Reconceptualizing Exiting and Career Development in Sex Work

This book explores ‘exiting’ programs for sex workers, which are behavioural change interventions that support people to stop selling sex. This book examines questions about how we should conceptualise and respond to ‘exiting’ and, by centring sex workers’ voices, it provides evidence of the impact of these programs. It examines sex work ‘exiting’, not as something sex workers need to stop doing, but as part of sex work careers. Drawing on interviews and a global program review to establish best practice, this book challenges the idea of sex work as something a person is ‘in’ or ‘out’ of. It also explores sex workers’ resistance to this area of programming to highlight the power and politics of ‘exiting’. Using a labour framing and seeing sex work as career, this book repositions ‘exiting’ as career development and sheds new light on everyday working circumstances, popular discourses, policies and programs and grassroots struggles for change. As a co-collaboration incorporating knowledge from researchers and lived experience experts, this book is a unique addition that challenges the dominant abolitionist, anti-sex work framings and is of interest to academics, policy makers, sex worker support organisations and non-government organisations globally.

Larissa Sandy is an associate professor in Criminology at the University of Nottingham. As a British Academy Innovation fellow, she co-collaborated on creating a crime reporting system for sex workers in Nottingham and is the author of Women and Sex Work in Cambodia: Blood, Sweat and Tears (2014).

Petrea Nes-Iadicola works in a Melbourne-based program supporting sex workers. Petrea has developed peer-led spaces, and with over twenty years’ experience, her research and advocacy focus on reducing stigma, strengthening inclusive practice, and ensuring lived experience is recognised within services. As a neurodivergent advocate, she is committed to building bridges between academic and peer spaces and valuing diverse knowledges and lived realities.

Daisy Matthews is a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. Her research focuses on religious/spiritual sex workers and she works on two research projects Working Together to Remove Barriers for Street-based Sex Workers (Huddersfield and Leeds) and Creating Opportunities for Sex Worker Justice (Nottingham, with Larissa).