Using Anticarceral Feminism to Illustrate the Impact of Criminalization on the Lives of Individuals in the Sex Trades

Our ability to provide affirming care to individuals who engage in sex work is limited by punitive foundations of social work. This study originates from within the sex worker rights movement. I utilize qualitative dialogues aligned with participatory principles to consider how a Black feminist disability framework can be employed to explore how intersectionality weaves itself into the lives and networks of 13 sex workers in Los Angeles, CA. Specifically, this study engaged in Participatory Action Research (PAR) and collective knowledge production to examine how criminalization operates within larger intersecting systems of oppression and complicates workers’ relationships with each other. The results of this study put forth the conceptualization of the sex worker-informed stratified social hierarchy – described as the “whorearchy” – and the ways that collective care is used to combat it. I conclude with a discussion on centering restorative sex worker narratives in order to examine how criminalization hinders sex worker solidarity and how, similarly, the state's role limits the ways social workers can support sex worker liberation.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sex Worker Collectives Within the Whorearchy: Intersectional Inquiry with Sex Workers in Los Angeles, CA

Fuentes

2022

“…Social workers use this information to develop a treatment plan. These plans tend to reflect “paternalistic ideas of what would be best for the participant's own good” (Capous-Desyllas et al, 2021, p. 526). Social workers often fail to inform participants of the purpose of these documents, and women who question this process may be perceived as ill-equipped for programming (Dewey & St. Germain, 2016).…”

Section: Sex Work Interventions Across Timementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These acts of kindness, along with service connection to benefits and other resources, are far outweighed by the power and control that police and providers have over participants' lives (Dewey & St. Germain, 2016). Capous-Desyllas et al (2021) found that criminalized sex workers often lost employment or custody of their children, lost affordable housing, or were unable to attend school. With these shortcomings in mind, it is troubling that fear of consequences such as jail sentences motivate participants to remain engaged with PDPs even when their needs are not being met (Wahab & Panichelli, 2013).…”

Section: Present Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Police officers see sting operations as “opportunities to detain and arrest suspected sex workers, trafficked persons, and traffickers” (Schwarz, 2021, p. 622). Researchers have found that arrests “further perpetuate a cycle of power and control that police hold over sex workers,” even when the aim is to prosecute traffickers (Capous-Desyllas et al, 2021, p. 513). Despite this finding, Anasti (2020) found that 70% of service providers interviewed at one PDP believed that “law enforcement and carceral mechanisms can be a useful force” in dealing with sex workers (p. 62).…”

Section: Sex Work Interventions Across Timementioning

confidence: 99%

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An Epidemic of Virtue: A Review of Social Work's Complicity in “Prostitution” Interventions

Welch

Rong

2022

This article engages with the field of social work's role in humanitarian and criminal legal responses to sex work in the United States over the last century. Our historical review reveals that, through interdisciplinary collaboration in the criminalization and rehabilitation of sex workers, social workers have contributed to the transformation of “prostitution” from an issue of sex workers’ rights to a psychological, criminal legal, and medical phenomenon. This has exacerbated the harm and stigma experienced by sex workers. In exploring social work interventions on sex work from the Progressive Era through the rise of neoliberalism, this article places its modern iteration, prostitution diversion programming, within the context of social work's carceral history with sex workers. We choose these periods not for their chronicity, but rather for the salient themes in these historical interventions that characterize modern diversion programming: power and control, punitive service provision, patriarchal rescue, and carceral feminism. To align with social work's mandate for social justice and client self-determination, this article offers policy and practice implications grounded in the decriminalization of sex work and divestment from the police and courts. Alternative service approaches spearheaded by sex workers are explored and placed within the context of labor, racial, gender, and immigration justice.

“…We join in the growing voices of those who do not and will not accept a turn to policing as the answer to violence. The policing of sex work (Capous-Desyllas et al, 2020;Shih, 2021) has only added to vulnerability, detention and deportations, incarceration, and victimization not only by the police but by social work's paternalism and collusion with law enforcement. As Chicago social worker, Anjanette Young, reminds us in our recent editorial (Young et al, 2021), police violence against Black women is an everyday occurrence.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical Feminist Reflections on the Atlanta Murders of March 16, 2021

Kim

Goodkind

Zelnick

2021

On March 16, 2021, six Asian American women and two men were slain by gunshot in the suburbs of Atlanta. The media's use of storefront signs with the words "spa" or "massage" signaled the small businesses many of us see in strip malls across the United States. Their association with "Asian women" evokes centuries-old connotations-steeped in power inequities and social/political/economic relationships, driven by exploitation, extraction, dehumanization, and disposability. While these murders took place in Atlanta, their legacies reach back to Japanese occupation, the Korean War, U.S. military occupation, and today's immigration labyrinth.Clearly, white supremacy, the specifics of anti-Asian and anti-immigrant racism, misogyny, and the devaluation of working-class lives-especially among those assumed to be engaged in sex work-were tightly woven into the gunman's search for victims that evening of March 16, 2021. These multiple factors also distort the reactions of a public awoken, once again, to the reality and lethal consequences of anti-Asian racism. While gender, class, and the fetishization of sexualized Asian women's bodies (Azhar et al., 2021) play a role in this recent set of murders, these dimensions were flattened into a singular category, "Asian," obscuring the complex realities of these women's lives. The women murdered in Atlanta, we later learned, were, of course, mothers, wives, aunts, sisters, and daughters, leaving behind devastated family members, friends, and communities. The seemingly daily attacks on older Asian Americans, with a specific brutality towards women, mark another category of disposability and targeted violence that now punctuates the daily news-too often accompanied by accounts of an utter lack of response by bystanders.Again, we ask, why is it a blood bath that makes the daily violence and loss of lives suddenly become a public concern? Why is it that a 9 min 29 s recording made in broad daylight of the murder of George Floyd is that which awakens a nation (yet again) to over 500 years of systematic murders of BIPOC in this country? Each public tragedy momentarily lifts us from the normality of violence that characterizes the everyday lives of so many community members.As incoming Editors-in-Chief of a journal committed to critical feminist analysis and research in social work, we take this opportunity to publicly join others in outrage and sorrow as we mourn the lives lost in Atlanta, that of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant, those of 23 transgender people murdered in the United States in the first 4 months of 2021, and so many others, to elevate the role that critical feminist scholarship can and must take in our analyses of these intersecting forms of violence and our move forward to meaningful change.Since March 16, the outpouring of messages of solidarity across race reminds us that anti-Asian violence must be understood in the context of racist, misogynist, classist, heterosexist, transphobic, and ableist violence across the globe. Atlanta cannot be understood outside of the brutal...