The intersection of policing and stigma in shaping violence and poor health among sex workers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Over the past decade, there has been a move by a number of higher income countries including the European Union, to control prostitution through ‘demand criminalisation’, which criminalises the purchase, but not the selling, of sexual services. This study explores the complex ways in which sex work-related stigma intersects with sex work policing strategies to shape street-based sex workers’ vulnerability to violence and poor health. Methods Vancouver, Canada, provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the impact of policies that criminalise clients as the local police department adopted a sex work enforcement policy that prioritises sex workers’ safety over arrest, while continuing to target clients. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 cisgender and 5 transgender women street-based sex workers about their working conditions. Data were analyzed thematically and by drawing on concepts of structural stigma and vulnerability. Results Our results indicated that despite police rhetoric of prioritizing the safety of sex workers, participants were denied their rights for police protection by virtue of their ‘risky’ occupation and where thus responsiblized for sex work related violence. Our findings further suggest that sex workers’ interactions with neighbourhood residents were predominantly shaped by a discourse of sex workers as a ‘risky’ presence in the urban landscape and police took swift action in removing sex workers in case of complaints. Conclusions Our findings highlight that criminalisation and policing of sex workers’ clients and the co-existing stigmatizing assumptions of sex workers as ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’, both victims and victimisers, deny sex workers their citizenship rights, facilitate the removal of sex workers from public space and perpetuate labour conditions that render sex workers at increased risk for violence and poor health. Key messages Policy approaches that criminalise sex workers' clients rather than sex workers are based on stigmatizing assumptions of sex workers as both ‘risky’ and ‘at risk’ This study highlights that the criminalisation of sex workers’ clients rather than sex workers perpetuates labour condition that render sex workers at increased risk of violence and poor health
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".