Far more men could be working as escorts than you might expect, according to data collected by importio, a web-based data scraper. Importio analysed the profiles of thousands of members of AdultWork, which is according to them, the most popular site for advertising by sex workers in the UK. There, 42% of men advertising escorting services were men. This flies in the face of common expectations on the gender divide in sex work. Think that looking at online profiles on one website isn’t the best way to analyse the sex work industry? Well, it actually could more accurate than what the government is doing. In official government figures – no sex workers are men. This year the Office of National Statistics (ONS) decided to include ‘vices’ like prostitution and drugs in their estimation of GDP. The result suggested that the UK spends about £4.3bn on prostitution in an average year. However, the ONS figures were based on a telephone study of brothels in London in 2004, which only collected information about women. And only in London. In reality – many thousands of men may be working as prostitutes in the UK…
Read more: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ampp3d/government-thinks-only-women-escorts-4441043