Contrary to the common perception of sex workers being forced into the profession through coercion or exploitation, prostitution is actually a rational and deliberate choice for some, according to a recent report out of the University of Victoria.
Published in the online edition of the British Sociological Association journal Work, Employment and Society on Jan. 30, “Would you think about doing sex for money? Structure and agency in deciding to sell sex in Canada” resulted from a survey of 209 sex workers, aged 19 to 61, in six Canadian cities. The study also looked at the perspectives of customers and managers in sex work, as well as workers’ intimate partners and police services.
“The idea that a person might legitimately choose sex work as a viable occupation is, for some, a contradiction in terms,” read the report. “Prostitution is typically understood as outside of wage labour; that is, as extreme exploitation or a form of modern slavery… Until the 1990s, the dominant understanding of entry into sex work was the ‘drift into prostitution’ passively experienced by neglected and abused children and teens.”
But while about 69 of the responding sex workers, or nearly one-third, cited “critical life events” like abuse or neglect as a factor that had driven them into the industry, more than one-quarter claimed that they found “personal appeal” in the work. Nearly 87 per cent of the workers stated “need or desire for money” as one of the factors.
A Venn diagram included in the report showed that 17 of the sex workers (eight per cent) had cited personal appeal as the sole factor that had made them choose the work, as opposed to seven (three per cent) who had claimed critical life events as the only reason. Ten of the workers (less than five per cent) had chosen prostitution for all three reasons.
“A substantial minority of participants in this study said sex work appealed to them largely because of the job’s intrinsic qualities,” the report read, “including opportunities for sexual and personal exploration, sexual gratification and expression of sexuality and gender identity.”
The report’s co-authors – led by Cecilia Benoit, a scientist with the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C. and a sociology professor at the university – conceded that the research had had limitations. For example, the sample of sex workers was not “statistically representative” of the profession across Canada and likely excluded those who had been prevented from taking part in the survey or did not want to discuss their work.
“The many nuances of choice imply that universal approaches to managing, regulating or policing sex work are not justified and are unlikely to be uniformly effective,” the report concluded. “Both choice and constraints differentially guide both entry into and pathways into different types of sex work, similar to how agentic and structural forces guide entry into and passages into lower-prestige jobs.”
“Would you think about doing sex for money?” is accessible online at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0950017016679331.