The Wicked Problem of Prostitution and Sex Work Policy in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prostitution is a wicked problem. The debate over prostitution policy in Canada includes a range of differently situated stakeholders centring different problems, proposing solutions that are in apparent conflict, and making divergent and oppositional rights claims. Prostitution policy is largely shaped by value conflicts rather than by material interests. Where contemporary policy models appear to have positive effects for some stakeholders, they have offsetting negative effects for others. Canada’s current prostitution policy aims to eradicate prostitution, but some individuals do and will continue to engage in prostitution. The constitutionality of the new legislative provisions accompanying the policy is uncertain, and the policy’s effectiveness and effects are currently unknown. This thesis applies the conceptual and analytical lens of interest-focussed legal problem solving to reconcile the interests of differently situated seller stakeholders reflected in the contemporary debate. Those who engage in prostitution are exposed to significant risk of harm, including adverse sexual and emotional health consequences and violence. All sellers and potential sellers share an interest in reducing their risk of experiencing the harms associated with prostitution. The current body of empirical knowledge about prostitution and sex work in Canada is incomplete, reflecting issue bias in favour of one group of seller stakeholders and prioritizing one set of harms. Removing criminal sanctions over prostitution has the effect of placing responsibility for risk management on individual sellers; all sellers or potential sellers may not be equally situated to manage the risks or to avoid the harms associated with participating in prostitution. Drawing on recent economic scholarship about prostitution policy regimes and on Martha Fineman’s vulnerability theory and the concept of resilience, this thesis suggests “incomplete commodification” as a means of recognizing and responding to the interests of differently situated sellers or potential sellers in reducing or avoiding the harms associated with prostitution, including in better ensuring that any permissible purchase of sexual services is from those most able to manage their risk of harm.
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 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 | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".