Skills and the Transnational Street Business of Pimping

The focus on illuminating the skills of migrants and showing which capacities are needed for them to succeed within specific business niches abroad has a central role in migration research. Important work focusing on migrant skills has been published in the recent decades, for example within research among what is termed “highly skilled” migrants or migrants in education, such as Indian IT, science, and technology professionals (Ilkjær 2015, 2016), highly educated South Asian migrants (Niraula and Valentin 2019), and educational migrants (Olwig and Valentin 2014). These contributions show how specific skills—also mundane skills in grocery shopping and wayfinding, which are not necessarily linked to the migrants’ specific business niche (Ilkjær 2015: 79–110)—are vital in order for their migration (and return-migration) to succeed, both for themselves and their families. The research also points out the consequences of the migrants’ lack of particular skills, such as local cultural skills or social navigation skills—sometimes in contrast to other skills that they master—which gravely affects their migratory experience. This highlights the general importance of carefully analyzing migrants’ different kinds of skills, and not conflating the many different kinds, which are necessary for them to master in their migration (Ilkjær 2015: 79–110). Inspired by this call for differentiation, this article zooms in on the intimate, interpersonal skills that are central to the pimps’ success abroad, while acknowledging that other skills—such as the pimps’ navigation of local social hierarchies at home in Galați, which I have analyzed elsewhere (Korsby 2017)—also play a vital role in their migratory success. Etymologically, skills connote positive associations, in that a skilled person is someone who can “do something well” (Ilkjær 2015: 82) in order to achieve something, in contrast to ignorance and not-knowing (Dilley 2010). It is this capability of the pimps, exemplified in their ability to read other people and their desires, that this article unfolds.

Although not necessarily using “skills” as a term, another body of academic literature that is relevant for this discussion is the work on “hustling” (Thieme 2018; Wacquant 2008) and “street smartness” (Di Nunzio 2012). This research is particularly relevant to my informants, because it deals with how people in the street or in other uncertain—and sometimes illegal—landscapes navigate their social relations and make a livelihood. Loïc Wacquant defines hustlers as persons who are able to profit from different kinds of schemes in the street economy, ranging from free food to the sale of drugs (Wacquant 2008: 62). Marco Di Nunzio writes that street smartness is an ability that people “have to have and manage in order to get by and navigate the street” (Di Nunzio 2012: 437). To be street smart is thus to have particular skills with which one can navigate life in the street economy, and this includes knowing how to maneuver the opportunities for getting by that arise in the moment (Di Nunzio 2012: 440). In relation to my informants, adding the complexity of being a migrant in the informal economy in a new place adds yet another layer of skills needed.

Entering or creating a transnational street business abroad—defined as “business niches that emerge in direct response to migrants’ need for mobility and their attempts to generate livelihoods in new locations” (Ravnbøl, Korsby and Simonsen 2023: 3)—is not an easy task for any migrant. And in the case of my informants, it is a task that requires thorough preparation in order to ensure the appropriate consolidation of the relationships with the sex workers in question. This is particularly evident because third-party facilitation of sex work is criminalized, and entering into not only the informal street economy but also into an illegal landscape abroad takes preparation. This article zooms in on the pre-migratory phases of preparation for entering the transnational street business niche of selling and managing sexual services. Preparing for a journey abroad should ideally allow the pimps to enter the street economy anywhere in the EU, since it is not always clear from the beginning which destination country they will end up in (Korsby 2015, 2017). This means that my informants need a set of transnational street-business skills that are refined with a view to their potential use in several different places.

The sale of sexual services is a business that is part of the street economy in many countries all over the world, and in the street, both local and migrant sex workers and pimps meet. However, the focus of this article is on pimping as a transnational street business, and thus on migrants and how they enter the informal economy abroad. Important scholarly work has shed light on the lives of migrant sex workers (see, e.g., Andrijasevic 2010; Brennan 2004; Day and Ward 2004; Korsby 2023; Plambech 2020; Skilbrei and Polyakova 2006), as well as on the contested theme of human trafficking. Several critical academic analyses have called attention to the often moralizing or sensationalist misuse of human trafficking as a concept (see, e.g., Doezema 2000, 2010; Kempadoo 2005; Korsby 2015, 2023; Lisborg 2014; Plambech 2014). This critique points out that when the term is being used to describe specific sex work cases where it is not applicable, it minimizes the agency and decision-making power of sex workers. This is problematic, both because it portrays sex workers as purely helpless victims versus their all-powerful pimps, but also because it blurs the focus on the actual cases of exploitation where national and international legislation on human trafficking is absolutely necessary and applicable. Overall, a conflation between transnational sex work and human trafficking often seems to exist (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998), even though these are two different phenomena and two different legal categories.

Despite the focus on sex work in the literature, pimps and other kinds of third-party facilitators are often only mentioned in passing or analyzed through the accounts of others in the sex industry, with sex workers or social workers as the main interlocutors (see, e.g., Day 2007; Dorais and Corriveau 2009; Raphael, Reichert and Powers 2010; Raphael and Shapiro 2004). Only few studies of pimps exist that are based on participant observation and ethnographic fieldwork, many of them focusing on pimps in the US (Bovenkerk and van San 2011; Horning and Marcus 2017; Horning, Thomas, and Jordenö 2019; Horning et al. 2020; Marcus et al. 2014; Milner and Milner [1972] 2010). Besides these contributions, pimps are rarely the focus of in-depth academic attention, which is a remarkable lacuna in light of how much political and media attention sex work—and human trafficking—receives. Therefore, little is known about how pimps—who in my empirical material primarily identify as male—position themselves in the unfolding of gendered power dynamics within this particular area of the market economy. This article aims to add to the existing body of literature on sex work and pimping by providing the perspective of pimps who migrate, showing how their business arrangements with migrant sex workers unfold, and to provide nuances to simplistic victim/perpetrator tropes within this field.

In the literature on transnational sex work, there is rich material on migrant sex workers’ backgrounds of venturing into sex work, such as an acute crisis or conflict occurring, or a general desire to travel and make money and thus improve one's own and one's family's life situations (see, e.g., Andrijasevic 2010; Brennan 2004; Plambech 2014, 2022; Skilbrei and Polyakova 2006). With this article, I offer another layer to these important contributions by analyzing situations in which pimps function as facilitators of sex workers’ migration. This perspective illuminates the complex intimacies in the recruitment process of potential sex workers, showing new aspects of how transnational sex work is instigated and which relational building blocks it rests on.

Fieldwork in a Criminal Landscape: Methods and Ethical Challenges

This article is based on 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork, primarily carried out in Italy and eastern Romania, which started in 2007 and is ongoing. Starting with fieldwork for my master's thesis in anthropology, these fieldwork periods—one to ten months in duration at a time—were carried out mainly across my PhD and postdoc research projects, all dealing with sex work, human trafficking, forced labor, theft, transnational crime, and pimping. My research started out with fieldwork among 16 minors at a shelter for victims of human trafficking in Italy (Korsby 2013, 2023), before expanding my focus to the pimps and the human traffickers. I then carried out ten months of fieldwork and subsequently one month of additional fieldwork, primarily in Galați in Eastern Romania, but also in Italy. This fieldwork was carried out primarily among 19 main informants, all of whom are pimps or convicted human traffickers, as well as their social networks of family members, friends, lawyers, wives, children, parents, business connections, and sex workers (Korsby 2015, 2017). It is from this part of my fieldwork that the main part of this article's empirical material stems.

Regarding my choice of methods during fieldwork in an illegal landscape, I quickly learned that building trust by spending time together and doing things other than actual interviews—such as grocery shopping and participation in family celebrations—were the most essential methodological first steps. My participation in family life and involvement with my interlocutors’ wives, parents, siblings, and children thus became important parts of my fieldwork, and these kinds of involvements gradually paved the way to conducting actual interviews with the pimps about their business, some of which I was even allowed to record. My empirical material is thus based mainly on the classic ethnographic method of participant observation as well as semi-structured interviews and numerous conversations while cooking, walking, or taking care of children. Language-wise, I learned Romanian and Italian in order to carry out my fieldwork. Towards the end of my fieldwork, I gave a few of my interlocutors one-time cameras for them to make photo diaries of their everyday lives. I also gave a dictaphone to one of the pairs of sex worker and pimp as they were planning to leave for Switzerland, so that they could record their experiences during their journey. These alternative methods provided me with surprisingly rich material about the relationships between the pimps and the sex workers.

Ethically, fieldwork in a criminal field like this one poses challenges on several levels. Besides taking my own and my informants’ safety into careful consideration, and besides abiding by the general ethical guidelines for anthropological fieldwork,² extra care had to be given to anonymity practices and the safe storage of data. During fieldwork in criminal fields, you have to “tag along” (Tourigny 2004: 115), but with ethical considerations every step of the way, for example regarding whether to react or refrain from acting in particularly charged situations of potential violence or aggression. On a larger level, ethnographic fieldwork with criminals—and especially with people like the transnational pimps who in public discourse are often referred to as “immoral migrants”—opens up questions about who and what we should be studying. Having researched the highly contested fields of human trafficking and sex work since 2007 and knowing the weight of these themes on the international political agenda, my stance is that the ethical, political, and societal benefits of getting insights into all aspects of these complex phenomena are significant. The significance—both within and beyond academia—of ethnographically documenting such phenomena has thus steered my research, with the hope that it will contribute with added nuance to understandings of sex work and the workings of the global sex industry (Korsby 2015: 37–38).

Lover Boys

Those pimps and sex workers who do not end up collaborating with a brothel abroad (Korsby 2017) often end up on the streets of big European cities, such as the access roads leading to the larger highways surrounding Rome in Italy. This area is densely populated by sex workers of all ages, who stand on the side of the street in dispersed groups, and in the intense, constant traffic of clients’ cars. The last time I visited this area outside Rome, it was a warm summer night, and the area was hectic and busy: traffic was flowing at a slow pace, and the air was full of cars honking their horns, people yelling, traffic exhaust and noise. The many cars not only contained clients, but also quite a few NGO social workers offering health services and handing out condoms through the car windows. The pimps would rarely be seen or be present in this busy street scene, but would be nearby if anything should happen that required their assistance, such as if a client became problematic. The women often told me that the “good pimps,” as they called them, would write down all the license plates of the cars that the sex workers entered in order to keep track of their whereabouts, thus being able to react if they did not come back on time, which might indicate that a client had become violent.

In his remark at the start of this article, Sebastian is referring to his experiences as a pimp of entering into agreements with potential sex workers to go abroad with him to do sex work. Being placed at the lower end of the hierarchy, Sebastian and most of my other informants do the work on the ground: they are the ones who make the initial contacts with a woman they want to take abroad. As they explained to me, they spend time with her, make her feel comfortable, and make arrangements for the journey—they are the “lover boys” (iubăreți). In this article, I explore what it takes to be successful as a pimp, taking the “lover boys” as my point of departure. It should be noted that the pimping hierarchy ranges from the lover boys to the “big fish” (pește mare). The big fish work at the management level of the lower placed pimps’ activities, simultaneously with managing—but not personally executing—other illegal activities both locally and abroad, such as cloning credit cards and organizing burglaries (Korsby 2015; 2017: 117–118).

During my fieldwork, I observed the pimps’ attempts to recruit new women, I met the pimps when they returned from their journeys abroad, and I heard them share experiences of the challenges and successes they had had with the sex workers. When meeting them before and after their journeys, as well as when following those who also pimped locally in Galaţi in their everyday businesses, I was often stunned by their quite elaborate explanations as to how pimping was done and how one became successful at it. In this article, I argue that the skills of pimping are not just random abilities that one can apply when necessary. Not everyone can become a pimp, let alone a skilled one. Pimping involves a deep understanding of interpersonal relations and being able to “read” other people.

Attentiveness, Scanning, and Reading Desires

There are many pimps who are strong, but you need the brain. Some are big [he shows his muscles on his right arm], but they have a chicken brain [he points to his head]. I buy the girl³ chocolate, I tell her nice things. I am sweet with her, I give her presents. I need to understand her mind. I enter into her mind [pătrund în mintea ei]. What does this girl want? What does she like? If a woman feels beautiful when she is with you, the girl will like you. She feels sexy, attractive. It is like a flower: if you don't give it water, it will not grow, it will fall down. It is like this with the girl: if you do these things, the girl's heart [inimă] will blossom. If you charm the girl, then it is all good, then you don't have the fear [frică] in you, because then you know that she will not tell the police about you if they catch her. It is about trust [încredere].

At the beginning of the article, we heard Sebastian explain how the pimps promise the women “the ocean” but in the end only give them a glass of water. To respond to my curiosity as to what that entailed and how the pimps would get close to the women they wanted to recruit, Alex, another informant, energetically provided me with the above explanation of how one successfully approaches a woman with the hope that she will agree to go abroad and work in sex work. He was referring to three elements, which I came to understand as crucial for the successful recruitment of a woman into one's pimping business. First, one had to be smart and sly: having physical power did not get one very far, as it was intelligence and a deep understanding of other people that counted. Second, to assess whether a woman would be the right person to collaborate with as his sex worker, the pimp needed to “read” her and her desires in different ways. Third, as a part of “opening up” the woman to his advances, the pimp had to charm her with presents such as clothes or flowers, and importantly he had to tell her nice words, which she wanted to hear. From what I observed and heard from my informants, the pimps’ abilities in reading or “scanning,” as they also called it, seemed to have two sides: one focused on the individual, the other on the general social landscape. This latter form could be a scanning of the environment and the atmosphere among people in a given situation: it happened on an everyday basis when hanging out in the parking lot or when drinking a coffee at the local café, and this kind of attentiveness was intrinsic to the pimps’ ongoing mapping of their surroundings (Korsby 2017), both at home in Galați and in the street economy abroad.

The first-mentioned layer of scanning was more focused on the individual, whether a prospective sex worker, a new business partner, or a client looking to buy sexual services. To scan or read a woman in this manner was a way of assessing whether she had potential as a sex worker. On the one hand, this scanning was played out on the outside by looking at the person's clothes and behavior and assessing what one knew about his or her family background. On the other hand, according to the pimps, the scanning could go much deeper than that, and this deep scanning was what the pimps employed when assessing a new woman for their business. This was a scanning on the inside, entering into the woman's interior domain: it was an entering into her mind [îi pătrundea în minte], as Alex said above, which was a phrase I heard repeatedly from the pimps. The purpose of the scanning was for the pimp to gain insights into the woman's desires and thoughts, needs and vulnerabilities, through which he would achieve an understanding of her (cf. Williamson and Cluse-Tolar 2002: 1080). If the pimp entered the woman's mind successfully, he would know even more about how to behave with her, and in response she would feel relaxed and safe and thus hopefully stay by his side.

While spending time with the pimps, I started noticing their observant ways of assessing and paying attention to people and changes in atmosphere. When a person entered a room, the pimps quickly seemed to get a sense of what the person wanted, which could be effective when getting clients for the women they were pimping or when deciding when, where, and how to move regarding a burglary or the installation of technical devices for credit card fraud at an ATM machine. The pimps had a particular way of looking deeply at new acquaintances without staring, looking at how the person moved, talked, and engaged with others. They were hyper- attentive to shifts in atmosphere that could point to dangers, threats, openings, or invitations: they seemed to embody a certain vigilance (cf. Vigh 2011). Being skilled in vigilance was a valued trait when navigating not only in their local landscape in Galați, but also in the street economy abroad, where other pimps, clients, and law enforcement could be potential threats.

The pimps’ attentiveness also extended to clients looking to buy sexual services, once they had established their transnational street business abroad. It was an ability to scan, which moved deeper than the outward appearance—an ability to read other people, to assess them for an overview of their aims and desires. In the words of Sebastian, who was talking about his interaction with clients looking to purchase sexual services:

You also have to look at the client's face. But he can also be playing theatre [acting a part]. So, you can't see it all the time. The thing is, not all the girls have the same price. And men want different things. Some men want beauty, and some just want to get his pistol going, you know. Some want pleasure, some want more horny things. You look at how he dresses, how he acts, how he speaks. It is like a scan, and you also need it because there are dangerous people in the world. Maybe the person wants to take your girl, or rape her. You must focus and enter into his mind [trebuie să-i pătrunzi in minte]. Just looking at the person, you cannot read his book, so you must speak with him; that is important. So, you play the stupid guy, ask questions and get him to talk.

To look at a person visually was the first part of the scan—how people dressed, acted, and spoke—but this was not enough if you wanted to read the person's “book” and search out what he desired. To deepen the scan, to enter into the person's mind, one needed to speak to him or her. As another of my close informants, Andrei, said: “I know how to feel [simt] the girls and what they want. I can feel this. I listen to what they say, and what they do not say. That silence also talks.” The desires and inner landscape to which the pimp was seeking access could thus be the client's sexual desire, but also the sex worker's desire: did she really want to go abroad, and was she tough enough to make it in the competitive street economy? These were central questions to clarify before entering into a collaboration with a prospective sex worker.

According to the pimps, a central part of reading desires consisted of understanding whether the woman in question had a deep desire and need to make money. They explained that this did not necessarily depend on whether people were poor or not: some poor people did not have that desire within them, they said, and that evaluation was an important part of the scanning. As Sebastian said about his ex-girlfriend, whom he had pimped in Italy:

I was nice with her. I bought her gifts. When you buy gifts for a girl here from [our neighborhood] it is special, because it is not so common here, people are poor. That is what you do to seduce a girl. And you can see on a girl, if she really needs money, so she will be open.

Here Sebastian points to the important ability to assess whether a woman is especially drawn to making money. To clarify further, he gave me the example of the local kiosk owner's daughter, Crina, who would never give in to his seduction—he would not even try, since he could tell that her longing for money was not very strong. This shows that the reading of other people's desires is an essential skill for the pimps as a technique for understanding the “composition” of both the sex workers and their clients, as well as others in their surroundings.

Social Skillfulness: Instillation of Love

Earlier in this article, one of my informants, Alex, made a comparison between watering a flower that would otherwise wither and his relationship with a woman he wanted to enroll in his pimping business. His statement points to the importance of displaying care, and of having a deep knowledge of the woman, whom he hoped would be leaving with him to sell sexual services abroad—having a feel for what she wanted and desired. In his line of thinking, this would ensure that she would be devoted to him and therefore be able to protect him from the police if she herself was caught. According to the pimps, this insight into a woman's desires, which shaped the way they interacted with her so as to make her “feel beautiful,” could enable them to open her heart up to love: “to make her heart blossom,” as Alex said. This is the final and most important element of the skills of pimping: to inspire love in the prospective sex worker. According to Alex and my other informants, the woman's love for the pimp appears to be one of the most central elements in ensuring that she will stay by his side (cf. Kennedy et al. 2007: 9). Being confident about the woman's love was a highly central concern for the pimps, who often feared that the sex workers would abandon them once they had become successful abroad—and the pimps were convinced that love would work as a guarantee against this. According to my interlocutors, to achieve the woman's love and keep it alive is thus the most reliable seduction technique and security net for the pimp from both a short- and a long-term perspective. However, the pimps knew that feelings of love were not easily obtained, and that it demanded intense personal and emotional investment on their part.

The pimps stressed that making the women fall in love with them and obtaining their devotion was much smarter than relying on the use of force or physical violence. Physical violence was part of how it worked “in the old days,” as the pimps said, and only the stupid pimps would resort to that. The problem, as some of the pimps pointed out, was that the current focus on human trafficking by law enforcement, politicians, and the media had obscured the actual picture of how their business worked by blurring the difference between being a human trafficker and a pimp (cf. Dank et al. 2014: 135–136, 166). In general, my interlocutors were quite knowledgeable about legislation and debates around human trafficking and sex work in different countries in the EU. They constantly navigated this knowledge of formal, legal domains while simultaneously maneuvering in the informal sphere of the street economy abroad and at home in Galați.

However, even though non-violence was the ideal approach, it did not always play out as hoped, and several of the pimps experienced their relationships with the sex workers escalating into conflict and even physical violence once they reached their destination country (Korsby 2015). Most of the pimps, however, agreed that this was not a smart tactic. As Marius, a friend of several of the pimps who had followed the business of pimping from the sidelines for years, stated pragmatically:

A pimp who has 15 girls, he cannot hold all these girls with force, it is impossible, and it is way too complicated. It is much better to make arrangements with the girls, you know, to work together with them. There is simply too much risk in keeping girls by force. Nobody wants 10 years in prison.

Violence was shortsighted, since it might turn the sex worker against the pimp. In Richard and Christina Milner's ethnography of pimps in California in the 1960s and 1970s the same pattern is observed: violence can be effective, but it is regarded as a last resort (Milner and Milner [1972] 2010: 72). This does not mean that control is not an element in the pimp-sex worker relationship, it is just of a different kind: the control my informants sought to achieve should preferably be more subtle and sophisticated than physical violence. However, there is a big difference between the interlocutors in Milner and Milner's research and my interlocutors in relation to the pimps’ use of sexuality in their relationships with their sex workers. Milner and Milner state that it is crucial for the pimps to control their own libido—they are “body salesmen,” as they say, and one of their ways of controlling the female body is by controlling their own sexual desires and not engaging sexually with her (Milner and Milner [1972] 2010: 65–67). This is unlike the lover boys among my informants, who all had ongoing sexual relations with the sex workers they worked with, accentuating the importance of their own personal, emotional, and bodily involvements with these women.

However, the pimps’ successful instillation of love in the women did not mean that the pimps themselves had similar emotions of love. The pimps would express care and warmth for the women, but not feelings of “true love” [dragostea adevărată], as they phrased it. As Andrei said about Diana, who was his girlfriend and who worked as his sex worker in southern Italy: “It was never real love, well never for me. Diana loved me. I cared about her yes, but what I wanted was the money.”

I use the term “instillation of love” because it reflects how the pimps would talk about this process of love: not as a feeling arising by chance, serendipity, or fate, but as emotions that one could decide to evoke, infuse, or place in another person through the right actions, forms, and words. I argue that these skills of reading desires and instilling love can be seen as a particular set of increased social capacities, which are vital to the pimps’ success. These highly tuned social skills were not necessarily useful in other arenas of their life; for instance, it most certainly did not help the pimps keep legal jobs, which they occasionally tried to hold down, for example, in telemarketing or construction work. But in the field of pimping and in preparation for entering the transnational street economy abroad, these skills were crucial. Once love was instilled, the pimp hoped that it would keep the woman by his side. However, the notion of instillation of love does not mean that love can develop with just anyone. The whole point of the process of scanning and reading desires is for the pimp to see whether the instillation of love will be possible and meaningful at all, meaning whether the woman has the right affordances to become a sex worker with whom he can collaborate. The woman simply has to be composed in a way that makes the instillation of love possible—it implies a particular kind of interior landscape. Therefore, it also follows that to “enter the girl's mind,” as Alex said earlier, and to eventually instill love in her is not something one can do lightly, nor is it something that the pimps could do with any woman. A particular emotional connection needed to be there. Alex explained that it was important for him to like the woman in order to charm her into love, pointing to how he had to engage himself for a successful outcome:

I need to like the girl in order to do this work. If I don't like her as a person, her personality, then I can't. . . . If I don't like the girl, then I can't tell her those words, to seduce her. Then I can't do this stuff, then I can't tell her from my heart [inimă].

Here Alex points to the necessity of authenticity in his own feelings for the woman in the process of instilling love: it is not sufficient that the woman loves him—that he successfully evokes feelings of love in her—as he needs to be positively engaged emotionally as well.

One could argue that the pimps exemplify what Nils Bubandt and Rane Willerslev refer to as “the dark side of empathy,” meaning that the ability to put oneself in the place of others or to take up the viewpoints of others is used to manipulate, deceive, trick, and seduce them (Bubandt and Willerslev 2015). This is an interesting approach, but I suggest adding nuance to it by going beyond the concept of empathy and any dualisms of “dark” and “light,” and instead seeing the relationality of the pimps and sex workers through the prism of what I call a “dominant evoking.” By this I mean that, in their ability to read the desires of others and to “enter into their mind,” as they put it, the pimps were able to evoke certain emotions (love), and through those emotions they experienced that they could dominate the relationship, at least momentarily—which is a different skill than empathy. The concept of dominant evoking is ambivalent: within the pimps’ horizon, going abroad and trying their luck was by far the best option to escape poverty and unemployment in Galați—not only for themselves, but also for the sex workers, many of whom they had known since childhood, growing up in the same neighborhood in Galați (Korsby 2015, 2017, 2023). In the pimps’ horizon, achieving that goal successfully entailed evoking emotions of love in the sex workers, which in turn provided them with a momentary dominance of the relationship. However, to approach the pimps’ use of this dominant evoking as solely a one-sided use of power would be to dismiss the agency, insight, clarity, and drive to change their lives, which sex workers in my empirical material and in many other studies have emphasized—such as prospective sex workers who actively seek out a pimp who has networks abroad, which they need access to (Korsby 2023: 70–71, 75). In fact, dominant evoking encapsulates the ambivalent intertwinement of care, exploitation, opportunity, business, and intimacy, which is particularly accentuated in relationships like these (Korsby 2023: 75–76)—relationships which exist and evolve exactly because they do not fall into stereotypical victim/perpetrator boxes. In their role as facilitators of migration and as access points into the street economy abroad (Korsby 2017), the pimps are also helpers and facilitators of change. These complexities in relationships with facilitators of migration are familiar to many migrants who are faced with the tension between exploitation and possibility, as they move across borders in a highly politicized and criminalized landscape.

Conclusion: Pimping as a Transnational Street Business Niche

This article has illuminated the pre-migratory phases of entering the transnational street business of pimping. I have suggested the concepts of “reading desires” and “instillation of love” in order to capture the skills which migrant pimps deem necessary for creating the solid relationships to sex workers, which are central for their transnational business ventures. Through the exploration of these concepts, I have argued that the pimps have increased social capacities—highly tuned social skills—in distinct social arenas. These skills are not necessarily useful in other arenas of their life, but in the field of pimping and in preparation for entering the transnational street economy, these skills are crucial. Skillfulness in these fields enable the pimps to evoke certain emotions in others, which in turn provide them with a momentary dominance of the relationship. This process is captured in the concept of “dominant evoking,” which encapsulates the ambivalence and complexity of the contested sex worker-pimp relationships. The illumination of these aspects of the relationships between sex workers and pimps has provided new insights into what recruitment can look like within the transnational sex industry in the global market economy, and how the intricacies of gendered power dynamics are experienced by the pimps: a group of people who play a vital role in the transnational sex industry, but whose livelihoods we rarely gain insight into. These insights contribute with nuances to simplistic victim/perpetrator tropes, by showing some of the relational complexities and negotiations at play, when people embark on transnational sex work.

The article has shown that entering into the transnational street business niche of pimping in a new country requires detailed preparation. The article has thus contributed with insights into how transnational street business niches come into being: how they are imagined, planned, and prepared for. This preparatory phase appears as particularly important to business niches in the illegal arena, such as pimping, where the consequences of failing and not making it can include law enforcement and imprisonment.

While other scholars have provided important attention to sex workers’ backgrounds of entering into transnational sex work, this article has sought to include the pimps’ livelihoods and experiences, in order to make visible how transnational sex work becomes a transnational street business niche abroad via the relational connections between pimps and sex workers. As the article has shown, the intricacies of the relational building blocks of transnational sex work include the pimps’ attempts to evoke love and devotion in the sex workers. In this way, Sebastian, Alex, Andrei, and the other pimps rely on their skills of instilling love and reading desires, in order to succeed in the transnational street business of pimping.