017, Eating BehaviorsCitation Excerpt :There was no was no significant relationship between participants' dietary consumption of fruit and vegetables and their self-efficacy scores on the F/V scale (r = − 0.074; p = 0.44 vitamin A; r = − 0.136; p = 0.154 vitamin C; r = − 0.077; p = 0.419 folate; and r = − 0.069; p = 0.474 β-carotene). Evaluation of the F/V scale, using polychoric correlation (Draus et al., 2015), resulted in a one factor solutions using an eigenvalue greater than one. Forcing the factor analysis to produce a two factor solution did not allow for higher loading and very little variation is explained by the second factor.
SITUATING POLICE LEGITIMACY: The Accounts of Substance-Using and Sex-Working Women in Nigeria
2022, The Routledge Handbook of Women’s Experiences of Criminal JusticeDodging rocks and baseball bats: Stories of territory, tourism and trespassing in Detroit neighborhoods
2022, Territories, Environments, Politics: Explorations in Territoriology