I realise this is an odd question to be asking, “What’s wrong with pimps?” but it is, at least to a certain extent, a serious one.

Now when I say pimp I don’t mean a slave master. Someone who kidnaps a woman and then forces her to have sex with strangers for money. No, that’s not the meaning of the word I have in mind at all. Rather, I mean the voluntary economic relationship, whereby a prostitute gives a portion of her earnings to the person who finds the customers for her.

Quite why I’m asking this is because of a change in the law coming up in the UK. Things are a little different there than they are in the US. Prostitution is legal in Britain as it always has been. But pimping, living off immoral earnings and soliciting have all always been illegal. This is now about to change:

There is one near certainty about the new law on prostitution introduced by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary: it will be tricky to convict anyone under it. Our Government didn’t dare adopt the Swedish solution and make sex with a prostitute illegal, so it took, broadly, the Finnish option instead and criminalised sex with a prostitute who is controlled by someone else. Since the Finnish law came into effect in June 2006, however, there has not been a single prosecution, largely because the police have problems proving that the customer knew he was dealing with a “controlled” woman.

Leave aside this difficulty and think for a moment instead about what it is that a pimp does. The law will be that it is illegal to purchase sex from a woman who is controlled by a pimp….but not illegal to purchase sex from someone who is not controlled by a pimp.

So, what is it that a pimp does? Well, it seems that in reality a pimp does the negotiating for the prostitute, finds the customers. In fact, acts as an agent.

In the neighborhood of Pullman, there was only one arrest made during the time Levitt and Venka collected data nearby Roseland had many more. What was the difference between the two neighborhoods? Pullman prostitutes tended to have pimps while Roseland prostitutes flew solo.

Pimps, it turns out, did a good job of directing customers to prostitutes and paid the women better wages. In fact, women in the survey who found out that the researchers had pimp connections asked to be put in touch with the pimps.

This research comes from Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) so we can be pretty certain that the result is real, not just the outcome of biased research methods. The full paper is here:

Our analysis also sheds light on issues of organizational form. Perhaps
surprisingly, in two of our neighborhoods that are side-by-side, prostitution activities are
organized along completely different models. In Roseland, there are no pimps and
women solicit customers from the street. Just a few blocks away in Pullman, all women
work with pimps who locate customers and set-up tricks, so that the prostitutes rarely
solicit on street corners. Under the pimp model, there are fewer transactions, but the
prices charged are substantially higher and the clientele is different. Prostitutes who
work with pimps appear to earn more, and are less likely to be arrested. It appears that
the pimps choose to pay efficiency wages. Consistent with this hypothesis, many of the
women who do not work with pimps are eager to work with pimps, and indeed we
observe a few switches in that direction over the course of the sample. Pimps are limited
by their ability to find customers, however, so they operate on a small scale.

This is what leads me on to my question of what’s wrong with pimps?

Yes, I understand the morality argument and so on but I’m also not sure that I want morality to be legislated. For different people have a different idea of what is moral and what isn’t, of course.

So we can see from this economic research that the relationship between a prostitute and a pimp is in fact an economic one. And that it’s a voluntary one, one that benefits both parties.

So, why this demonisation then? And why the insistence that the presence of a pimp makes the transaction illegal and the absence of one makes it legal?

No, I’m not particularly in favour of either prostitution or pimping: I completely fail to see the attraction myself. But I simply cannot work out this distinction that the British Government is trying to make between legal and illegal forms of it.