Sex Work Politics: From Protest to Service Provision by Samantha Majic

Author:Samantha Majic [Majic, Samantha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Medical, Political Advocacy, Social Science, Political Science, Political Process, Women's Studies, Health Care Delivery
ISBN: 9780812245639
Google: UUMoAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17890668
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

CAL-PEP, the SJI, and Inclusive Research

Since Project AWARE, CAL-PEP and the SJI continue demonstrating how social movement–borne nonprofits may use the process of knowledge production to continue their oppositional goals and challenge mainstream conceptions of their community. Following Project AWARE in 1991, a doctor with the Alameda County Public Health Department approached CAL-PEP to apply for funds from the CDC to promote HIV prevention among women and infants through the Women and Infants Demonstration Project. This project ran from 1991 to 1995 and aimed to decrease pregnancy and increase condom use among women and their partners considered at high risk for HIV—namely, women aged fifteen to thirty-four who were sexually active, used crack cocaine, and exchanged sex for cash, drugs, or other trade and who were likely to have unprotected sex with multiple partners.

Lockett and CAL-PEP used the Demonstration Project to promote their political goals; they used its data-collection practices and program development and delivery methods to promote nonjudgmental, sex worker–positive approaches to the community’s health and safety. The project involved CAL-PEP’s staff (many of whom had histories of sex work and drug use themselves) in all aspects of the project’s design and implementation, for everything from subject recruitment to peer counseling and service delivery. And the results, which were published in AIDS Education and Prevention (Terry et al. 1999), were even more remarkable for challenging status quo understandings of prostitution policy. The study found that noncriminalizing approaches to prostitution were particularly valuable for promoting sex workers’ health and safety. By involving prostitutes in the implementation and diffusion of the project, prostitutes’ stigma in the community was minimized, and they gained more knowledge about and confidence to adopt safer sex practices. Since publishing this study, CAL-PEP has bolstered its expert status in the HIV/AIDS prevention field by publishing research extensively in a range of peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes (for examples, see the following: Bowser, Whittle, and Rosenbloom 2001; Bowser, Word, Lockett, and Dillard Smith 2001; Dorfman 1992; Dorfman et al. 1988; Lockett 2004; Oliva et al. 2005; Terry et al. 1999).

The SJI has followed CAL-PEP’s example, using the process of knowledge production to challenge the utility of current (criminalizing) policy approaches to prostitution through the Sex Work Environmental Assessment Team (SWEAT) study. SWEAT, which began in 2003, was led by Dr. Cohan, at that time the SJI’s medical director, and was a community-based research partnership between the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco; the San Francisco Department of Public Health; and the SJI. The study examined three different areas that concerned the sex-worker community: “the individual-level psychological risk factors associated with the prevalence of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and viral hepatitis among female sex workers in San Francisco; social capital among sub-populations of female sex workers in San Francisco; and whether diminished social capital is associated with an increased prevalence of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and viral hepatitis” (Lutnick 2011: 6). To study these issues, SWEAT focused on sex workers (783 in total) of all genders.

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