Procuring (prostitution)

Procuring or pandering is the facilitation or provision of a prostitute or sex worker in the arrangement of a sex act with a customer. A procurer, colloquially called a pimp (if male) or a madam (if female), is an agent for prostitutes who collects part of their earnings. The procurer may receive this money in return for advertising services, physical protection, or for providing, and possibly monopolizing, a location where the prostitute may engage clients. Like prostitution, the legality of certain actions of a madam or a pimp vary from one region to the next.

Examples of procuring include:

Procuring can often take abusive forms. Pimps may punish clients for physical abuse or failure to pay, and enforce exclusive rights to 'turf' where their prostitutes may advertise and operate with less competition. In the many places where prostitution is outlawed, sex workers have decreased incentive to report abuse for fear of self-incrimination, and increased motivation to seek any physical protection from clients and law enforcement that a pimp might provide.

The pimp–prostitute relationship is widely understood to be abusive and possessive, with the pimp/madam using techniques such as psychological intimidation, manipulation, starvation, rape and/or gang rape, beating, confinement, threats of violence toward the victim's family, forced drug use and the shame from these acts. Marcus et al., however, suggested that these assumptions about abusive relationships represent stereotyped oppression narratives that may only represent a small percentage of the relationships between pimps and sexworkers. Pimps can be arrested and charged with pandering and are legally known as procurers. This combined with the tendency to identify pimping with African American masculinity may provide some of the explanation for why 62% of all "confirmed" human traffickers in the United States are African American men. In fact, it has recently been argued that some of the extreme examples of violence cited in the article below come primarily from such stereotyping supported by Hollywood screenwriters, selective and decontextualized trial transcripts, and studies that have only interviewed parties to sex commerce in institutions of rescue, prosecution, and punishment, rather than engaging rigorous study in situ.

In most places where prostitution is illegal, so is procuring, whether the relationship between the procurer and prostitute is formal or informal. Where prostitution is decriminalized or regulated, procuring may or may not be legal. If it is legal, however, it is only forms that do not involve threats or other forms of non-consensual acts towards the prostitute or other persons that are permitted. In jurisdictions where procuring is allowed, the regulations of if differ widely from place to place.

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