Ric Curtis

Conflict and Agency among Sex Workers and Pimps A Closer Look at Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking

The dominant understanding in the United States of the relationship between pimps and minors involved in commercial sex is that it is one of “child sex trafficking,” in which pimps lure girls into prostitution, then control, exploit, and brutalize them. Such narratives of oppression typically depend on postarrest testimonials by former prostitutes and pimps in punishment and rescue institutions. In contrast, this article presents data collected from active pimps, underage prostitutes, and young adult sex workers to demonstrate the complexity of pimp-prostitute dyads and interrogate conventional stereotypes about teenage prostitution. A holistic understanding of the factors that push minors into sex work and keep them there is needed to designand implement effective policy and services for this population.

“You're Always Training the Dog”:1 Strategic Interventions to Reconfigure Drug Markets

Based on ethnographic observation of the changes in drug markets and violence in New York City over the past 20 years, this paper compares and contrasts three distinct types of drug markets and the types of systemic violence that are characteristic of each and argues that knowing which kinds of markets and contexts are associated with what kinds of violence can be valuable for policy makers and professionals. Further, evolving drug markets and different forms of violence associated with particular market types are, in part, responses to law enforcement interventions intended to eliminate drug markets. Police interventions alter the character of drug markets—either for better or for worse—as they adapt, and these interventions can produce markedly different outcomes with regard to violence and crime. Comparatively brief interventions of limited scope can effectively control violence and reconfigure markets by “training” them to act in ways less likely to produce violence and social disorder.

A reexamination of connectivity trends via exponential random graph modeling in two IDU risk networks.

Patterns of risk in injecting drug user (IDU) networks have been a key focus of network approaches to HIV transmission histories. New network modeling techniques allow for a reexamination of these patterns with greater statistical accuracy and the comparative weighting of model elements. This paper describes the results of a reexamination of network data from the SFHR and P90 data sets using Exponential Random Graph Modeling. The results show that “transitive closure” is an important feature of IDU network topologies, and provides relative importance measures for race/ethnicity, age, gender, and number of risk partners in predicting risk relationships.

Pimping and Profitability Testing the Economics of Trafficking in Street Sex Markets in Atlantic City, New Jersey

Human trafficking has been identified as the second or third most profitable illicit business on the planet. Underlying these claims and billions of dollars in policy funding since the 1990s is an economics of human trafficking built heavily on two assumptions. The first is that nonconsensual labor is more profitable than consensual labor with minors being particularly profitable due to their ubiquity and inability to effectively consent. The second is that, unlike illicit narcotic and weapons sales, human trafficking involves a uniquely renewable and nearly limitless source of profit. This article uses empirical data collected from street sex markets in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 2010–2012 to test some of the assumptions of the economics of human trafficking and puts particular focus on U.S.-based domestic minor sex trafficking by exploring market practices and understandings of young sex workers and pimps/third parties who have opportunities to benefit from the sexual labor of minors. Consistent with broader literature by economic historians and labor process scholars, findings do not support the assumptions of trafficking economics, suggesting the need for trafficking economists and policymakers to give more consideration to local political economies of sex in the design of antitrafficking policy.

WHITE CHICKS ON DOPE: HEROIN AND IDENTITY DYNAMICS IN NEW YORK IN THE 1990s

We examined heroin use among 15 White middle-class women using data from in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic observation between May 1996 and April 1999. These women represent a subsample of a diverse group of 550 in an ethnographic study of heroin use and dealing in New York City. Our analysis is organized into four sections: (1) a demographic sketch, (2) the first time, (3) mode of administration and patterns of use, and (4) heroin in the medicine cabinet. Heroin use among these women was not related to poverty or lack of opportunity, social disenfranchisement, defective or addictive personalities, childhood trauma, or seeking membership into deviant subcultures. While some of these discourses of adversity and thrill seeking may have surfaced in individual stories, the dominant theme that emerged from the data was that of active struggles around identity, struggles over who and how one does and does not want to be.

Hepatitis C serosorting among people who inject drugs in rural Puerto Rico

Due to the high cost of treatment, preventative measures to limit Hepatitis C (HCV) transmission among people who inject drugs (PWID) are encouraged by many public health officials. A key one of these is serosorting, where PWID select risk partners based on concordant HCV status. Research on the general U.S. population by Smith et al. (2013) found that knowledge of ones own HCV status facilitated serosorting behaviors among PWID, such that respondents with knowledge of their own status were more likely to ask potential partners about their status prior to sharing risk. Our objective was to see if this held true in rural Puerto Rico. We replicate this study using a sample of PWID in rural Puerto Rico to draw comparisons. We used respondent driven sampling to survey 315 participants, and have a final analytic sample of 154. The survey was heavily modeled after the National HIV Behavioral Survey, which was the dataset used by the previous researchers. We found that among PWID in rural Puerto Rico, unlike in the general population, knowledge of ones own HCV status had no significant effect on the selection of ones most recent injection partner, based on his/her HCV status. We conclude that PWID in rural Puerto Rico differ from the general U.S. population when it comes to serosorting behaviors, and that these differences should be taken into account in future outreaches and intervention strategies.

Implementing policy for invisible populations: social work and social policy in a federal anti-trafficking taskforce in the United States

In the United States, the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) has been one of the principal foci in the fight against human trafficking during the past decade with billions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of helping professionals trained in anti-trafficking best practices. Despite this attention, prosecutions, convictions and rescues have been scarce relative to funding, leading critical scholars to argue that CSEC is a moral panic. The following article, based on fourteen months of participant-observation between 2009 and 2010 with social service providers, law enforcement officials, not-for-profit directors and local clergy from a voluntary participation federal anti-trafficking taskforce in Atlantic City, New Jersey provides an ethnographic account of the ways that helping professionals confront the challenges and contradictions of implementing policy and advocating for an invisible target population that is rarely, if ever, visible in their work lives.

No Love for Children: Reciprocity, Science, and Engagement in the Study of Child Sex Trafficking

The following article recounts our struggles in New York City and Atlantic City, New Jersey between 2008 and 2012 to conduct finely grained, intersubjectively engaged, and ethical empirical research into the lives of sex worker minors while adhering to contemporary laws and research protocols governing child sex trafficking that dictate reticence, aloofness, and avoidance by adults who are not licensed authorities or trained professionals. We argue that these laws and protocols systematically impede the type of engaged, ethical, situated, and contextually nuanced research that is necessary to developing effective and appropriate evidence-based policy. In contrast to this regime of fear and avoidance, we argue for the “personhood” of mature minors and the need for a science that is ethically engaged with that personhood, rather than built around protecting their childhood and instantiating their victimhood.

Mike Agar: "The Story of Crack"

Production, distribution, and consumption. These are the three elements that constitute an economic system. In a globalized economy, understanding how these three elements are connected is often difficult because they are frequently separated by time and space and they typically involve different people at each juncture. Yet to truly understand one moment, it is necessary to appreciate how it is affected by, and in turn affects, the other components of the system. This larger picture, however, is rarely seen in social science, especially in an era when researchers are encouraged to specialize and ‘‘narrow in’’ on a problem. In the field of drug research the lack of theory or theorizing has also been a serious problem. The Story of Crack is an important paper because it addresses these various problems through the use of ‘‘trend theory’’ to explain illicit drug epidemics. Following ground-breaking work by anthropologists Wolf (1982, 1999), Mintz (1985), and Roseberry (1989), Agar sketches an epic ‘‘story’’ that combines widely disparate and dissimilar sources of data into a holistic picture and allows readers to begin to appreciate the complex dialectical relationship between production, distribution, and consumption. Of course, an epic story cannot be told in its entirety in an article, but by presenting the overarching parameters and contours of the argument, Agar has provided researchers who have typically had a more provincial orientation, like myself, an opportunity to make important contributions to fleshing out the details of the story in ways that have not been done. ‘‘How did crack take off ?’’ To answer that question, most researchers point to the psychopharmacological properties of crack as the primary reason why the drug became so popular in the middle and late 1980s. Once dubbed the ‘‘most addictive drug on earth’’ by some observers, the siren’s call of the pipe was said to instantaneously hook users. This simplistic explanation, however, begs the question, ‘‘why these people in this place at that time?’’ After all, smoking cocaine in the form of ‘‘basuco’’ or ‘‘freebase’’ had been known for years prior to the mid-1980s, when the crack phenomenon swept across the United States. Agar shows us that there is no single explanatory device; without the right conditions at each junction of the economic triad, the crack epidemic might well have not taken off. His approach to answering the central question (why did crack take off ?) seeks to ‘‘explain local events in terms of interactions among several distant social locations.’’ For example: Production without Nixon’s ‘‘war on drugs’’ in the early 1970s that devastated Mexico’s marijuana crops, Columbia might never have become the major supplier

Tolerância zero: a má interpretação dos resultados

The strategies and the realities of policing as practiced on the streets of New York City have changed dramatically in the last twenty years. Aggressive programs aimed at taking guns and drugs off the streets were among the main goals of these new anti-crime strategies. At at time when crime is at its lowest level in thirty years, arrests for low-level offences are higher than ever before. There is little evidence to suggest that drug markets have been eliminated or even substantially reduced. This ethnographic research explores the impact of these new policing strategies on the quality of life in the neighborhoods of New York City and argues that an understanding of the complex relationships between drug markets and crime must move beyond simply coparing the numbers of arrests genberated by different policing sterategies to an understanding of the role played by drugs in the wider political eceonomy.