Expansion of prostitution demand policies and resistance in the global west: a comparative discourse analysis of canada, england, and northern ireland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of prostitution policies continues to be a dynamic issue globally with new developments continually occurring. This dissertation integrates social constructionism and Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse to study how conflicting interests construct the main issues in prostitution public policy disputes and power dynamics involved. Specifically, the study focuses on disputes between multiple conflicting interests in legislative hearings and debates in England, Northern Ireland, and Canada on proposed end demand legislation- which refers to legislation with the stated emphasis on criminalizing the sex buyers rather than the sex providers in prostitution. Transcripts from legislative hearings and debates are the main data sources analyzed using NVivo software for qualitative coding and organization. This discourse analysis found that across the nations included, supporters and opponents of end demand legislation differed to an extent in their constructions of the main issues in prostitution policy disputes-including the meanings they attach to concepts including consent, victimization, harm reduction, and gender equality. These differing constructions shaped their conflicting positions on prostitution policies. The opponents of end demand tended to support non-criminalized systems of prostitution. Results indicate that interest groups’ power in shaping prostitution policies was based primarily on how well their ideologies aligned with those of powerful political parties. The vast majority of people testifying to legislatures on conflicting sides specified neither current nor past sex trade or sex industry experience. Of the testifiers who did, more identified as former sex workers or survivors of prostitution than as current 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 | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".