Governing Through Punishment: The Impacts of Sex Work Criminalization on People in the Sex Trades in Oregon

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

Feminist social work has long engaged sex work and its related issues and concerns, largely through discursive and practice arenas. Less present in social work specific scholarship is a focus on policy frameworks in the United States for managing and regulating sex work. This pilot study employed an exploratory qualitative design to examine sex work policy, specifically the impacts of the criminalization of sex work on people in the sex trades in Oregon. The findings engage two interrelated and mutually constitutive domains of harm produced by criminalization, namely the manufacturing of stigma and cascading harms. Criminalization operates as a mechanism of social regulation that legislates sex workers as “others,” restricting access to full social and economic participation. Legal stigma and punitive sanctions generate material and symbolic forms of exclusion, producing isolation, economic precarity, and heightened vulnerability to harm. By centering the voices and experiences of sex workers impacted by policy, this study contributes to critical feminist social work scholarship and policy debates. The findings challenge dominant regulatory frameworks by demonstrating how criminalization functions as a structural determinant of harm, underscoring the urgent need for social work engagement with decriminalization and rights-based approaches to sex work policy.