Recently I posted about an absolutely fascinating (to me anyway) national survey of nearly 700 internet-based sex workers, the SASP. It stayed on the front page of Coed for a surprisingly long time, indicating maybe that there is some interest in something about our little community other than the antics of the resident provocateurs. I’ve delved deeper into the papers posted on the authors’ websites and am back with more tidbits.
The average worker who worked the week before completing the survey saw 5.4 clients that week of whom 2.94 were repeats. Getting out the calculator, this implies 270 clients per fifty week year with 147 repeaters. There is no way to know how many different individuals this involves since the survey was a one week snap shot. The average reported weekly earnings for this group was $2,272 which would work at to 113,000 per year, all things being equal, which they usually are not. I should point out that this is a national survey and was largely taken before the boy geniuses of Wall Street blew up the world economy. The income levels then reported may not have survived the subsequent Great Recession.
Cunningham & Kendall quote an earlier study of Chicago streetwalkers that found a mean of 7.2 clients per week with 47.4% regulars. The eye-catching contrast between the earlier studies on streetwalkers and SASP internet providers is that the latter admit to 6.1% unprotected vaginal or anal sex while the SW survey found 79.4% unprotected penetration rising to 97% in some subsamples! Perhaps an explanation of why some of the fellows are out late driving in the blue light punctuated night despite the hours of fruitless search and the danger from that other “Blue Team”.
Perhaps not unrelated to the risky practices, “studies of streetwalking prostitutes generally find between 40%-80% work under pimp management” while 93% of “technology-facilitated sex worker(s)” are independents “who do not operate under third-party management”.
The average age of sex workers surveyed was 28.3 while the average age of customer guys was 43. The authors note that survey respondents are somewhat older than the average age of women on the TER data base from which they were invited to participate. Presumably client ages were estimated. The paper notes that women under 30 were more likely to report “risky behavior” which the authors consider to include seeing more clients and “group sex” as well as “unprotected” sex.
They consider the beloved BBBJ to be unprotected sex but but quote a 2001 study in this rather convoluted sentence: “ For a heterosexual woman who has receptive vaginal sex without a condom with a partner of unknown HIV serostatus and an HIV prevalence of 1%, the risk of HIV transmission in a single sex act would be ten times higher than is associated with receptive fellatio without out a condom”. Or, in other words, oral without a condom is much safer than intercourse without a condom, something teenagers obviously have grasped even if the news media has not.
Mean body mass index, apparently self reported, was 23.1 which works out to 142 lbs for 5’6”. Eleven percent reported a BMI below 18.5 which would be 115 lbs or less for the same height.
The study’s finding of an average of one client per day or less is an interesting contrast to the fevered speculations sometimes seen here locally although obviously the findings are an average of a nationwide group and do not necessarily apply to low BMI teenagers from Dallas with “professional management”.
This is largely from the paper entitled “Prostitution 2.0”. If you want to see for yourself it is at
http://www.toddkendall.net/Pros20_Final.pdf
More from the Survey of Adult Service Providers
