Co-optation, Complicity, and the ‘Helping Relationship’ in Sex Work

KEYWORDS:

• Sex work
• public policy
• structural inequalities and violence
• sex workers’ rights movements
• anti-trafficking discourses and collaborations

This special issue complicates the prevailing discourse and public policy surrounding sex work. The authors raise questions about sex workers’ personal agency, environmental and individual-level factors, and new policy regimes, such as hybrid penal and therapeutic approaches. This issue weaves traditional academic genres with research, teaching, and practice reflections. The diverse voices and perspectives in this special issue collectively shed light on the changing discourse, policy, and day-to-day landscape of sex work in a variety of contexts. Contributions focus on several different jurisdictions, offering contextual perspectives on both the macro and micro level experiences of sex work, and the ‘helping relationships’ that contribute to structuring understandings of sex work. Authors in this volume employ different terminology (e.g. ‘sex work,’ ‘prostitution,’ ‘sex trade’), reflecting a diversity of context-specific language and viewpoints. However, authors have in common the prevailing perspective that sex workers should be valued and supported.

Challenging the influences behind the social construction of sex workers and sex work is a key theme in this special issue, highlighting the importance of centring sex workers’ voices and experiences. Alison Jobe, Kelly Stockdale and Maggie O’Neill examine the implications of stigma for service provision and access to justice for women selling sex in North East England. Centring sex workers’ voices as co-researchers through a peer-led participatory action research methodology, they demonstrate how the design of health services and approaches to justice need to recognise and ameliorate the stigma attached to sex work. Sharmila Parmanand critiques externally imposed constructions of sex work in the context of the Philippines. Contrasting policy approaches to domestic work and sex work, Parmanand draws upon ethnographic research with Filipino sex workers to challenge a false distinction that views domestic work as valuable and virtuous, while sex work is viewed as abusive and bad. The devaluing of sex work as labour, and the lack of recognition of stigma as an obstacle to service provision, represent failures to centre sex workers’ perspectives and experiences in the creation of policy and services. This can be partly addressed through the inclusion of sex workers as researchers and policy-makers, and the Sex Worker Syllabus is an essential tool in achieving this. The interview with co-creaters of the syllabus, Heather Berg, Angela Jones, and PJ Patella-Rey, reflects on the failures that led to the need for the syllabus, and on the process of collating resources on sex work by sex workers, that should be essential reading for ‘helping professionals’ to better understand the needs of the community.

Building on the themes of ‘nothing about us without us’ from the Sex Worker Syllabus, authors in this special issue also dive into the complications of community and narrative control. Responses to violence and harm are not only shaped by individuals’ self-defined experiences but stigmas and stereotypes that risk further conflating sex work with sex trafficking. Nili Gesser describes the role of peer support in one group of women navigating substance use and sex work in the Greater Philadelphia area. In their intentional efforts to stop using drugs and transition out of commercial sex, these women found that working alongside peers whose stories mirrored their own helped alleviate the affective challenges that can emerge in retelling their experiences in more clinical contexts. Jennifer Musto troubles the narrative of ‘risk’ that appears in an ostensibly trauma-informed space: a specialised court for youth ‘at risk’ of commercial sexual exploitation. Musto uses ‘the afterlife of decriminalization,’ or coercive structures outside formal sanctions and criminal codes, to interrogate the state surveillance and punishment in nominally non-carceral interventions in the lives of young girls of colour.

Nancy Franke and Corey Shdaimah extend this focus on specialised courts to Project Dawn Court, a ‘prostitution diversion program’ that connects various criminal legal stakeholders with sometimes-conflicting notions of court support. Blurred roles, competing notions of professionalism, and individual perspectives on victimhood and criminality all contribute to a context where the structural dynamics of participants’ lives are left out of calculations that still point towards punishment. Kate D’Adamo offers a way to define sex work–specifically, professional kink and BDSM–as a helping profession in community with social workers and service providers whose conceptions may place sex workers exclusively in the role as ‘victim-survivor’ or ‘client.’ While noting this redefinition may not resonate with all, D’Adamo positions the embodied care, professional expertise, and emotional labour of kink-focused sex workers as one vector of a larger helping profession that can meet clients’ needs in ethical, affirming ways.

The insights in the special issue contributions are compatible with global social work ethical obligations that include anti-oppressive practice and self-determination and which apply to all forms of practice, including: research, service delivery, programming, and policy interventions (International Federation of Social Workers 2018). A growing number of critical voices within the profession describe dangers of paternalistic and harmful interventions ostensibly aimed at helping sex workers (Anasti 2020; Wahab and Panichelli 2013) and other forms of professional collusion with carceral interventions (Jacobs et al. 2021). They join the chorus of sex worker activists and practitioners who carefully document harms, such as the collective US sex worker organisations report to the United Nations (Best Practice Project et al. 2019) and offer alternative accounts of the diversity of sex work and sex worker experiences. Maggie Buckridge, Jules Lowman, and Chrysanthi Leon’s innovative methods use language and chronology chosen by their respondents in response to the researcher’s questions. The I-poems create a platform for narratives of those who are not usually asked to join traditional academic forums to be read with less mediation. Doris Murphy mobilises the walking interview as a methodology to ethically speak alongside sex workers in solidarity, not lean on binary representations that flatten the complexity of sex workers’ lives. Even with distance limitations imposed by COVID-19, Murphy’s pilot interview with one Irish sex worker activist uses a feminist ethic of care to explore the intimacy of this biographical method–and point towards a radically inclusive, autonomous future for sex workers. Finally, Jamilah Watson’s review of Francine Tremblay’s book chronicles the important work of Stella, a sex worker collective in Canada. Watson highlights the importance of Tremblay’s work for tracing sex worker histories as recorded in their own documents created by and for them and as told through their perspectives, while also reminding us that any one version of such history is incomplete thus underscoring the need for many such histories.

These ethical interventions were already pressing before the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has laid bare vast discrepancies in workplace safety, risk, and precarity. Sex workers, too, felt the public health and economic impacts of COVID-19. For example, as documented in the Global Network of Sex Work Projects’ (2021) survey, sex workers were left out of government stimulus packages or relief funds, intensely surveilled by law enforcement for breaking ‘stay at home orders,’ and pushed into increasingly tenuous workplace conditions through venue closures. None of these practices changed the larger ecosystem in which sex work is conflated with sex trafficking, stigmatised as immoral or ‘dirty’ work, and leveraged as a cudgel for criminalising legislation.

But this does not have to be our future. Taking a cue from Arundhati Roy, the pandemic could be a portal to new ways of envisioning autonomy, labour, and justice with regards to sex work. For example, Bromfield, Panichelli, and Capous-Desyllas (2021) reverse the traditional power dynamics between social workers and sex workers, centring mutual aid and community-based grassroots ‘organizing led by sex workers who are the most impacted by the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, citizenship, and ability status’ (146). Deferring to sex worker-led initiatives to redistribute resources, agitate for safer working conditions, and resist the pull of the carceral state shifts the locus of expertise to sex workers and prioritises their autonomy, their self- and community-defined practices to navigate COVID-19. This power structure, though connected to COVID-19, does not have to ‘return to normal’ with reopening policies and reversed mask mandates–this could be a ‘new normal’ of ethically engaging sex workers on their terms without repeating histories of paternalizing and stigmatising service.