In 2020, COVID-19 spread worldwide, and a state of pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization. Female sex workers are in many ways dependant on the social conditions of society and have, throughout time, been considered as a highly victimized group. This study aims to gain insight into the changes and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has had on female sex workers in Sweden by conducting semi-structured interviews with individuals who, through their employment, have connections to female sex workers. The collected data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The results revealed four themes that describe the changes and consequences witnessed by the participants. The first theme entails the vulnerabilities and circumstances that female sex workers are conditioned by in society. The second theme demonstrates the economic consequences which the pandemic outbreak caused. Not only in relation to expenses and difficulties traveling but also in terms of an increased market due to unemployment and lockdowns in Central Europe. This theme also includes a subgroup of physical consequences as a result of the competition created by the increased market of female sex workers in Sweden. This has caused the women to have to take additional risks and abuse. The third theme includes the bureaucratic and social complications caused by the social restrictions enforced to hinder the spread of the COVID-19. The fourth and last theme presents the participants' post-pandemic predictions.

The premise of this thesis was to investigate how one national news outlet (Dagens Nyheter) in Sweden portrayed sex workers and sex buyers in their article series Skuggsidan. The series, published in effect of a famous TV-persona’s sex buying scandal in May of 2020, included interviews with former female sex workers, two case worker from a help organization and one former male sex buyer. By adopting Fairclough’s three- dimensional model as method, the series was analysed and compared against the concept of folkhemmet as well as an intersectional and poststructuralist feminist theoretical framework. The analyses distinguished two main themes, indicating the series follows a traditional Swedish radical feminist view of sex buyers as deviant individuals with obscured ideas and sexual habits; and sex sellers as victims in need of rehabilitation and intervention. The analysis also pointed out a binary discourse of the sex worker and the sex buyer, where the man is the assumed buyers and the woman the assumed sellers, effectively excluding other gender identities from the narrative. Lastly, the series lacked intersectional sensitivity to multi-layered identities, specifically when it comes to migrant sex workers in Sweden. This thesis argues there is an urgent need for further empirical research to get a comprehensive and fair view of sex industry to address future challenges in the field.

Women engaged in street prostitution are among the most vulnerable populations, due to the conditions they work in, their often disadvantaged backgrounds, and their limited choices and agency. In order to surmount the multiple barriers that they encounter when trying to exit prostitution, both at the structural and the individual level, women need holistic support that addresses their diverse needs (Hester & Westmarland, 2004). Extant theoretical frameworks of exiting prostitution failed to incorporate this important element of support into the exiting process. Some of these frameworks are based on mixed samples of women in indoor and street prostitution, despite their different situations and needs. Furthermore, while researchers generally agree on the need for wrap-around holistic support of a range of services, it has not been sufficiently explored, neither in depth nor systematically. Questions remain as to what support looks like, what is its influence, and what is the best timing for offering support to women exiting street prostitution. This study set out to better understand the patterns of exiting street prostitution, to explore the role of support in facilitating successful and long-term disengagement from prostitution, and to determine the more effective time to offer support in the exiting process. The study employed a mixed-method design combining qualitative interviews with an Agent-Based Model (ABM), an innovative computerized simulation tool that has never been applied to street prostitution. In-depth interviews with 29 women from five recovery programs for women with substance abuse disorder who have exited prostitution were analyzed in ATLAS.ti to provide thorough responses to the research questions about support and helped refine the ABM. The ABM was designed based on the theoretical framework offered by Baker, Dalla, and Williamson (2010), enhanced by support and some additional elements incorporated into this framework. This framework conceptualizes exiting as a staged process, starting when women are immersed in prostitution, moving on to the Awareness stage, then to Deliberate Planning, then to Initial Exit and at last to the Final Exit stage. A simplified structure of the stages was applied in the ABM, whereby virtual agents representing women immersed in street prostitution made a series of decision to determine whether they eventually exited prostitution, first to the initial exit stage and later to the final exit stage. The ABM model was a computerized representation of a 10-year virtual longitudinal study, during which a support intervention was offered, first consistently to all agents and then in a second model only to agents who enter the Initial Exit stage. Two more interventions, suggested by the women’s narratives, were tested to determine the influence of spirituality on exiting and the impact of offering women more support when they were ready to exit. street prostitution. The qualitative findings of the study indicated the importance of peers over professionals as facilitators of women’s exiting journeys. Peers provided women with hope and a nonjudgmental understanding of women’s experiences in prostitution; helped alleviate guilt and shame by normalizing these experiences; and allayed women’s loneliness. Another important source of support for women was discovering their spirituality. Women often spoke of God in similar terms to their peers, as an entity that offers knowledge, love and experience. The qualitative findings informed the operationalization of several variables in the ABM and contributed a new variable, Spirituality, to the model. Another important qualitative finding was the importance of offering support at the moment women were ready to exit, which resulted in an interaction between women’s intention to exit and support in the ABM. Additional qualitative findings highlighted the importance of treating both substance abuse and prostitution to unravel the prostitution-drugs nexus in order to achieve a successful exit. Women described their relapse into drugs, which almost always preceded a return to prostitution, as a gradual internal process of a growing desire to use drugs which culminated in an opportunity to use drugs. Such a process mirrored their readiness to exit– an internal process of despair which ended with reaching out for support, or a “hook for change” (Giordano et al., 2002). However, while women were fully aware of both the moment of relapse and the moment of readiness to exit and could easily identify what had led to their relapse, the elements that led to being ready to exit remained nebulous. More research is warranted on this issue. The quantitative findings clearly demonstrated that once virtual women received support in the exiting process, more of them exited, their exit was more permanent (in other words, more of them moved from the Initial to the Final Exit stage and stayed there), and they exited earlier in the process. The more support we offered, the more these findings were pronounced. The best model fit to the data was the one including all support types– continuous support, additional support for the Initial Exit stage, spirituality, and the interaction between readiness and support. While the model without support was characterized by oscillating exiting trajectories regardless of the final outcome, offering support helped smooth the curve and prevented the back and forth movement that characterized women’s journeys in and out of prostitution, both in the quantitative and the qualitative data. This research elaborates the theoretical foundation of the process of exiting prostitution, and specifically, the impact of support, and what support means, in the exiting process. The findings of this study have important implications for service providers and policy makers in deciding on how much, when, and what type of support to offer women who are exiting street prostitution—for example, incorporating peer support in programs that assist women. The quantitative inquiry revealed the impact and benefits of offering support in the exiting process; the qualitative inquiry revealed the multidimensional nature this support. The ABM may be further applied to other exiting processes in related fields, such as recovery from substance abuse. The mixed-method design combining ABM with qualitative interviews should serve as a model to study vulnerable populations with simulation tools. / Criminal Justice

Sex work has been subject to a variety of different conceptualisations throughout history. Within Scandinavia the debate has for long centred on topics such as trafficking, gender- equality and the representation of sex work as either work or exploitation. The thesis aims to examine how sex work is represented as a problem in Sweden and Denmark, as well as how this has manifested in policies. This is done through analysing the discourse within policies on sex work utilising Bacchi’s WPR approach. The thesis constitutes a comparative case study. The study is conducted with a focus on the representation of sex work within different feminist frameworks. In conclusion, the thesis finds that Sweden shares viewpoints with both the carceral and radical feminist framework. The Danish representation has been influenced by a significant number of diverging opinions, however the radical feminist line of thought is also apparent in the Danish case.

Sex work is one of the rare elements of our society that is both accepted and stigmatized. Ironically enough, it is stigmatized without being studied in depth. The truth is we know very little about sex work and even less about pornography—the most legal of genres. While researchers have spent a great deal of time determining the effects that pornography has on viewers, particularly juvenile viewers, little research has been done on the men and women who make pornography. A 43 question survey was created and disseminated to those in the pornographic film industry, both amateur and professional, resulting in 210 respondents from all walks of life. The results of the inquiry show that social scientists know relatively little about working in pornography, having a profound impact on the current discussion and future research. Additionally, this investigation presents a new and creative method for surveying hard to reach, hidden, or sensitive subject populations that will aid in aspects of future research on sex work and other stigmatized behaviors.

In this thesis, I explore how law enforcement officials in Mississippi and Alabama make sense of and respond to human sex trafficking cases. The central questions guiding this research project are: How do law enforcement officials perceive sex trafficking and what does this mean for victim identification and treatment? By conducting 20 interviews with law enforcement officials, I offer insight into how the training, or lack of training, officers receive impacts victim identification, labeling, and treatment. Further, I examine how perceptions, experiences, and training work to influence officer responses to those that do not fit a typical victim narrative, such as sex workers, immigrant, and migrant populations.

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This study aims to explore how sex work is presented as a problem in relation to gender in the state’s public investigations. Using Carol Bacchis (2009) discourse analysis method What's the problem represented to be?, two public investigations where analyzed. Report könshandel (SOU 1995:15) where an important step in the process of making it illegal to buy sex but legal to sell in Sweden, and the second public investigation is an evaluation (SOU 2010:49) of how the law has worked in practice since it was implemented. The study shows that the problem with sex work is presented as a question about equality, where sex work represent inequality. Throughout the investigations the representation of the ‘problem’ is directly affected by the gender of the person described. And the main result shows that sex work as a problem is focused on descriptions of the female sex worker and mens violence against women. Which has affected the way we work with people in sex work, the earlier language that focus on women have influenced social work today and how the resources are distributed. Males and transgendered people have been set aside in working with people in sex work.

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