Survival sex: Sexual agency and consent in a state of deprivation? A scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Survival sex is the exchange of sex for material goods required for survival (i.e., shelter, food, drugs). Because this exchange occurs under conditions of deprivation, there is a power imbalance that limits the ability to freely consent to sex or to exercise sexual agency. This review aimed to examine the consent and sexual agency implications of survival sex and to identify which factors push people into greater levels of deprivation and vulnerability to engage in survival sex. We searched six databases and included 21 articles that discussed the sexual consent or sexual agency implications of survival sex and synthesized the study findings via qualitative analysis. We identified three themes as they relate to the consent or sexual agency implications of survival sex—power, coercion, and sexual agency—and five themes we called push factors into greater vulnerability to survival sex—hunger, patriarchy, poverty, substance use, and insecure housing. Each factor has the effect of limiting people’s capacity to consent to sex by creating a coercive environment that limits their power to exercise sexual agency. We found that women are at particular risk to be coerced into survival sex by other people or circumstances of deprivation. Our findings suggest that survival sex is often nonconsensual sex. In contrast to traditional approaches that consider survival sex a risk factor for sexual health, we discuss policy and advocacy efforts and apply a human rights perspective that considers how survival sex is a violation of personhood and autonomy.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".