This episode of Radio 4's Thinking Allowed series includes a segment on the female sex industry. Prostitution, an industry reckoned to be worth more than £770m a year in the UK, employing an estimated 80, 000 women in Britain, is scheduled for its first comprehensive overhaul in fifty years.
Laurie Taylor talks to Dr Teela Sanders, Lecturer in Sociology on Crime and Deviance at the University of Leeds, about the findings of her 10-month ethnographic study of women working in the licensed saunas, illegal brothels, massage parlours and from home (as escorts) in Birmingham. The segment is fist in the audio clip.