Beyond Ingrained Stigma: a Critical Intersectional Analysis of Sex Work, Social Equity, and Canada’s PCEPA Legislation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction In this research, we grapple with stigmatization of sex work and ways to prioritize both equity and protection of vulnerable individuals. Drawing on Canadian policy perspectives and using an intersectional policy analysis framework, we examine how sex work legislation, often justified to protect communities and exploited persons, has instead created detrimental impacts on the safety, well-being, and human rights of sex workers, particularly those from vulnerable and marginalized groups and communities. Methods An intersectional-based policy analysis (IBPA) framework is applied to provide critical insight into understanding the broader issues of governing and legislating sex work. The IBPA framework offers a structured approach to understanding the complex impacts of the Protection of Exploited Persons and Communities Act (PCEPA) by considering the interplay of various factors and power dynamics. It allowed us to critically engage descriptive and transformative questions that go beyond identifying harms to prompt consideration of historical context, the role power in shaping policy, and broader implications for diverse groups and communities. Results We critically analyze Canada’s PCEPA legislation through an IBPA framework that prompted a multi-level analysis, considering the role of power and equity in policy outcomes. The analysis reveals disproportionate harm to marginalized groups such as Indigenous women, im/migrants, and people of color due to intersecting systems of racism, sexism, and colonialism. We explore existing inequities in legislation to identify where and how targeted interventions can be made, and propose actionable short, medium, and long-term solutions with a focus on decriminalizing sex work as the end goal to reduce inequities. We outline pathways for empowering sex workers and prioritizing their agency through decriminalization and other measures with the potential to lead to more just reforms. Conclusions The IBPA framework helps elucidate how current policies such as PCEPA fail to address real and lived experiences of sex workers while perpetuating harm. We conclude with ways forward and key indicators drawing insight from diverse knowledge in pursuit of reduction in inequities and social justice. Policy Implications Sex work policies have been shaped by progress, persistent challenges, and a diversity of perspectives that continue to inform legislative and policy developments. Using the IBPA helps to understand how alternative policy options are better suited to the diverse nature inherent within the sex work profession. Decriminalization is considered to be the ideal policy alternative in this vein as it has been proven to produce positive effects for various members of the sex worker community by providing freedom of choice at the individual level. However, a political climate marked by increasing anti-rights measures brings into question how this might be readily accomplished.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".