The paper is based on interviews with thirty-two female street sex workers in a city in southwest England during 1998. The study explores violence from pimps and clients as well as how the street environment exposes sex workers to risk. It also explores the self protection strategies of individual sex workers and the female sex work community as a means of maintaining a survivor identity and not a victim identity. Women who were interviewed were paid for their participation. Payment was included in the methodology of this research because: (1) payment acknowledged the risks to the women in being part of the study; (2) it recognized that the women were experts and emphasized that this interview was very different from other interviews they may have experienced; (3) it was a vehicle to overcome the social distance between respondent and researcher; and (4) it showed that the feminist research community does more than take information from marginalized groups. Findings highlight the possible connections between childhood sexual abuse, entrance into the sex industry at an early age, and continual experience of violence. References