RED LIGHT, BLUE LIGHT: PROSTITUTES, PUNTERS AND THE POLICE by Karen Sharpe. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 1998.
Reviewed by Mary W. Atwell, Department of Criminal Justice, Radford University.
Some of the questions scholars ask about prostitution are virtually as old as the profession itself. Why do some women become prostitutes? Why do some men patronize prostitutes? Why are the women condemned and their clients tolerated? What can a community do to control or proscribe commercial sex? What is the actual relationship between law enforcement and prostitutes? Karen Sharpe sets out to answer some of these questions through an empirical study of a "northern city" in England. She notes at the outset that there were few compelling reasons for her subjects to cooperate with her project. That she was able to persuade both street prostitutes and—with more difficulty—the police to assist in her research makes this a valuable "insider’s" examination of the topic.
Sharpe conducted her research through observation, using several interview techniques to gather data from the prostitutes, the police, and from public records. She anticipated that using a triangulation of perspectives would allow her to draw more reliable conclusions and to test her work against previous studies. Her original sample of street prostitutes comprised one hundred women. Approximately one third of them were "regulars," who worked four or more nights each week; 24% were "semi-regulars" who worked one to three nights per week; the remainder were "occasionals." Forty women were actually interviewed for the study. Three quarters of them were regulars; most of the rest were semi-regulars. Only one occasional remained in the final group of interviewees. The demographic make up of the sample was interesting, if not surprising. Slightly more than 50% were between the ages of 20 and 30; most had started working in their late teens; most had grown up in the city and continued to live near their place of work. The red light district, known as "the patch," was essentially a triangular, rather seedy non-residential area. Most of the eating and drinking establishments banned the prostitutes from their premises based on the argument that respectable customers would be offended. Thus at first glance, the police seemed to be pursuing a strategy of containment—where public soliciting was tolerated as long as it remained within the designated area.
Sharpe next examined the developmental and motivational factors that led the women into a career in prostitution. After noting that the vast majority of criminological research analyzes delinquent behavior among males, she inquires about the factors influencing female deviance. She finds that associates are an influence—although not a simple cause. In many instances family members and friends acted as motivators and/or mentors to the novice prostitute. Although family members also acted to discourage the profession in some cases, "friends" almost always offered strong encouragement. She notes the significance of adolescent peer pressure among these young women, a similarity with their contemporaries who choose more conventional behaviors. Aside from differential association, Sharpe identifies a variety of factors that made prostitution an apparently attractive choice—broken homes and sexual abuse, unemployment, drug abuse—combined with a personality type that craved excitement and easy money. The single most common characteristic of all the women in the sample was a lack of education and employment qualifications. It appears for most, prostitution was a rational economic choice—easy money for little effort.
Inquiring into "life on the patch," Sharpe found the streetwalkers aware of the threat of violence. Most who persisted in the work developed strategies to cope with the clients (punters), to depersonalize the encounters and to avoid threatening situations. They described blanking out during the act, dressing in wigs and "tart clothes" on the job, and otherwise putting distance between themselves and the customers. In general, success required becoming street wise. There were complex links between prostitution and other criminal behavior. Most had records for other offenses before becoming prostitutes, but few had arrests for other crimes since starting in prostitution. It became clear that prostitution offered the financial benefits of property crime with many fewer risks of arrest and prosecution. None of the women interviewed regarded prostitution itself as a crime. Rather they considered it a job or a business, a deviant lifestyle preferable to other dishonest or honest ways to earn a living.
Sharpe turned her attention to the "punters," the men who patronized the streetwalkers. This information was even more difficult to gather than data about the women involved. She proposes a few characteristics—they seem to be married men, usually in their thirties. Oral sex was the most frequent request. In quite a significant insight, Sharpe notes the amount of control prostitutes exercised in dealing with clients. They looked over the punters and decided whether to do business with an individual. They set the prices, determined which services were available, negotiated, then made a decision whether to accept or decline the offer. They were not victims at the mercy of men, the author claims. Rather the women were very much in charge.
It was not easy for Sharpe to develop a relationship with the police, who tended to regard her as an intruder. Never fully satisfied that she had won their confidence, she describes their attitude toward dealing with prostitution as a combination of apathy and anger, probably not unusual for law enforcement in either Britain or the US. Police realized that prostitutes were not going to go away and tended to follow a containment policy. Officers were most likely to become involved when residents of nearby areas complained that the women had strayed off the patch. Their approach was to monitor, confine, and control with a sort of cynical tolerance. Meanwhile, the prostitutes firmly expected the police to also take responsibility for protecting them from clients who got violent.
In a chapter focusing on how to deal with the problem of prostitution, Sharpe has no new suggestions. This is not surprising, as the arguments for and against legalization and decriminalization are well known. Regulation and containment, although imperfect strategies, seem the best available. With an unusual slant, however, Sharpe does consider the alternatives from the prostitutes’ point of view as well as from "society’s."
In the concluding section, the author summarizes the study and restates her findings that poverty does not provide a single explanation for choosing a life of prostitution and that the women are not simply helpless and hopeless victims of male oppression. The prostitutes she studied did seem to exercise significant control over their business. They were shrewd and tough. I would argue, though, that Sharpe goes too far in calling prostitutes "quintessential feminists" because they have "financial independence, sexual choice, control over what they do with their own body, and probably more freedom than other women." This seems at best a naïve description of women who live on the edge of financial disaster and violence, experience extreme social stigmatization, and whose means of livelihood is counterfeit intimacy. Feminists may support every woman’s right to choose how to live
her life. They would generally advocate, however, a society in which selling one’s body was not more rational choice than legitimate work.
To whom would one recommend this interesting book? I would not assign it to my students as required reading,
but many of them could profit from examining Sharpe’s research design and her provocative conclusions. It belongs
in a review of the literature on prostitution in particular and female deviance in general. As the book was adapted
from the author’s dissertation, it has the problems typical of such a work. I think it might have appealed to a
wider audience if the author had taken the historical material included in lengthy appendices and incorporated
it into the narrative.