Games Pimps Play: Pimps, Players and Wives-in-Laws - A Qualitative Analysis of Street Prostitution

This is a detailed and insightful enthnographic analysis of the underworld of adolescent female prostitution. James Hodgson combines observations of street action and interviews with prostitutes and their pimps to present a candid and shocking overview of a social problem that affects the lives of so many of society's most vulnerable citizens. Hodgson's study clearly exposes the manipulative and predatory victimisation of vulnerable teenage girls - many of them runaways from dysfunctional homes - and debunks the belief that prostitution is a victimless crime. His data also expose the opportunistic, cunning, and sometimes violent strategies of the pimp and corrects a common perception that prostitutes and pimps form symbiotic relationships. Games Pimps Play is a rich, original, and compellingly comprehensive study of various stages of development and transformation of vice, violence, and victimization. Offering new and provocative insights into prostitution and the concomitant enterprises of pimping, the author challenges the reductionist, facile, and obfuscating conceptions of street prostitution, so characteristic of conventional approaches, by reiterating the more dynamic, elusive, and complex interactions of contexts, activities, and actors within specified socio-political sites. This is a detailed ethnographic analysis of adolescent female street prostitution, focusing on the primary role played by pimps in reproducing the subculture of street prostitution. It provides a typology of juvenile prostitutes, and describes the methods of procurement used by pimps to recruit girls, by seduction at one end of the spectrum, to violence at the other. The training process the girls undergo is described, and the role of violence in controlling prostitutes is highlighted Offers a rich, original, and compellingly comprehensive study of various stages of development and transformation of vice, violence, and victimization. Offering new and provocative insights into prostitution and the concomitant enterprises of pimping, the author challenges the reductionist, facile, and obfuscating conceptions of street prostitution. "Games Pimps Play provides a first-hand look at the role that pimps play in the recruitment and compelling of young girls into prostitution. This study is of value to anyone interested in the sociology of deviance, social problems, social welfare and social policy." Dr. Frederick Desroches, St. Jerome's College University of Waterloo. James F. Hodgson ; Foreword By Livy Visano. Includes Bibliographical References.