Ecological Contexts of Resilience in Sex Work: Managing a Precarious, Stigmatised, and Criminalised Occupation in One Canadian City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the ways that sex workers in one Canadian city cultivate resilience in their workplaces. In 2017–2019, a period following the enactment of Canada’s revised prostitution law, a cross-section of active sex workers (N = 59) from Victoria, Canada, were interviewed about what they do to keep safe in their sex work jobs, including what they do before or during dates, how their strategies for safety have changed over time, how they draw on their larger networks, and what resources they wish they could access to improve their abilities to remain safe. Using an ecological framework of resilience, our findings show that, despite job precarity, stigma, and criminalisation, participants were actively involved in developing strategies to keep safe at work. Their resilience is a combination of factors unique to each worker’s social location and their access to workplace safety measures, including screening techniques and tools, diverse social networks, and safe working locations. We call for a public health approach to sex work that builds on workers’ strengths and enacts policies that aim to dismantle the structural environments of risk in their occupation.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".