A Note on the Full Picture

Reality has many shades of gray. The stories told in Block 16: Live focus on the women who, by and large, chose this path — out of necessity, perhaps, but chose it. That is not the whole picture.

The skin trade existed alongside it: Chinese tongs, traffickers, organized crime that controlled women, saloon owners who advertised for "bar help" while looking for something else entirely. Those stories are real, and they deserve their own telling. Below are sources if you want to read further.

Historical Context: Tongs, Vice Economies, and Organized Crime

• Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York's Chinatown — Scott D. Seligman. A narrative history of Chinese tongs, vice economies, and the violence surrounding gambling and prostitution in New York's Chinatown.
• The Tongs of Chinatown (FoundSF) — A free historical overview of San Francisco's tongs, their role in vice districts, and their control over Chinese communities.
• The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream — Patrick Radden Keefe. A nonfiction account of a modern human-smuggling network run out of New York's Chinatown.
• The Paper Daughters of Chinatown — Heather B. Moore. A novel based on true events, following efforts to rescue trafficked Chinese women in late-19th/early-20th-century San Francisco.
• Human Trafficking and Piracy in Early Modern East Asia: Maritime Challenges to the Ming Dynasty Economy, 1370–1565 — Harriet Zurndorfer, Comparative Studies in Society and History (open access). Academic context on trafficking systems tied to early global trade.

Voices From the Trade: Agency and Structural Coercion

• Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry — ed. Frédérique Delacoste & Priscilla Alexander. First-person essays on agency, stigma, and conditions in the sex industry.
• Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor — Wendy Chapkis. An ethnographic study of women in erotic labor, examining choice and working conditions.
• Youth Who Trade Sex in the U.S.: Intersectionality, Agency, and Vulnerability — Carisa R. Showden & Samantha Majic (Temple University Press). Research on how young people navigate trading sex amid structural vulnerability.

Trafficking and Abolitionist Perspectives

This section presents an explicitly abolitionist framework, which holds that prostitution is inherently exploitative — a view some sex-worker advocacy groups dispute.

• Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths about Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade — Janice G. Raymond. Argues prostitution is structurally tied to inequality and trafficking.
• The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth — Julie Bindel. A critique of the "sex work" framing, focused on harms and organized crime.
• Trafficking, Prostitution and the Sex Industry: The Nordic Legal Model — Janice G. Raymond. An explainer on the Nordic model, which criminalizes buyers rather than sellers.
• Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence — Open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal.
• Prostitution Research & Education (PRE) — Melissa Farley et al. Research and survivor testimony on links between prostitution and trafficking.
• Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International (CATW) — Policy reports and legal analysis.

Documentaries

• Sex Trafficking in America (PBS Frontline, 2019) — Follows coerced young women and the law enforcement units identifying trafficking victims.
• Born into Brothels (2004) — Oscar-winning documentary on children growing up in Calcutta's red-light district. (Streaming availability varies; check JustWatch or a similar service.)
• Montclair State University Global Center on Human Trafficking — Film Guide — Curated list of documentaries on human trafficking.

General Overviews and Organizations

• The Exodus Road — "10 Books About Human Trafficking" — Reading list mixing survivor memoirs, investigative journalism, and policy analysis.
• Polaris Project — Data and reports on U.S. trafficking patterns.
• Rights4Girls — Survivor-centered reports and policy advocacy for girls and young women.
• Breaking Free — Minnesota-based direct services for women exiting prostitution and trafficking.
• European Women's Lobby — Pan-European advocacy network working toward a Europe free of prostitution.

Note: Links were checked at the time this page was written. Please verify they're still active before publishing, and note that some sources above (particularly in the "Trafficking and Abolitionist Perspectives" section) represent one side of an active, contested policy debate — sex-worker advocacy groups hold different views on these same questions.