This is a tangled mess of unrelated statistics pulled from other sources.
It lumps together childhood sexual abuse, sexual assault AS PART OF sex work, and violent sexual assault of adults, unrelated to sex work. It goes on to mix random factoids about race, adult sex work, juvenile sex work, child prostitution, trafficking (however that is actually defined), participation in pornography, family history, physical abuse, alcohol use, even childhood church attendance. It’s meaningless and unsubstantiated.
There are 313 million people in the US—-give or take; that’s 159 million women and 154 million men. 1 in 6 women (17%) and 1 in 33 men (3%) report having been a victim of some type of sexual violence, as children or adults. Thats 20%, or roughly 63 million people. Now, consider that it’s estimated that 60%+ of all sexual assaults are never reported.
To use scientific language-—that’s a fuck of a lot of people. A very small % of whom happen to be sex workers.
The paper you cite says: 1% of US women have worked as prostitutes at some point….” Who knows where that number came from, but lets go with it.
If I utilize at least as much scientific method as the author of this paper, I conclude that: 17% of all US women have reported being a victim of sexual violence. And, 1% of all US women become sex workers; ergo 99% do not. Of course, one might try to argue that the majority of that 1% is coming directly from the 17%.
But a little more simple ninja math tells us this isn’t true either.
1. 17% of (27 million) US women report having been a victim sexual violence.
2. According to your source 1% of (1,590,000) US women are now, or have been sex workers.
3. 1,590,000 is 6% of 27 million
This means if we pull only from the 17% of women who report being sexually victimized, to try to establish that being a victim of sexual violence “causes” women to become sex workers, we still find that 94% of women who have reported being a victim sexual violence do NOT become sex workers. And this doesn't account for unreported sexual assaults. So if we apply common sense, we know the 27 million number is actually higher; which means the 6% number is actually lower.
Posted By: !_!
You seem to wish to ignore facts. Yours and Tobi's case, while it's all well and nice, is not typical and does not represent prostitution as a whole. Take it for what it's worth but I'm guessing that multiple studies don't really lie. Sure, it may have some inaccuracies here and there but in general it doesn't lie. They reveal that majority were abused as a child and had other issues. Granted, 2/3rd grew up from families that were doing OK in the beginning but they began escorting when the family income dried up. It seems that the ones posting here claim to be from normal families but the statistics of a broader scope seem to tell a very different story. Are you saying that these studies are completely false?
There was a study from labor economics showing girls from wealthy families getting into prostitution as just another career move, but they are much more likely to be high end providers seeing an upper class clientelle, they avoid legal brothels and low end escorting. Therefore, your argument only holds true for girls in the "high end" market where girls are far more likely to be doing this as a personal choice considering they have other career opportunities and a stable supportive family as well, but we aren't talking strictly about just the high end rather we're talking about the whole universe of escorts in general: upper middle, middle, low range. As a whole, many escorts started young, from dysfunctional families, and they aren't high end escorts either, according to the studies.
