Street-Level Bureaucrats and Ethical Conflicts in Service Provision to Sex Workers

Anasti, Theresa

doi:10.1080/17496535.2019.1664608

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Family difficulties and other stressful life events were common among PDC participants in this study and may have made family relationships particularly complicated. Our data indicate that the socioemotional aspects of staff/client relationships warrant further investigation than is found in extant literature, which looks primarily at staff decision-making (e.g., Anasti, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

“I’m Doing Everything Right All Over Again”: How Women Manage Exiting Street Prostitution Over Time

Gesser

Shdaimah

2021

Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice &Amp; Criminology

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Exiting street prostitution is a complex, recursive process which has been rarely studied over time. Using typical case sampling, we selected two respondents from a two-year ethnographic study of a court-affiliated diversion program in Philadelphia who participated in a total of eight interviews. Saldaña's (2009) seldom-used longitudinal coding method was applied to conduct a fine-grained longitudinal analysis of participants' perceptions of exiting prostitution, focusing on participants' motivations and actions. Respondents managed expectations of others and themselves and their sense of self-worth within a context of changing relationships, structural opportunities, accomplishments and setbacks. Viewed in a longitudinal context, the same relationships and structural hurdles often had different impact on women's motivation to exit at different time points. We argue that a longitudinal perspective of the exiting process is critical to avoid erroneous binary classifications of women as either exiters or non-exiters from prostitution, as the exiting process is more complex than what cross-sectional studies have previously revealed. Findings have implications for researchers of prostitution and programs for women exiting prostitution that should structure supports and (dis)incentives in a nonjudgmental fashion in line with this nuanced understanding of exiting over time. This is particularly important in criminal justice settings, where punitive responses have serious shortand long-term consequences.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

“I’m Doing Everything Right All Over Again”: How Women Manage Exiting Street Prostitution Over Time

Gesser

Shdaimah

2021

Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice &Amp; Criminology

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“…PDPs join an established history of social workers acting in a social control role toward sex workers that is in tension with social work ethics of solidarity and social change (Anasti, 2020b;Reisch, 2019;Wahab, 2002;Wahab & Panichelli, 2013). Instead of calling out and heeding these tensions, many of those who are charged with the obligation to protect people and groups with whom they work (e.g., public defenders, therapists, social workers) often join their criminal legal system counterparts (e.g., prosecutors, judges, probation officers) in seeking to surveil and change women's individual behaviors under threat of punishment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Do We Call “Creepy?”: Sex Workers’ Relationships as Targets of Intimate Intervention

Shdaimah,

Becker,

Franke

et al. 2023

Affilia

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Like other forms of problem-solving justice, prostitution diversion programs (PDPs) are designed to (re)shape thinking and behaviors. The authority to surveil and punish stems from criminalization of sex work, itself an act of control over women and their bodies. The court cues normative behaviors through rewards and punishments based on information gleaned through ongoing surveillance in and out of court. Using a critical feminist lens, we draw on ethnographic and interview data from studies of two court-affiliated PDPs to examine the regulation of women's bodies and intimate relationships. We found that criminal justice professionals explicitly viewed constant discussion and surveillance of all facets of PDP participants’ lives as a tool to cause participants to internalize particular understandings of normative relationships. Such normative understandings involve assumptions about which men are “creepy” that do not always reflect women's lived experiences and decontextualize relationships in ways that are incompatible with women's own assessments of these relationships. This analysis contributes to feminist social work by revealing the social control functions of such programs, which employ “creepy” intrusion to police the boundaries between unacceptable and normative behavior while simultaneously disregarding the systemic forces that shape women's choices and constructions of normativity.

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“…Studies also show that street-level workers may also use discretion to professionally resist discriminatory practices that violate their ethical principles (Strier et al, 2020). For example, Anasti (2020) showed how the emotional and moral discourse surrounding sex workers has shaped the response, which is sometimes in conflict with agency and field policies, of street-level bureaucrats who work with this population.…”

Section: Social Workers As Street-level Bureaucratsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Services in Ethnically Mixed Cities: Street-Level Bureaucracy at the Crossroads of Ethno-National Conflict

Strier

Abu-Rayya

Shwartz-Ziv

2021

Administration & Society

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There is a paucity of research examining street-level bureaucracy in cities affected by ongoing ethnopolitical conflict. This study addresses this limitation by exploring the work of social workers in the public services of mixed cities in Israel. It shows the interconnection between ambiguous institutional policies, varying workers’ views of the role of social services, and changing discretion patterns. Findings also suggest that episodes of conflict escalation intensify staff ethnic sectarianism, as well as increase workers’ own ethnic biases, which affect the ways in which they act as a liaison between the welfare system and citizens through their use of discretion.

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Street-Level Bureaucrats and Ethical Conflicts in Service Provision to Sex Workers

Cited by 9 publications

References 29 publications

“I’m Doing Everything Right All Over Again”: How Women Manage Exiting Street Prostitution Over Time

“I’m Doing Everything Right All Over Again”: How Women Manage Exiting Street Prostitution Over Time

Who Do We Call “Creepy?”: Sex Workers’ Relationships as Targets of Intimate Intervention

Social Services in Ethnically Mixed Cities: Street-Level Bureaucracy at the Crossroads of Ethno-National Conflict

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