One in three strippers are students, says new study

Most of us get a job working behind a bar or setting up a tragic new club night.

But new research suggests growing numbers of students are turning to STRIPPING to make ends meet.

A Leeds University study found almost a third of strippers are students who are dancing to pay their way through uni.

Increasing numbers of students are dancing their way through uni

Sociologists also found that the adult industry actively targeted students for business, with clubs sending leaflets to freshers during their first week.

Researchers interviewed almost 200 strippers and found 29.4% – almost a third – were “engaged in some form of education”.

The study, published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education,  showed most students went into stripping for the money but some – particularly those from middle-class backgrounds – were motivated by excitement.

Teela Sanders, from the sociology department said: “Many of these dancers are from middle-class backgrounds – they are not coming from families where money is a big issue.

“They enjoyed dressing up to go out and many say it wasn’t too different to heading out on a night out.”

With prices high, stripping can be a well paid job

One 23-year-old student, named as Lana, told researchers that she considered an evening in a strip club as “just like a party night”, adding: “I prefer to go to work than go out.”

Many of the students in the study became lapdancers after visiting as a customer or doing bar work in the venue.

But often female freshers are lured in by adverts promising well paid work.

One club manager in an unnamed northern city said he flyered freshers’ week events, advertising auditions to 18-year-old girls.

He claimed September is a “peak time for requests from experienced and inexperienced dancers alike to work a shift”.

For most students, pole dancing is a fun way to exercise, but for others, it is sexual performance

The study aimed to work out if the increase of tuition fees to £9,000 was causing more students to work in strip clubs, but it says more research needs to be conducted before they can reach any firm conclusions.

Strip clubs are not the only places female students are selling their bodies – some undergrads are going further and working as prostitutes.

One Liverpool escort agency even boasts of the “fresh faced, beautiful” students they have available, calling students at the university the “creme de la creme” and advertising “skinny, middle-class” girls to punters.

A 22-year-old student escort working for the company said she became an escort to fund her dream of becoming a psychologist.  She said: “While I’m going to be doing my studies, I’m going to be doing this to make things easier for myself.

“If I have to use men to get what I want then so be it – women have been doing that for ever. The money outweighs the negative side. It’s sex. It’s fun. I just think in my head ‘it’s a job’.”

Male spectators are invited to “sexy” poledancing events like the one above

Others are taking advantage of the internet for more creative arrangements. SeekingArrangement, a website which aims to match rich older men with good-looking women in a “sugar daddy” relationship, claims thousands of students use its service.

A survey last year revealed 80% of matches on SeekingArrangement involve sex.

But its founder Brandon Wade denied it was a form of prostitution.

He said: “Because the relationship between a sugar daddy and a sugar baby is romantic in nature, most sugar relationships will likely involve ‘sex’ … And because a sugar daddy is expected to be the generous gentleman, ‘money’ will always be spent on the sugar baby. I don’t see anything wrong (or illegal) with that!”