Research paper
Streets, strolls and spots: Sex work, drug use and social space in detroit

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2015.01.004Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

In this paper, we explore social spaces related to street sex work and illicit drug use in Detroit. We consider these spaces as assemblages (Duff, 2011, Duff, 2013, Latour, 2005) that reflect the larger moral geography (Hubbard, 2012) of the city and fulfill specific functions in the daily lives of drug using sex workers.

Methods

We draw on thirty-one in-depth qualitative interviews with former street sex workers who were recruited through a court-based treatment and recovery program, as well as ethnographic field notes from drug treatment and law enforcement settings.

Results

Our interview findings reveal highly organized and routine activities that exist in a relatively stable, symbiotic relationship with law enforcement practices, employment and commuter patterns, and built environments. While the daily life of street sex work involves a good deal of individual agency in terms of moving between spaces and negotiating terms of exchange, daily trajectories were also circumscribed by economics, illicit substance use, and the objective risks of the street and the police.

Conclusion

We consider the implications of these results for future policy directed at harm reduction in the street setting.

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.

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