Parlor to Back Alley: Tracing the Migration of Prostitution after Legal Changes

• In Event: Immigration and Migration Policies: Emerging Issues

Abstract

Can tougher laws effectively deter criminal activities? Leveraging a prostitution-related judicial interpretation in 2017, which specified the minimum number required to qualify as organized pimping to three, we evaluate the Chinese government’s recent legal efforts to combat organized prostitution by drawing upon novel datasets consisting of more than 110,000 administrative penalties imposed on sex workers, clients, and other third parties, along with 3,300 national criminal judgments entered against pimps. We find that the judicial interpretation, despite its aim at reducing prostitution activities through the crackdown on pimps, is only more effective at facilitating prosecutions against pimps operating in previously conspicuous establishments such as clubhouses, massage parlors, and karaoke bars. Moreover, the legal efforts, instead of uniformly curbing organized prostitution, have only led to the displacement of prostitution from conspicuous establishments to more private venues such as residential apartments due to pimps’ heightened susceptibility to criminal repercussions. Our findings suggest that the segmented nature of crime markets and the varying impact this judicial interpretation has on law enforcement may undermine the effectiveness of legislative/judicial initiatives; in our case, legal efforts aimed at deterring organized prostitution may only result in the transformation of prostitution activities into more obscure and diffuse forms. Despite the Chinese party-state’s need to maintain regime legitimacy via confirmation of conservative social and moral values, when dealing with norm-violating behaviors and their associated criminal activities, imposing strict legal measures solely on criminal intermediaries may prove inadequate in curbing these behaviors without addressing the underlying social phenomena that drive them.

Authors

• Yutian An, Harvard University

• Yingjie Fan, Princeton University

• Xuancheng Qian, Princeton University

• Leo Yang, University of California San Diego