ABSTRACT
Women who engage in sex work have a wide range of lifestyles and can work in vastly different settings. An understanding of the social context in which prostitution occurs is important in order to promote AIDS prevention and service delivery in this population.1 Unfortunately, epidemiological models of AIDS risk behavior tend to address prostitution as individual sexual behavior but often ignore its social context. Although patterns of prostitution may differ across cities or regions of the country, much of the research assumes that patterns of street-level sex work are similar.2 This chapter demonstrates that street prostitution varies considerably by race, drug use, and locale within one city, and on the basis of these differences we suggest targeted strategies to prevent the spread of HIV and to provide needed services to this population. In other words, the social ecology of street prostitution is an important variable in both the manifestation of prostitution and in the kinds of harmreduction practices that need to be tailored to workers in particular locales.
