Sex workers’ confidence in the police in one Canadian city under the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Confidence in the police, a significant concern of sex workers across the globe, is an important gauge of their views of the legitimacy of law enforcement and their likelihood to seek help when in harms’ way. The purpose of this study is to explore sex worker confidence in police in one Canadian city after the enactment of the dramatically revised prostitution law in 2014, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. In 2017–2018, a cross-section of active sex workers (N = 60) from Victoria, Canada, were interviewed about their personal and work lives under the criminal code law. Thematic analysis was carried out using the participants’ answers to these questions: (1) You said you have _____ confidence in the police. Please elaborate on why you feel this way about the police; (2) You said you had _____ interactions with police in the last 12 months? What happened, when, where, why, etc.? Have your interactions with the police changed in recent years? Our findings show the police’s treatment of sex workers is influenced by intersecting stigmas and structural factors that shape the confidence sex workers’ have in law enforcement. We provide greater contextualisation related to the confidence sex workers have in police, why lack of confidence may not always be synonymous with negative experiences, and why their distrust of the ‘institution of policing’ highlights the importance of having public policies that address the fundamental causes of sex worker victimisation and stigmatisation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".