abstract: This study is based on 31 interviews conducted in 2012 with male, female, and transgender sex workers at the St. James Infirmary, a full-spectrum health clinic run by sex workers for sex workers, located in San Francisco, California. My primary goals were, first, to document the lived realities of a diverse range of sex workers who live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, and, second, to understand the impact of sex work discourse on the facilitation of stigma toward the sex work community and, finally, how that stigma influences the sex worker group identity and individual identity constructions. My primary findings indicate that although sex work discourse has traditionally been constructed within the dominant public sphere and not by sex workers themselves, this discourse has a profound effect on creating and perpetuating the stigma associated with sex work. In turn, this stigma affects both how the group and how individuals construct their identities, often negatively. Alternatively, a benefit of stigma is that it can induce the production of counterpublics which facilitate the emergence of new discourse. However, for this new discourse to gain acceptance into the public sphere, activist organizations must utilize traditional (and sometimes unintentionally marginalizing) strategies that can impact both the identity construction of the group and of individuals within the group. Understanding these complex relationships is therefore essential to understanding how activist organizations, such as the St. James Infirmary, situate themselves within the larger dominant public sphere, their impact on sex work discourse, and their impact on individual sex worker identity construction. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2013

abstract: Sexual exploitation is a problem faced by women victimized by sex trafficking and are involved in the commercial sex industry as a result of limited employment options. Negative consequences associated with engaging in sex work in the United States include violent victimization, physical and mental health problems, addiction, isolation from positive social support, and economic instability. These consequences make exiting difficult, and recently Baker, Williamson, and Dalla (2010) created an integrated prostitution exiting model to help explain the exiting process, accounting for the impact of these consequences and identifying the role that failed exiting attempts play in leading women to a final exit. Currently, much remains unknown regarding the usefulness of the model and researchers have yet to explore the process of exiting from the perspective of former sex workers. This dissertation examines the process of exiting commercial sex work from the perspective of 19 adult women who exited the sex industry and had not engaged in sex work for at least two years. The goal of the study was to compare findings from these interviews to Baker et al.'s (2010) integrated model and to further understand the experience of exiting sex work. A narrative approach to data collection was taken (Wells, 2011), and individual interviews were conducted with each participant in order to elicit narratives about their experiences exiting sex work. A phenomenological approach was utilized to analyze the data (van Manen, 1990), and five overarching themes encompassing 21 subthemes emerged as key findings. Many of these themes supported the stages of Baker et al.'s (2010) model, including the experience of becoming disillusioned with the prostitution lifestyle as a precursor to successfully exiting, the likelihood that women will attempt to exit and then re-enter sex work a number of times before finally exiting, and the presence of specific barriers that inhibited the exiting process. Additional themes emerged, offering new information about the importance of involving former sex workers in treatment, the role that children, customers, and other relationships play in helping or hindering the exiting process, and the development of resiliency among women undergoing the exiting process. Recommendations for research and practice are discussed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Social Work 2014

The pimp serves as an iconic ghetto hero who stands in street cultures as a figure that represents defiance, anti-establishment angst, and victorious criminality (Funches & Marriott 2002; Horton-Stallings, 2003). The American pimp has been brought into mainstream American culture through 1960’s literature, 1970’s Blaxploitation films, 1980’s hip hop and more recently, documentaries, films, books, music and television. The word ‘pimp’ has found its way into mainstream usage and popular caricatures of the pimp can be found in everything from Halloween costumes to ‘pimp and ho’ themed college parties. Despite being highly visible within mainstream culture, this character is still enigmatic as pimps are an underresearched population. Thus this thesis aims to uncover and unveil the lives and experiences of pimps involved in illegal prostitution to produce a more panoramic understanding of prostitution and an unexplored segment of major players within it. This thesis investigates the experiences and narratives of pimps involved in illegal, predominately street, prostitution in the USA. This research project stands to offer in-depth insight into the experiences of pimps in the United States within this unique subcultural context. In order to fill that literature gap, this research interviewed pimps and gathered data that explored how and why individuals become pimps, their personal histories, how they maintain their position as pimps, how pimps pimp, and the motivations for exit and/or retirement from The Game (the world of prostitution and pimping). More than just a managerial position, the role of the pimp also embraces a lifestyle with special rules, fashions and activities that create a unique and complex underground, criminal community. Rather than just presenting pimps as violent exploiters or ghetto heroes, this thesis examined the language of pimping, their orientation to their roles, the relationship between pimping and the surrounding communities and mainstream society, and explored this criminal career as a social role as well as career. With their childhood experiences of life in American ghettos leading to regular exposure to pimps and favorable impressions of illicit, underground careers, respondents came to ‘choose’ pimping as their career trajectory in their teens. Once dedicated to becoming pimps, many pimps underwent training with older pimps and later gained acceptance within the street community to earn their positions and status as pimps. When established within The Game, they started to practice ‘pimpology’ (pimp ideology) and to firmly establish their skills and methods of pimping. Two substantive chapters within this thesis are dedicated to addressing pimpology: pimpology covers the core processes, social connections and methods of management that are vital for a pimps success and survival in The Game. The aim of these chapters is to explore how pimps function as individuals, with the women who work for them, within their peer networks, and within their communities while they are actively pimping. And finally, exit from pimping will be explored. Issues such as age, exhaustion, family, health, drug addiction, trauma, imprisonment, law enforcement crackdowns and social betrayal all also act as further incentives for pimps to ‘hang up their pimp hat.’ This research has uncovered new themes and trends within the narratives of this hidden, underground subcultural population and offers great insights into the ‘career cycles’ of pimps. This project stands to fill a major gap within prostitution research as current literature lacks the perspectives and voices of pimps themselves. Within this research, a nuanced approach offers a unique view of the pimp and their complex roles and relationships within The Game. As an understudied population, pimps have rarely been the focus of academic inquiry; thus this research stands to contribute new perspectives, insights and data on a population that has remained enigmatic and well hidden from academic exploration for decades.

Feminist scholarship contributes to our understanding of the day-to-day experiences of female refugees especially as they relate to social and economic security. Traditional gender roles, the gender division of labour, systems of patriarchy, and sexual and gender based violence are contributing factors to the daily violence and insecurity that female refugees experience. This thesis employed unstructured interviews with 15 refugee women and 9 institutional representatives based in Malawi’s Dzaleka Refugee Camp as well as participant observation to examine perceptions of security within refugee camps as articulated by female refugees and by the institutional representatives working in Dzaleka camp. My findings underscore diverging perceptions between these two groups particularly along the themes of access to heating resources, prostitution and survival sex, boreholes, corruption, livelihoods, early and forced marriage, and reporting insecurity. Analysis of these themes indicates a gendered duality regarding the visibility of women refugees and their access to basic necessities, particularly heating resources. As such, refugee women have limited options to achieve their basic necessities and therefore may engage in negative survival strategies such as sex work. Furthermore, inadequate trust between refugees and refugee-based organizations as well as limited accountability mechanisms contributes to the insecurity that refugee women experience.

When not invisibilized in society, transgender women are subject to pervasive transphobia in the social sphere and encounter devastating discrimination across the institutions. In light of discrimination in the mainstream job market, many look to the sex industry for a source of income. In fact, trans women have long ties to the sex work community and have been foundational to the sex workers rights movement, engaging in activism predating Stonewall. Yet, the experiences of trans women who sell sex remain largely overlooked in historical retellings and social science research on sex work. By creating space for the voices of those who have long gone unheard – conducting in-depth interviews with seven transgender women who sell sex – this thesis seeks to move beyond the dominant narrative of sex workers and bring greater attention to their unique experiences. This thesis explores the experiences of trans women in sex work as it relates to their labour practices and processes, engagement with the criminal justice system, and health and access to health and social services. Challenging the ways in which norms have been produced and sustained under the guise of ‘truth’, this thesis applies the concepts intersectionality and stigma to explore how experience is conditioned by the environment of oppression – at the intersection of sexism and cisgenderism – and the social judgment and marginalization of sex workers. Alongside navigating through the hardships associated with the criminalization and stigmatization of sex work, trans women who sell sex are subject to intensified violence, discrimination and oppression on the basis of gender. Amidst the height of the trans rights movement and in light of the recent amendments to federal legislation that protects trans Canadians from discrimination, this thesis considers what is warranted to achieve social change. Reflecting on history and looking to the future, it is imperative that the trans and sex worker communities forge stronger bonds in their battle for rights.

The concept of the ‘procurer’ comes from section 212 of Canada’s Criminal Code, which prohibits directing, enticing, assisting or profiting off the prostitution of another person. A contentious debate surrounds Canada’s prostitution laws, with a constitutional challenge currently before the Supreme Court. Within this climate of debate, the concept of the ‘procurer’ has moved out of the strictly legal sphere and into a broader discourse, with a range of parties laying their claims to truth on the “realities” of the industry generally and on the procurer specifically. Using a methodology of Foucauldian discourse analysis, this thesis examines Ontario Provincial Court case summaries to consider the contribution of the Canadian judiciary to discourse on the procurer. Findings suggest that the judiciary replicates many of the existing stereotypes of prostitution and its participants, such as the procurer as pimp, while (re)producing a small counter discourse of the procurer as business manager.

Over the last two decades, the use of empowerment approaches to help reduce health-related vulnerabilities and violence among female sex workers has increasingly informed global health efforts directed at HIV/STD prevention. The empowerment approach to sex worker health rejects both abolitionist and narrowly conceived clinical approaches in favor of strategies that promote commercial sex as valid work, strengthen sex workers’ agency, reinforce female sexual autonomy, and support rights-based framing. A significant outcome of the empowerment approach to integrating health, social, and legal strategies has been the creation of numerous sex worker associations and NGOs, which advocate for collective mobilization and community-based HIV/STD prevention programs among sex workers. Despite numerous studies examining the efficacy of community empowerment approaches to sex worker health and the creation of civil society organizations to implement such approaches, there has been little theorization about how participation in sex worker NGO-based programming and activism shapes the personal, embodied experiences and subjectivities of sex workers. Similarly, questions of how sex worker associations and NGOs are shaped by the experiences, realities, feelings, and personal opinions of sex workers have received limited attention. Given the morally charged and highly stigmatized environments in which sex workers typically operate, studying how and which sex workers come into contact with these NGOs helps to illuminate how community and kinship relations, and individual and collective aspirations, shape sex work activism and contribute to the making (and unmaking) of related associations and NGOs. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with female sex workers and sex work activists, this work combines medical anthropological and feminist perspectives to interpret sex worker associations and NGOs as “local moral worlds” that highlight how subjectivities, body, moral experience, kinship, care, and women’s agency relate. From the subjective experiences of older female sex worker/activist informants, I argue that sex worker associations and NGOs are best comprehended not simply as the outcomes of global health efforts to curb the spread of HIV and other STDs, but also as complex social arenas that need to be reconsidered in light of existing relationships between and among sex workers and their families and the state. This argument is informed by my yearlong engagement with Women’s Solidarity House (WSH), a pseudonym for an organized association of active and retired female sex workers in the red-light district of San José, which recently received NGO status from the Costa Rican state. One important dimension of WSH that requires careful consideration is the fact that most of the women who participate in its development and programming are over the age of 40, with an average age of about 52. This fact makes WSH an interesting and important case study, since it caters most especially to female sex workers who are generally outside of the purview of most sex worker empowerment and health-related prevention programs, which are designed and implemented by public health researchers and development specialists. While theories of gender, stigma, and social inequality have increasingly informed medical anthropological efforts to understand how structural factors shape the personal, embodied experiences of sex workers and the distribution of HIV/STDs, there has been very little effort to understand how aging and ageism factor into the making and unmaking of sex worker embodiment and subjectivity and older women sex workers’ risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and infections. Given that sex work is a profession or income-generating strategy that adult women in various stages of their lives perform, the lack of research and theorization about these aspects of female sex workers’ lives, I suggest, has prevented a broader research and programmatic response both to common risks such as HIV/STDs and violence, and to work-related health problems and occupational conditions that older sex workers may consider more important in their day-to-day lives. My research shows that a “structural approach” to sex work, which highlights the underlying social, historical, political, and economic forces that encourage and foster the economic exploitation, stigmatization, and negative health outcomes of women (and men) who sell sex, would benefit from adding a feminist anthropological perspective on aging. In this view, aging is a critical social structural inequality that society uses to devalue women’s status and which women often experience as stigmatizing and/or shameful. In Costa Rica, where recent reporting has suggested an increase in the number of older women in the local sex industry, studying women’s experiences of and responses to growing old in the sex trade reveals not only the long-term impacts of neoliberal reform polices, but also how gendered discourses about aging, increasing familial caregiving responsibilities, and growing inequality and economic pressure, together, conspire to limit older women sex workers’ employment opportunities and put them at greater risk of violence, discrimination, psychological distress, sexual assault, substance abuse, poverty, and HIV/STDs.

Thesis advisor: Janet E. Helms / Historically, psychological theory and mental health researchers have viewed sex work as inherently harmful to sex workers and capable of producing negative mental and physical health effects (Sprankle et al., 2018). Moreover, research focused on clinicians’ expectations for sex workers in therapy has not specifically examined clinicians’ attitudes toward sex workers or sex work as separate concepts (Benoit et al., 2015; Koken, 2011; Ma et al., 2017). In addition, mental health professionals may not view sex work as legitimate work because of the virtual lack of evidence-based theoretical frameworks for guiding therapy for sex workers, and, therefore, may use prostitution stigma as a substitute for theory (Krumrei-Mancuso, 2017; Williamson & Cluse-Tolar, 2002). The present study investigated the extent to which mental health professionals’ expectations of sex work and sex workers were related to prostitution stigma and their perceptions of sex workers’ overall mental health and evaluations of sex work as decent work. In particular, the study investigated the extent to which mental health professionals stigmatized the work of sex workers. Mental health professionals (N = 201) read a clinical vignette and completed an online survey containing a demographic information sheet, the Attitudes Toward Prostitutes and Prostitution Scale (Levin & Peled, 2011); (c) the Decent Work Scale (Duffy et al., 2017), (d) the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (Zigmond & Snaith, 1986), and (e) the PTSD-8 (Hansen et al., 2010). Results from multivariate multiple regression analyses supported that when mental health professionals held higher levels of stigma towards sex work and sex workers, they may diagnose the client with higher levels of PTSD symptoms. Further, the results supported that endorsement of a feminist orientation moderated the relationship between sex work stigma and diagnosis clients’ PTSD avoidance symptoms. The discussion included methodological limitations and implications for research and practice. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

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Although human trafficking was not a new concept, it gained increased attention across the United States and Canada in the first two decades of the 21st century. To better understand the Canadian anti-trafficking movement, this thesis analyzed the discourse on the topic in six local and national daily newspapers between 2008 and 2018. The goal of this thesis was to investigate the emergence of human trafficking as a social problem. Using social constructionism as a point of departure, a critical discourse analysis was conducted in NVivo of the quotes made by human trafficking experts in Canadian media. The results of this analysis suggest that an Unofficial Christian Coalition emerged in Canada, which – assisted by the media – led a moral crusade against human trafficking and pushed for the adoption of restrictive sex work legislation in Canada.