What Research Shows About Pimping and the Women Involved

hoodboxoffice

Sep 26

8 min read

In 2014 the Urban Institute published the results of interviews with 73 people convicted of pimping and sex trafficking across eight American cities, and the offenders described their work as a business with weekly take-home earnings running from $5,000 to more than $32,000. The women and girls who produced that money appear in a different set of records: hotline case files, clinical surveys, mortality studies and federal prosecutions. Read together, several decades of research show pimp-controlled prostitution as an institution built on the transfer of risk. The pimp keeps the income and the women carry the violence, the arrests and the long-term harm. The research also shows that some of the most repeated numbers about this world are weaker than their popularity suggests, and this article marks those plainly.

Two meanings of one word

MTV's Pimp My Ride used the word to mean customizing a car, a sign of how far it had drifted from the crime. The pimp of popular culture runs from Iceberg Slim's memoirs through the 1970s films Super Fly, The Mack and Willie Dynamite, to documentaries such as Pimps Up, Ho's Down and American Pimp.

Songs such as Big Pimpin' and It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp, from the film Hustle & Flow, carried the figure into the 2000s. The scholar T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting examined the cost of that familiarity in her 2007 NYU Press book Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women, which shares its title with the 1998 documentary. She argues that commercial circulation of these images has made them seem "normal, acceptable, and entertaining," and she draws on interviews with exotic dancers and others in hip-hop's orbit. Her book does not claim a measured causal link between a song and a crime. What the research below documents is the distance between the style and the institution, and the women on the far side of it.

The law and the prosecutions

Federal law gave that institution a new name in 2000. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act defines sex trafficking as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing or soliciting of a person for a commercial sex act, and treats it as a "severe form" of trafficking when it is induced by force, fraud or coercion. The statute's definition of coercion covers threats of serious harm, schemes meant to make a person believe she will be harmed if she refuses, and abuse of the legal process. One clause matters more than any other for the girls in this story: if the person is under 18, prosecutors do not have to prove force, fraud or coercion at all.

Pimping that meets those elements can now be charged federally as trafficking, not only as a state pandering offense. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in 2015, 1,923 suspects were referred to U.S. attorneys with human trafficking as the lead charge. Fifty-nine percent were prosecuted, 93 percent of defendants were convicted, and 99 percent of the 769 people convicted received prison sentences. That category is broad. Only 39 percent of the referrals involved peonage, slavery, forced labor or sex trafficking; the rest involved child sexual abuse material or transporting people for illegal sex.

How convicted pimps describe the business

The Urban Institute study, led by Meredith Dank and funded by the National Institute of Justice, estimated the 2007 underground sex economy in the individual cities at between $39.9 million and $290 million. (How those operations are ranked internally is covered in a separate archive article.)

The interviews are most revealing for what the offenders admitted about risk. They believed pimping was less risky than other crimes, drug trafficking included. A quarter had dealt drugs before they began pimping, and 18 percent kept dealing while they pimped. Asked what worried them most, 21 percent named arrest and 18 percent named their own safety. Six percent named the safety of the women working for them.

On violence, the pimps offered a self-portrait the researchers did not fully accept. Most said media portrayals exaggerated it, and they described psychological coercion as their main tool. Only 15 percent admitted using violence, a figure the report's authors called likely low. Nearly one-third said they entered the trade because they grew up around it.

Pimps who began as the exploited

A 2010 DePaul University College of Law study pushed that last finding further. Jody Raphael and Brenda Myers-Powell interviewed 25 former pimps and madams in Chicago for the report From Victims to Victimizers. According to DePaul's announcement of the findings, 68 percent had been prostituted themselves before they became pimps, their average age of entry into prostitution was 15, and 60 percent had family members involved in prostitution.

The study does not excuse its subjects. It shows a cycle in which the institution recruits its managers from among the people it has already harmed, which is one reason advocates argue that arrests alone rarely end it.

What women and girls report

Celia Williamson and Terry Cluse-Tolar's 2002 study in Violence Against Women, based on interviews with women in street prostitution, found that pimps kept control through threats, intimidation and violence, and imposed schedules and earnings quotas. The authors compared the power dynamics to those of abusive domestic relationships. They also noted that women under a pimp's control are the ones least likely to reach researchers at all.

Polaris, which operates the National Human Trafficking Hotline, analyzed 32,208 potential trafficking cases reported between December 2007 and December 2016. In its outdoor solicitation category (1,643 cases), traffickers frequently recruited by posing as a romantic partner, and Polaris found they used physical violence more often there than in other forms of sex trafficking. Across the categories, Polaris recorded control through quotas, confiscated earnings, isolation and threats, alongside violence. Its residential category showed a different face of the same crime: family members and intimate partners exploiting people during economic hardship, often children.

A Justice Department report on child sex trafficking describes the result as a "trauma bond," an attachment to the abuser that can make victims protect him. The same report warns that failing to recognize children as victims leads police to arrest them instead, on drug, truancy or solicitation charges.

Not every study finds a pimp at the center. A 2008 study of 249 young people in New York City's commercial sex market, led by Ric Curtis at John Jay College, found that only 10 percent had a pimp or "market facilitator" at the time of interview (14 percent of girls). Friends were frequently named as the route in, by 46 percent of girls. Follow-up work by Anthony Marcus and colleagues in New York and Atlantic City, reported by Slate in 2014, found the violent pimp of the standard narrative in only rare cases; young people more often named customers, homelessness and drug addiction as their biggest dangers. The New York study also found that 87 percent wanted to leave.

Violence, trauma and early death, and the fight over the data

The starkest clinical numbers come from Melissa Farley and colleagues, who in 2003 surveyed 854 people in prostitution across nine countries, including the United States. Seventy-one percent had been physically assaulted in prostitution, 63 percent had been raped, 75 percent had been homeless at some point, and 68 percent met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. Eighty-nine percent said they wanted to leave.

Farley's work is also the most contested in the field. In 2005 the sociologist Ronald Weitzer argued in Violence Against Women that a body of prostitution research, hers among it, did not meet conventional scholarly standards, relied on unrepresentative samples, and generalized from street prostitution to all sex work. Farley replied in the same journal under the title "Prostitution Harms Women Even if Indoors." The dispute tracks a wider policy divide. Abolitionist researchers treat prostitution itself as violence. Amnesty International's 2016 policy calls for decriminalizing consensual sex work, including laws against its "general organization," while insisting that trafficking and child sexual exploitation be criminalized everywhere. Both camps condemn coercive pimping. They disagree about whether laws aimed at third parties protect women or push them further from help.

The mortality evidence is harder to argue with. A study in the American Journal of Epidemiology followed 1,969 women in Colorado Springs from 1967 to 1999. While they were active in prostitution, their death rate was 5.9 times that of comparable women, and their homicide rate was 17.7 times higher. Violence and drug use were the leading causes of death.

The "average age 12 to 14" figure

The most quoted statistic in this field says the average girl enters prostitution between ages 12 and 14. It traces to a 2001 University of Pennsylvania study led by Richard Estes, which reported entry ranges of 12 to 14 for girls and 11 to 13 for boys. PolitiFact, examining the claim in 2015, found serious limits. The sample was 107 girls and 63 boys, interviewed in the 1990s, all street youth who had run away, and none controlled by traffickers. Estes himself told PolitiFact he could not claim the findings still held. David Finkelhor of the University of New Hampshire pointed out that an average of 12 to 14 would require large numbers of much younger children to offset older ones, which he considered implausible. PolitiFact rated a congressman's version of the claim half true.

Other data sit higher. The New York study found an average entry age of 15.29. The Justice Department report, citing the Human Trafficking Institute, gives an average of 15 for child victims in 2020 federal cases, with 89 percent aged 14 to 17. None of this makes the harm smaller. It means the 12-to-14 figure describes one 1990s sample, not a national average.

What the record does not show

An average entry age of 12 to 14. Often repeated, but it rests on a small, dated sample of runaway youth, and later data put the average near 15.
A reliable national count. The Urban Institute's estimates are city by city, Estes said no one knows the true statistical picture today, and Williamson and Cluse-Tolar noted that women under a pimp's control rarely take part in research.
A pimp behind every exploited minor. In the New York study, most young people had no pimp at the time of interview.
Pimps' claims that violence is rare. Only 15 percent of the Urban Institute's interviewees admitted it, and the researchers judged that number likely low.
That most pimps were once victims. The DePaul figure of 68 percent comes from 25 former pimps in one city. It describes a pattern worth taking seriously, not a national rate.