Co-optation, Complicity, and the ‘Helping Relationship’ in Sex Work

Abstract

This special issue complicates the prevailing discourse and public policy surrounding sex work. The authors raise questions about sex workers’ personal agency, environmental and individual-level factors, and new policy regimes, such as hybrid penal and therapeutic approaches. This issue weaves traditional academic genres with research, teaching, and practice reflections. The diverse voices and perspectives in this special issue collectively shed light on the changing discourse, policy, and day-to-day landscape of sex work in a variety of contexts. Contributions focus on several different jurisdictions, offering contextual perspectives on both the macro and micro level experiences of sex work, and the ‘helping relationships’ that contribute to structuring understandings of sex work. Authors in this volume employ different terminology (e.g. ‘sex work,’ ‘prostitution,’ ‘sex trade’), reflecting a diversity of context-specific language and viewpoints. However, authors have in common the prevailing perspective that sex workers should be valued and supported. Challenging the influences behind the social construction of sex workers and sex work is a key theme in this special issue, highlighting the importance of centring sex workers’ voices and experiences. Alison Jobe, Kelly Stockdale and Maggie O’Neill examine the implications of stigma for service provision and access to justice for women selling sex in North East England. Centring sex workers’ voices as co-researchers through a peer-led participatory action research methodology, they demonstrate how the design of health services and approaches to justice need to recognise and ameliorate the stigma attached to sex work. Sharmila Parmanand critiques externally imposed constructions of sex work in the context of the Philippines. Contrasting policy approaches to domestic work and sex work, Parmanand draws upon ethnographic research with Filipino sex workers to challenge a false distinction that views domestic work as valuable and virtuous, while sex work is viewed as abusive and bad. The devaluing of sex work as labour, and the lack of recognition of stigma as an obstacle to service provision, represent failures to centre sex workers’ perspectives and experiences in the creation of policy and services. This can be partly addressed through the inclusion of sex workers as researchers and policy-makers, and the Sex Worker Syllabus is an essential tool in achieving this. The interview with co-creaters of the syllabus, Heather Berg, Angela Jones, and PJ Patella-Rey, reflects on the failures that led to the need for the syllabus, and on the process of collating resources on sex work by sex workers, that should be essential reading for ‘helping professionals’ to better understand the needs of the community. Building on the themes of ‘nothing about us without us’ from the Sex Worker Syllabus, authors in this special issue also dive into the complications of community and narrative control. Responses to violence and harm are not only shaped by individuals’ self-defined experiences but stigmas and stereotypes that risk further conflating sex work with sex trafficking. Nili Gesser describes the role of peer support in one group of women navigating substance use and sex work in the Greater Philadelphia area. In their intentional efforts to stop using drugs and