Sell Them Mothafuckin' Hoes a Dream"" \u2014 A Look Into the Business Structure Behind Recruitment and Retention in Sex Trafficking

Sex trafficking in the United States is an enormous illegal underground business economy that involves the sexual exploitation of many persons. Due to the large nature of the sex trafficking business and the many different types of sex trafficking, it is helpful for social workers, government agencies, and activists to understand the intricacies of the various types of sex trafficking. This research focused on determining the human resources business structures behind pimp businesses that relied on mental coercion of the victim. The data source used, Pimpfeet.com—an online pimp authored blog—provided data from actual pimps on their business practices that were analyzed to determine trends in recruitment and retention. These trends were compared to human resource management theories from business literature to determine to what extent, or if at all, a pimp’s business recruited and retained workers in a way that was similar to how a legal business would, according to human resources strategies. The data extracted from Pimpfeet.com and used in this study consisted of 69 pimp quotes that were put into three recruitment categories and five retention categories based on human resource management literature in order to see which categories were used for recruitment and retention by pimps. This study found that pimp recruitment and retention followed, to some extent, the same models described in the human resource management literature, with slight modifications. This study showed that job embeddedness theory (Holtom, Mitchel and Lee, 2009) was able to explain much of why sex trafficking victims are retained so well by pimps since they are so embedded in the prostitution lifestyle. These findings show the different business techniques that pimps use for recruitment and retention of sex workers and are useful for understanding how a social worker, government entity or an activist can combat these forces to help remove victims from a pimp’s control, or keep victims from getting recruited in the first place. Further areas of research related to this topic were suggested.