scholarly journals Criminalisation, Health, and Labour Rights Among Im/migrant Sex Workers Globally

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-171
Author(s):  
Bronwyn McBride ◽  
Trachje Janushev
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Health Access ◽  
Structural Determinants ◽  
Labour Rights ◽  
Sti Testing ◽  
Gender Diverse ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis chapter introduces the structural determinants that shape health and labour rights among im/migrant sex workers globally. It explores issues related to criminalisation, mandatory health testing, precarious immigration status, economic marginalisation, racialisation, racism and discrimination, language barriers, and gender. This chapter examines how these factors shape health access, health outcomes, and labour rights among im/migrant sex workers in diverse contexts. These issues were explored through a review of academic literature, which was complemented by community consultations that elucidate the lived experiences of gender-diverse im/migrant sex workers from Europe and across the globe. Findings illustrate how shifting sex work criminalisation, public health and immigration regulations (e.g. sex worker registration, mandatory HIV/STI testing), and policing practices impact im/migrant sex workers and shape the labour environments in which they work. The chapter subsequently presents recommendations on policy and programmatic approaches to enhance health access and labour rights among im/migrant sex workers. Finally, it concludes by highlighting the ways in which im/migrant sex workers resist social and structural exclusion, stigma, and ‘victim’ stereotypes, highlighting their tenacity and leadership in the fight to advance labour and human rights among im/migrants and sex workers worldwide.

Sex work abolitionism and hegemonic feminisms: Implications for gender-diverse sex workers and migrants from Brazil

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 852-869
Author(s):  
Lua da Mota Stabile
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Global South ◽  
Radical Feminism ◽  
Trafficking In Persons ◽  
Gender Diverse ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Decolonial Feminism ◽  
Brazilian Case

This article investigates and analyses the main characteristics and issues involving Western hegemonic feminisms, especially so-called ‘radical feminism’, on the topic of sex work and trafficking in persons/migration, to understand how these discussions have influenced the main conventions, regulations and legislation on this global subject. In particular, it enables understanding of how these regulations invisibilize and, sometimes, criminalize trans* and gender-diverse people in migratory contexts. The contributions to decolonial feminism and transfeminism made by decolonial trans writers are essential to analyse and critique some of the conceptions espoused by Western hegemonic and especially trans-exclusionary feminisms that have influenced the international anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution discourse today. These discourses often affect the voluntary migration of trans* and gender-diverse sex workers, mainly from the Global South, such as in the Brazilian case.

“Sex Work Is Star Shaped”

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-590
Author(s):  
Vanessa Carlisle
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Sexual Performance ◽  
Worker Rights ◽  
Sex Worker ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Real Work ◽  
The Common

This article interrogates the common sex worker rights’ slogan “sex work is real work,” a claim that yokes sex worker struggles to labor struggles worldwide. This article argues that US-based sex worker rights activism, which relies on the labor rights framework to confront stigma and criminalization, is unable to undo how racial capitalism constructs sex work as not a legitimate form of work. While labor protections are important, sex work offers opportunity for the development of antiwork potentials. Many people engaging in sexual performance or trading sex are already creating spaces where sex work itself exceeds analysis as a job. By foregrounding sex workers’ lived experiences and the theoretical moves of antiracist anticapitalism, antiwork politics, queer liberationists, and disability justice, this article locates sex workers at the nexus of important forms of subjugated knowledge crucial for undermining the criminalization of marginalized people.

scholarly journals Of Raids and Returns: Sex work movement, police oppression, and the politics of the ordinary in Sonagachi, India

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-139
Author(s):  
Simanti Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Current Literature ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Red Light ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Sex Worker ◽  
Labour Rights ◽  
Red Light District

Drawing on ethnographic work with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a grassroots sex worker organisation in Sonagachi, the iconic red-light district in Kolkata, India, this paper explores the politics of the detritus generated by raids as a form of state violence. While the current literature mainly focuses on its institutional ramifications, this article explores the significance of the raid in its immediate relation to the brothel as a home and a space to collectivise for labour rights. Drawing on atyachar (oppression), the Bengali word sex workers use to depict the violence of raids, I argue that they experience the raid not as a spectacle, but as an ordinary form of violence in contrast to their extraordinary experience of return to rebuild their lives. Return signals both a reclamation of the detritus as well as subversion of the state’s attempt to undermine DMSC’s labour movement.

scholarly journals Sex Work and Occupational Homicide: Analysis of a U.K. Murder Database

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Cunningham ◽  
Teela Sanders ◽  
Lucy Platt ◽  
Pippa Grenfell ◽  
P.G. Macioti
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Prostitution Policy ◽  
Sex Worker ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Work Related ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

This article presents an analysis of occupational homicides of sex workers in the United Kingdom, 1990-2016. Characteristics of 110 people murdered between 1990 and 2016 are explored including the location of their murder, ethnicity, migration status, and gender. Key changes over time are noted including an increase in the number of sex workers murdered indoors as well as an increase in murdered migrant sex workers. By developing the concept of “occupational homicide,” we argue that sex worker homicide should be viewed as an occupational issue and that the distinction between work-related homicide and nonwork-related homicide should be accounted for in future studies and is essential to inform prostitution policy.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Government Regulation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

The conclusion surveys how in nineteenth-century Mexico, Europe, and regions around the world under European colonial rule, sex work took place in an environment of increasing government intervention, a phase in the history of sexuality that extends into the twenty-first century. The concern about disease control took on a more scientific, sanitary tone in the eighteenth century. This discourse remained critical to sex work law, as it does to the present day. Through prolific regulations, scientific studies, works of literature, and statements made by sex workers themselves, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw an enormous increase in the archiving and inscribing of women who sold sex. But their roles remained the same: either pathetic victims (usually of non-whites or non-Christians or other feared populations), lascivious and scandalous disturbers of the peace, or dehumanized and horrific threats to public health. Imperialism and international conceptions of race/gender difference led to increasing government regulation in locations as dispersed as the disappearing Spanish American viceroyalties, extending outwards to Europe, Asia, and Oceania.

scholarly journals COVID-19 Feminist Framework to Address Public Health Impact of Violence, Abuse, and Trauma in Children, Women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ Community: A Preliminary Observation

2021 ◽  
pp. 101053952110143
Author(s):  
Sonia Mukhtar ◽  
Shamim Mukhtar ◽  
Waleed Rana
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Health Impact ◽  
Preliminary Observation ◽  
Public Health Impact ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Gender Diverse ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender

This article explores the development and implementation of inclusive COVID-19 (corona disease 2019) Feminist Framework (CFF) on the equitability of response for researchers, health care advocates, and public health policymakers at international platforms. Mechanism of CFF entails the process to address and mitigate the institutional inequities, violation of human rights, public health, and race/sex/gender-based violence amid COVID-19. This framework is about institutional building, raising consciousness, ensuring freedom, collective liberation, bodily autonomy, equality, and giving women, children, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and racial- and gender-diverse people the freedom to make choices to promote a sense of greater control over their own lives.

scholarly journals Mobility, Latino Migrants, and the Geography of Sex Work: Using Ethnography in Public Health Assessments

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thurka Sangaramoorthy ◽  
Karen Kroeger
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Health Care Services ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
Health Needs ◽  
Needs Assessments ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Public Health Practitioners

Recent studies have documented frequent use of female sex workers among Latino migrant men in the southeastern United States, yet little is known about the context in which sex work takes place or the women who provide these services. As anthropologists working in applied public health, we use rapid ethnographic assessment as a technical assistance tool to document local understandings of the organization and typology of sex work and patterns of mobility among sex workers and their Latino migrant clients. By incorporating ethnographic methods in traditional public health needs assessments, we were able to highlight the diversity of migrant experiences and better understand the health needs of mobile populations more broadly. We discuss the findings in terms of their practical implications for HIV/STD prevention and call on public health practitioners to incorporate the concept of mobility as an organizing principle for the delivery of health care services.

Men in Transit and Prostitution: Using Political Conventions as a Natural Experiment

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Cunningham ◽  
Todd D Kendall
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Economic Theory ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Health Resources ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Commercial Sex Work ◽  
Percent Increase ◽  
In Transit

Abstract Approximately 100,000 visitors came to Denver, Colorado and Minneapolis, Minnesota to attend the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Economic theory suggests that men in transit can shift demand for commercial sex work. We estimate the responsiveness of labor supply to these two conventions, focusing on a previously neglected but increasingly important segment of the prostitution market: indoor sex workers who advertise on the Internet. Using a differences-in-differences estimator of prostitution advertisements posted on a major classified ads website, we find that the conventions caused a 29-44 percent increase in advertisements in Minneapolis and a 47-77 percent increase in Denver. Given the key role prostitution plays in the transmission of STIs, these results imply that focusing public health resources on men in transit may be beneficial.

scholarly journals “I Walked into the Industry for Survival and Came Out of a Closet”

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Premala Matthen ◽  
Tara Lyons ◽  
Matthew Taylor ◽  
James Jennex ◽  
Solanna Anderson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Health Assessment ◽  
Work Experiences ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Gender Minorities ◽  
And Gender

Background/Objectives: This article seeks to examine how gender and sexual identities shape sex work experiences among men, two spirit, and/or trans people in Vancouver. Methods: In-depth, semistructured interviews were conducted with men and trans people in Metro Vancouver from Community Health Assessment of Men Who Purchase and Sell Sex. An intersectional critical feminist perspective guided the thematic analysis of interview transcripts, and ATLAS.ti 7 was used to manage data analysis. Results: Three themes emerged from the data: (1) the diversity of sexual and gender identities among sex workers and clients, (2) the expression and exploration of sexual and gender identities through sex work, and (3) the migration of sexual and gender minorities to urban centers to escape discrimination in their places of origin. Discussion: These findings complicate existing narratives of sex work, demonstrating the need for policies and services that reflect the diversity of sex work experiences.

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