The demand side of the market for sex services in Britain

The market for sex services is a market like other markets. There is a demand for services (by clients), a supply of services (by sex workers), and a price. However, unlike other markets we often don't know much about the demand or supply of sex services. Data isn't widely available, because one or both sides of the market may be illegal, or participation in the market is stigmatised. Nevertheless, some studies do manage to get data that highlights some features of the market (see here and here, for example).

As another example, this 2018 article by Marilena Locatelli (University of Turin) and Steinar Strøm (University of Oslo), published in the journal Kyklos (ungated version here) looks at the demand side of the market in Britain. Specifically, they used data from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL3), undertaken in 2010-2012, which collected data on whether, and how often, men aged 20-74 years had purchased sex services. Locatelli and Strøm looked at the factors associated with purchase of sex services, and found that:

Men travelling abroad, living in London, drug users, religious men and men with middle-class income are more often together with prostitutes than other [men].

There are a couple of surprises in there. Locatelli and Strøm don't have a good explanation for why men who report belonging to a religion are more likely to purchase, and purchase more, sex services than men who do not belong to a religion. Locatelli and Strøm explain their results in terms of income in the following way. Sex services were purchased most by middle-income men. They were purchased less by low-income men, which is likely to be an income effect, suggesting that sex is a normal good (like many other goods, consumers buy more as their income increases). Sex services were also purchased less by high-income men, where the income effect may be outweighed by a potential loss of reputation for high-income consumers of sex services. However, that should also apply to religious men, and yet that doesn't appear to be the case.

Locatelli and Strøm highlight one other result that has policy implications, which is that:

...learning about sex in school has a significant and sizeable negative marginal effect on the expected number of times with a prostitute. To require that sex education at school should be compulsory in all schools could therefore help in reducing prostitution in Britain.

That sex education may lower demand for sex services will come as a surprise to many people. On the other hand, Locatelli and Strøm's results don't answer the question of how sex education would reduce demand for sex services. Perhaps sex education leads to more casual sex (an obvious substitute for paid sex). They don't have data on casual sex, but they do find that engaging in masturbation is associated with less demand for sex services (although, as almost all of the sample reports masturbation, it is difficult to read too much into that result).

This study provides some interesting results, but there are much more important reasons to support sex education in schools than hoping it will reduce demand for sex services.