The brothel system as a social network: an approach to the sexual exploitation of women from a feminist perspective and social network analysis (Bahía Blanca, 2003-2015)

Ma. Valentina Riganti ()
Additional contact information
Ma. Valentina Riganti: Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

AWARI, 2023, vol. 4

Abstract: This article reconstructs the sexual exploitation networks that acted in the brothel system of Bahía Blanca and identifies its main actors between 2003 and 2015 from a feminist perspective and using Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a methodology. In the phase that began with post-convertibility, Bahía Blanca, a town located in the southwest of Buenos Aires (Argentina), had a series of geographical, economic and social characteristics that gave it relevance in the national brothel system. In addition, there were local ordinances regulating cabarets and clubs that came into tension with national laws on the prevention of pimping and provided the possibility for sexual exploitation networks to act legally. In this scenario, the main actors moved constantly in the tension between what was legal and what was illegal. The use of diverse sources, ranging from court cases to journalistic articles, analyzed considering the ARS, allowed us to characterize the resulting network and compute the degree centrality and the betweenness centrality of each node. Thus, we were able to recognize the central actors and link their prominence with some attributes they had. Likewise, among the final considerations we point out that the actors, relationships and norms of the brothel system were intertwined with Bahian society and that its operating logic was crossed by the existence of power relations based on gender.

Keywords: sexual exploitation; brothel system; feminism; social network analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://awari.pro-metrics.org/index.php/a/article/download/46/45 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:prm:awjrnl:v:4:y:2023

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://awari.pro-metrics.org/index.php/a

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in AWARI from AWARI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pro-Metrics Editorial Office ().