Digital Traces of Mobility, Migration and Risk in a Danish Population of Sex Workers

• In Event: Researching Illicit Markets: Online, Offline and In-Between

Abstract

The increasing use of internet-mediated tools as components of deviant and lawbreaking activity enables access to unique data. In addition to being economically feasible, these methods also provide alternative representations of social activity than traditional survey methodologies can, in particular with regards to the dynamic aspects of social life. We exploit these advantages to study the Danish population of sex workers. Using webcrawling we collect a dataset of online advertisements for sexual services from publicly available websites. This provides unique access to demographic data on a population of sex workers in continual change due to migration.
We present estimates for the composition of the population of sex workers operating in Denmark across gender identities, age, ethnicity, work type and countries of origin. Using the longitudinal aspect of the data we further profile the mobility of the population. Based on the demographic composition of the population we model significant predictors of sellers engaging in risky behavior, namely offering unsafe sex, and sellers accepting poorer working conditions (e.g. lower price, long hours) to study how these intersect with mobility and migration.

Authors

• Rasmus Munksgaard, University of Copenhagen

• Jakob Demant, University of Copenhagen