Women of the Street: How the Criminal Justice-Social Services Alliance Fails Women in Prostitution [Hardcover]

Explores encounters between those who make their living by engaging in street-based prostitution and the criminal justice and social service workers who try to curtail it

Working together every day, the lives of sex workers, police officers, public defenders, and social service providers are profoundly intertwined, yet their relationships are often adversarial and rooted in fundamentally false assumptions. The criminal justice-social services alliance operates on the general belief that the women they police and otherwise regulate choose sex work as a result of traumatization, rather than acknowledging the fact that socioeconomic realities often inform their choices.

Drawing on extraordinarily rich ethnographic research, including interviews with over one hundred street-involved women and dozens of criminal justice and social service professionals,Women of the Streetargues that despite the intimate knowledge these groups have about each other, measures designed to help these women consistently fail because they do not take into account false assumptions about street life, homelessness, drug use and sex trading. Reaching beyond disciplinary silos by combining the analysis of an anthropologist and a legal scholar, the book offers an evidence-based argument for the decriminalization of prostitution.

This significant ethnographic study of women in the sex trade and those they interact with who seek to restrain their business or help them live more healthful lives is a compelling account that takes readers into a little-understood area of society. This is perhaps the most insightful ethnographic book on women in the street-based sex trade published in some time. Susan Dewey and Tonia St. Germain have written a book that draws readers into the real struggles and dilemmas faced not only by poor and criminalized women but by the social service and police personnel who interact with these women on a daily basis. Their compelling writinglS%