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Loved or Seduced? Intimate Relationships Between Hungarian Sex Workers and Pimps in Berlin’s Kurfürstenstraße

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Third Party Sex Work and Pimps in the Age of Anti-trafficking

Abstract

Attachments between sex workers and procurers in street-based prostitution are commonly described as the loverboy phenomenon in the academic and public discourse, when pimps pretend love in order to seduce and convince young girls or women to do sex work. In this paper, I provide an in-depth analysis of intimate relationships between Hungarian sex workers and pimps in an outdoor prostitution area in Berlin based on ethnographic fieldwork. I show a different narrative of intimate relationships between pimps and sex workers by looking at cases of women who started to work in prostitution as adults, and love relationship with pimps was not part of their recruitment. However, I explain that intimate partnership is the general pattern of pimp–sex worker dyads in this field as working agreements between pimps and sex workers often turn into intimate ties while living and working in an isolated, strongly sexualized environment, dominated by mainly male pimps who maintain their powerful position also by means of strong intimate bonds. I highlight that sex workers perceive very differently the role of pimps and intimate relationships, but all of them experience a high pressure to follow this pattern, especially if they want to be integrated in the social network. All in all, I show that love and intimacy play central role in the social structure of street-based prostitution, and the relationship with pimps also deeply affects the self-presentation and the agency of women in sex work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A public health department, where anonymous medical checks and gynacological examinations are offered for people without health insurance.

  2. 2.

    The role of ethnicity and the construction of Roma at this particular field site and regarding prostitution in general are complex issues that need further explanation. However, it is not in the main focus of this current paper and because of space limits I will not be able to discuss it more deeply here.

  3. 3.

    Prostitution and sex work are both contested terms that originate from different theoretical and political standpoints, as I will explain in the literature review. As I do not fully identify myself with any of these traditions (the abolitionist and the pro-sex feminist) I will use both terms in this paper interchangebly. However, I will refer to individuals engaged in prostitution as sex workers as this term shows prostitution as an income generating activity, not as the identity of the whole person (Kemala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema. Global Sex Workers. Rights, Resistance and Redefinition. Routledge, 1998. p. 3).

  4. 4.

    http://www.stoploverboys.nu/en/.

  5. 5.

    Female pimps are very exceptional; in Berlin I have encountered only cases, when women were members of male pimps’ families.

  6. 6.

    For the protection of my informants, I have anonymized the names of the cities as well.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all my informants, who were willing to share their stories with me and made this research possible. Further I am grateful to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation who has been generously supporting my Ph.D. research project on the same topic. I am thankful for the support of the coworkers of Frauentreff Olga. Furthermore, I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. Gökce Yurdakul, and Eva Fodor, Tom Rooney, Eva Mihalovics, Anna Szasz, Anna Chiritou, Livia Marshall and the two anonymous reviewers for their useful insights and comments on previous versions of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Diversity and Social Conflict, Institute of Social Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Noemi Katona

  2. Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin, Germany

    Noemi Katona

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  1. Noemi Katona
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Correspondence to Noemi Katona .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology , William Paterson University, New York, New York, USA

    Amber Horning

  2. Anthropology Department, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, New York, USA

    Anthony Marcus

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Katona, N. (2017). Loved or Seduced? Intimate Relationships Between Hungarian Sex Workers and Pimps in Berlin’s Kurfürstenstraße. In: Horning, A., Marcus, A. (eds) Third Party Sex Work and Pimps in the Age of Anti-trafficking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50305-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50305-9_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50303-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50305-9

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