Assessing the Power of Prostitution Policies to Shift Markets, Attitudes, and Ideologies

Skilbrei, May-Len. „Assessing the Power of Prostitution Policies to Shift Markets, Attitudes, and Ideologies“. Annual Review of Criminology 2 1 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-011518-024623..

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Since the late 1990s, many countries have been debating what prostitution policies to apply, and, particularly in Europe, several have changed the overall approach to the phenomenon and the people involved. Prostitution is more than ever before firmly placed on policy agendas as a topic related to gender equality and globalization. Furthermore, it is seen in context with issues relating to organized crime, health, and gentrification. In both policy debates and the academic discourse, particular ways of regulating prostitution are treated as models and a central discussion is which model among these works best. In this article, I argue that this search for a best practice of prostitution policy that can be transferred to and work similarly in a new jurisdiction builds on a lack of understanding of the importance of context and implementation. How policies work depends on, among other factors, aims, implementation structures, and characteristics of local prostitution markets. But I present a broad spectrum of research to clarify what should be taken into consideration when assessing policies’ abilities to achieve diverse goals. I argue that a fundamental problem in both prostitution policy debates and scholarship is that the arguments over prostitution policies have become too detached from the many and differing contexts in which these policies operate and I propose a way forward for resear

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“The Prostitution Problem”: Claims, Evidence, and Policy Outcomes

Benoit, Cecilia, Michaela Smith, Mikael Jansson, Priscilla Healey, und Doug Magnuson. „“The Prostitution Problem”: Claims, Evidence, and Policy Outcomes“. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 29. November 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1276-6.

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Prostitution, payment for the exchange of sexual services, is deemed a major social problem in most countries around the world today, with little to no consensus on how to address it. In this Target Article, we unpack what we discern as the two primary positions that undergird academic thinking about the relationship between inequality and prostitution: (1) prostitution is principally an institution of hierarchal gender relations that legitimizes the sexual exploitation of women by men, and (2) prostitution is a form of exploited labor where multiple forms of social inequality (including class, gender, and race) intersect in neoliberal capitalist societies. Our main aims are to: (a) examine the key claims and empirical evidence available to support or refute each perspective; (b) outline the policy responses associated with each perspective; and (c) evaluate which responses have been the most effective in reducing social exclusion of sex workers in societal institutions and everyday practices. While the overall trend globally has been to accept the first perspective on the “prostitution problem” and enact repressive policies that aim to protect prostituted women, punish male buyers, and marginalize the sex sector, we argue that the strongest empirical evidence is for adoption of the second perspective that aims to develop integrative policies that reduce the intersecting social inequalities sex workers face in their struggle to make a living and be included as equals. We conclude with a call for more robust empirical studies that use strategic comparisons of the sex sector within and across regions and between sex work and other precarious occupations.

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Comments to this article have been published in the same journal:

Foley, Ellen E. „“The Prostitution Problem”: Insights from Senegal“. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 14. Dezember 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1368-3.

Vanwesenbeeck, Ine. „The Making of “The Trafficking Problem”“. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11. Dezember 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1367-4.

Do Feminists Need an Economic Sociology of Law?

Kotiswaran, Prabha. „Do Feminists Need an Economic Sociology of Law?“ Journal of Law and Society 40(1) (2013): 115–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2013.00615.x.
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Feminist legal scholars have long exposed the mutually constitutive relationship between the market and the social sphere, particularly, of the family, as mediated by the state. A peculiar division of labour has emerged in American feminist legal theorizing on the market in the context of care work, on the one hand, and sex work on the other. Care is valorized, thus entrenching the family‐market dichotomy while the sex‐work debates view the market as a source of harm and violence and therefore to be eliminated from the social. This produces a problematic feminist understanding of the market and generates legal reforms that produce unintended consequences for women themselves. The article offers an economic sociology of law pursued in legal ethnographic terms as a way of revitalizing contemporary feminist legal thought on the market and, indeed, the economy, illustrating its use in the context of international anti‐trafficking law and transnational surrogacy.

Governing Prostitution: Differentiating the Bad from the Bad

Scott, John. „Governing Prostitution: Differentiating the Bad from the Bad“. Current Issues in Criminal Justice 23, Nr. 1 (2011): 53-72.
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Accounts of the governance of prostitution have typically argued that prostitutes are, in one way or another, stigmatised social outcasts. There is a persistent claim that power has operated to dislocate or banish the prostitute from the community in order to silence, isolate, hide, restrict, or punish. I argue that another position may be tenable; that is, power has operated to locate prostitution within the social. Power does not operate to ‘desocialise’ prostitution, but has in recent times operated increasingly to normalise it. Power does not demarcate prostitutes from the social according to some binary mechanics of difference, but works instead according to a principle of differentiation which seeks to connect, include, circulate and enable specific prostitute populations within the social. In this paper I examine how prostitution has been singled out for public attention as a sociopolitical problem and governed accordingly. The concept of governmentality is used to think through such issues, providing, as it does, a non-totalising and non-reductionist account of rule. It is argued that a combination of self-regulatory and punitive practices developed during modernity to manage socially problematic prostitute populations.

Full article available here.

Individual or Structural Inequality? Access and Barriers in Welfare Services for Women Who Sell Sex

Brunovskis, Anette, und May-Len Skilbrei. „Individual or Structural Inequality? Access and Barriers in Welfare Services for Women Who Sell Sex“. Social Inclusion 6, Nr. 3 (28. September 2018): 310–18. https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v6i3.1534.

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It is often taken for granted that women who sell sex are vulnerable, that welfare services can and should alleviate this vulnerability, and as such, being defined as ‘vulnerable’ can be beneficial and associated with special rights that would otherwise be inaccessible. At the same time, ongoing debates have demonstrated that establishing individuals and groups as vulnerable tends to mask structural factors in inequality and has negative consequences, among them an idea that the path to ‘non-vulnerability’ lies in changing the ‘afflicted’ individuals or groups, not in structures or in addressing unequal access to resources. In this article, we take this as a starting point and discuss challenges for the welfare state in meeting the varied and often complex needs of sex sellers. Based on qualitative research with service providers in specialised social and health services in Norway, we examine access and barriers to services among female sex sellers as well as how vulnerability is understood and shapes what services are available. An important feature of modern prostitution in Norway, as in the rest of Western Europe, is that sex sellers are predominantly migrants with varying migration status and corresponding rights to services. This has influenced the options available to address prostitution as a phenomenon within the welfare state and measures that have previously been helpful for domestic women in prostitution are not easily replicated for the current target population. A starting point in a theoretical understanding that considers vulnerability to be a human predicament (rather than the exception to the rule or a deficit in individuals or groups) allows for a discussion that highlights the centrality of structural conditions rather than a need for change in the individual. In order to understand the limitations of the welfare state in addressing modern prostitution as such, it is highly relevant to look at the structural origin of vulnerabilities that may look individual.

Full article available here.

Resistance to sex work stigma

The journal “Sexualities” published a discussion around Ronald Weitzer’s piece “Resistance to sex work stigma” in its September 2018 issue.

From the Editor’s Note:
“Professor Ronald Weitzer has written a short piece to Sexualities. It is a commentary in which Weitzer examines the notion of stigma in the context of sex work. He points out that stigma is not determined but has the possibility of change and suggests ‘a set of preconditions for the reduction and, ultimately, elimination of stigma from sex work’, which includes neutralization of language, a more balanced representation of sex work in the mass media, decriminalization, industry mobilization, sex worker activism, and intervention from the academia. We thought this piece would generate discussion and thus open up theoretical debate as well as practical concern about policy and legislation regarding sex work and stigma. We then invited scholars to comment and the following have agreed to write a commentary: Professor Teela Sanders, Professor Wendy Chapkis, Professor Jo Phoenix, and Professor Minichiello (together with Professor John Scott and Mr Cameron Cox).”

Read full note here (freely available).

The contributions to the discussion can be found here (paywall).

• Chapkis, Wendy. 2018. „Commentary: Response to Weitzer ‘Resistance to Sex Work Stigma’“. Sexualities 21 (5–6): 743–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716684511.
• Kong, Travis SK. 2018. „Editor’s Note: Ronald Weitzer“. Sexualities 21 (5–6): 715–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460717690714.
• Lee, Na-Young. 2018. „Un/Forgettable Histories of US Camptown Prostitution in South Korea: Women’s Experiences of Sexual Labor and Government Policies“. Sexualities 21 (5–6): 751–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716688683.
• Minichiello, Victor, John Scott, und Cameron Cox. 2018. „Commentary: Reversing the Agenda of Sex Work Stigmatization and Criminalization: Signs of a Progressive Society“. Sexualities 21 (5–6): 730–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716684510.
• Phoenix, Jo. 2018. „A Commentary: Response to Weitzer ‘Resistance to Sex Work Stigma’“. Sexualities 21 (5–6): 740–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716684512.
• Sanders, Teela. 2018. „Unpacking the Process of Destigmatization of Sex Work/Ers: Response to Weitzer ‘Resistance to Sex Work Stigma’“. Sexualities 21 (5–6): 736–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716677731.
• Weitzer, Ronald. 2018a. „Additional Reflections on Sex Work Stigma“. Sexualities 21 (5–6): 747–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716684513.
• ———. 2018b. „Resistance to Sex Work Stigma“. Sexualities 21 (5–6): 717–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716684509.

“I Get Paid to Have Orgasms”: Adult Webcam Models’ Negotiation of Pleasure and Danger

Jones, Angela. 2016. „“I Get Paid to Have Orgasms”: Adult Webcam Models’ Negotiation of Pleasure and Danger“. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (1): 227–56. https://doi.org/10.1086/686758.

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This article makes several important contributions to the burgeoning literature on sex work in a digital era. The scholarly literature that has documented the use of the Internet by sex workers has focused almost entirely on prostitution and has yet to make adult webcam modeling a focal point of analysis. This article critically examines the ways in which entry into adult webcam modeling is facilitated by an expectation that sex work in cyberspace maximizes pleasure, primarily because it minimizes the risk of dangers associated with street-based sex work. I conduct content analyses of discussions on a popular online forum for webcam models to explore the themes of pleasure (erotic and affectual) and danger (capping, doxxing, and harassment) in adult webcam modeling. I argue that adult webcam models experience sexual and affectual pleasures in the course of their work and that they are able to experience these pleasures because the computer-mediated sexual exchange acts as a psychological barrier, and that the computer in turn becomes the primary tool that performers use for emotional management. My analysis focuses on how sex workers reconcile the pleasure in their work with the exploitation that is also found there. Here, these camgirls use neoliberal ideas to minimize the perception of danger of their work so that they can experience high levels of pleasure. I further open up a new dialogue about neoliberalism and sex workers by focusing on the neoliberal subject in this new form of sex work.

Full text available here.