Rethinking the Prostitution Debates: Transcending Structural Stigma in Systemic Responses to Sex Work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract As legal authorities consider the constitutionality of the laws surrounding prostitution in Canada, we have the opportunity to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions that have been made about sex work and the socio-legal responses to it. In this article we draw on the concept of structural stigma to analyze the stigmatic assumptions inherent in the Canadian laws and briefly describe their effect—the civic exclusion of sex workers. We then consider the ways in which these same assumptions of risk and immorality are reproduced in end-demand (partial criminalization), legalized (regulatory) models, and decriminalization. While the decriminalization of sex work is the response that relies on the least stigmatic assumptions, even the celebrated New Zealand model is not absent of moralization and “othering” discourse. Further reflection is required to conceptualize a policy approach that transcends stigmatic assumptions so as to respect the human and civil rights of sex workers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.159 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".