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Managing Conflict: An Examination of Three-Way Alliances in Canadian Escort and Massage Businesses

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

Abstract

Weitzer (2009) notes that the sex work employment triangle involves three groups: workers, clients, and various third parties; the latter includes pimps, facilitators, brokers, managers, and others who help organize or facilitate sex work. Our research focuses on the third group, and in particular on managers who work in legal or licensed sex industry businesses. We gathered data in 2013 from 43 managers of escort agency and massage parlor businesses in five Canadian census metropolitan areas. Following Weitzer’s (2009) recommendation, managers were interviewed as part of larger study that included people who sell and who purchase sexual services. We argue that one central responsibility of managers is to prevent and intercede in conflicts between workers and clients, as well as between workers, and that managers play an important role in the occupational health and safety of sex industry populations. These findings make a novel contribution to the sociology of service work literature; they are also important in the context of recent legal changes in Canada which made commercial-sex businesses and third-party material benefits from them, illegal.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Addictions Research of BC, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

    Lauren Casey, Rachel Phillips, Mikael Jansson, Samantha Magnus & Dan Reist

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Bill McCarthy

  3. Department of Sociology, Centre for Addictions Research of BC, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

    Cecilia Benoit

  4. Department of Sociology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Bill Reimer & Frances M. Shaver

  5. Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

    Chris Atchison

Authors
  1. Lauren Casey
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  2. Bill McCarthy
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  3. Rachel Phillips
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  4. Cecilia Benoit
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  5. Mikael Jansson
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  6. Samantha Magnus
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  7. Chris Atchison
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  8. Bill Reimer
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  9. Dan Reist
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  10. Frances M. Shaver
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lauren Casey .

Editor information

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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Casey, L. et al. (2017). Managing Conflict: An Examination of Three-Way Alliances in Canadian Escort and Massage Businesses. 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_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50305-9_7

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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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