This thesis aims to understand and explain the importance that prostitution forums have for the exercise of power and influence in the area of prostitution. It also seeks to clarify how these forums developed and were able to occur within a Swedish context. Sweden was the first country to legislate to criminalise only the buying, but not the sale, of sexual services. Social work provisions aims to get people out of prostitution. The thesis is based on an ethnographic study of the three largest Swedish prostitution forums during a two-year period. The empirical material consists of both quantitative participant and content analysis and field notes from observation of the interactions on the forums. The theoretical framework is based mainly on A Theory of Fields by Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam. It focuses on the collective action on - and between - fields and how institutions are reproduced and changed. The results show that most of the content was published by a smaller group of actors. The interaction can be divided into the following subjects: social shims; information; negotiations and rules; advice and support; viewpoints on the forum as well as discussion on prostitution and its regulation. Moreover, the study shows that the forums enabled both sex service providers and sex clients to meet collectively, pursue common interests and discuss which rules should prevail in the prostitution market. Providers also pursued self-organised harm reduction social measures. This form of self-help was also sanctioned by a municipal prostitution unit, which can be interpreted as if it acted in a contrary direction to the government’s prostitution policy. The actors in the forums perceived themselves to be stigmatised by society, where sex service providers to a greater extent than sex clients, described a form of stigma. In the forums they could, however, feel a sense of belonging. The actors perceived themselves to be monitored by the Swedish state and they collectively self-regulated the interaction. Sex service providers and sex clients also co-operated, on occasions, with the Swedish state in order to jointly combat child prostitution, human trafficking and organised crime.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-34170 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Scaramuzzino, Gabriella |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för socialt arbete (SA), Växjö |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, monograph, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Linnaeus University Dissertations ; 167/2014 |
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