Demand for sexual services in Britain: Does Sex Education Matter?
| Author | Steinar Strøm,Marilena Locatelli |
| Published date | 01 November 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/sjpe.12198 |
| Date | 01 November 2018 |
DEMAND FOR SEXUAL SERVICES
IN BRITAIN: DOES SEX EDUCATION
MATTER?
Marilena Locatelli* and Steinar Strøm**
ABSTRACT
On survey data from 1999 to 2001 and 2010 to 2012, we estimate the demand
for commercial sex among British men. We estimate a zero-inflated count model,
which takes into account the probability of not participating in the sex market
and number of times with a prostitute. We find that sex education in school has
a negative and significant role in the demand for paid sex. We also find that
men with a typical middle-class income are more likely to buy sex. Travelling
abroad or living in London increases the likelihood of British men buying sex.
II
NTRODUCTION
The main goal of our paper is to estimate the demand for commercial sex
among British men. We estimate the impact of observed variables on demand
for paid sex, based on a zero-inflated count model estimated on British survey
data from 2010 to 2012. One of the variables is whether the men have learned
about sex in school or not.
In Britain, prostitution is legal, but a number of related activities, including
soliciting in a public place, kerb crawling, keeping brothel, pimping and pan-
dering, are illegal. The Policing and Crime Act 2009 makes it illegal to pay
for sex with a prostitute who has been ‘subjected to force’ and this is a strict
liability offence. The legal age for solicitation is 18 (House of Common Home
Affairs Committee, Prostitution, Third Report of Session 2016–17). In spite of
the problematic aspects related to prostitution, its demand has increased from
1990 to 2010 (White and Johonson, 2014).
In the literature, prostitution is widely studied including topics such as vio-
lence, sex tourism, drug abuse, HIV risk and necessity of regulation (Gerthler
and Shah, 2011; Immordino and Russo, 2015). An important branch of the
empirical literature on sexual behaviour focuses on sexually transmitted infec-
tions: Men paying for sex are considered to be a bridging population of the
diffusion of such type of diseases, since their paid partners are often
*The Ragnar Frisch Centre of Economic Research and University of Turin
**The Ragnar Frisch Centre of Economic Research and University of Oslo
Scottish Journal of Political Economy, DOI: 10.1111/sjpe.12198, Vol. 65, No. 5, November 2018
©2018 Scottish Economic Society.
550
individuals at high risk for what concerns sexually transmitted infections
(White and Johonson, 2014).
Of special interest for our paper are studies of the British sex market.
Cameron and Collins (2003) study the male decisions concerning whether or
not to buy sex. They used data from a national survey of sexual attitudes and
lifestyles in the United Kingdom in 1990/1991. Two logit probabilities are esti-
mated; the probability of ever have been together with a prostitute and the
probability of have been together with a prostitute during the last 5 years.
They find that important determinants for buying sex are health risk and reli-
gious denomination. Ward et al. (2005) based their analysis on the national
probability sample surveys of sexual attitudes and lifestyles (‘Natsal’) of men
aged 16–44 resident in Britain. Their data sets are from 1990 and 2000. They
find that paying for sex is more frequent among men aged between 25 and
34 years, who were never married and who lived in London. They do not find
any association with ethnicity, social class, homosexual contact or injecting
drug use. Men who paid for sex are more likely to report 10 or more sexual
partners in the previous 5 years; only a minority of their lifetime sexual part-
ners (19.3%) were prostitutes. They were more likely to meet prostitutes
abroad. Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews, Sanders (2008) found that the
typical male client in the sex market in Britain is an ordinary person searching
for intimacy with a woman. However, the sample is small and skewed towards
white middle-class men. Jones et al. (2015) use the British Natsal-3 data set.
They report that over the past 20 years, young people refer to school lessons
as their main source of information about sex. However, in 2010–2012, as
much as 68.1% of young men reported not knowing enough when they first
felt ready for sexual experience.
Recently, there have been a few international studies concerning the impact
of sex education programme on the sexual behaviour of young people. Kirby
(2011) gives a review of several international studies assessing the effectiveness
of sex education programmes in reducing risky sexual behaviour and number
of partners among adolescents and young people. Reis et al. (2011) studied
the significance of sex education in schools and its effects in promoting
healthy sexual behaviour among university students in Portugal. The sample
included 3278 students. The most notable finding is that students who had sex
education in school mentioned more often having had fewer sexual risk beha-
viours (less occasional partners, less sex associated to alcohol and drugs, less
unwanted pregnancies and abortions). Wylie (2010) reviews the international
experiences concerning the impact of sex education in school on sexual
behaviour.
To our knowledge, there have been no studies that analyse the effects of
sex education in school on the demand for paid sex. For this reason, we focus
on sex education in Britain, but many other variables are also included in
explaining the behaviour of British men in the commercial sex market. The
econometric model we apply to study this phenomenon assumes that zero
contacts with prostitutes occurs in two ways: as a realization of taking part or
not in the market for sexual services and as realization of a count process,
DEMAND FOR SEXUAL SERVICES IN BRITAIN 551
Scottish Journal of Political Economy
©2018 Scottish Economic Society
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