ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical and legal description of the relationship between social workers and the sex trade in the United States through the lens of social work history, the law, historical and contemporary interventions in the helping professions, and social movements. Often referred to as prostitution, escorting, nude dancing, and pornography, sex work takes many forms. Individuals enter sex trade through choice, circumstance, or coercion, and remain in sex trades for one or more of those reasons. Social work as a profession, practice, academic discipline, and field of research, is called to engage with the complexities and nuances of people engaged in sex trade. As such, this chapter guides the reader toward an intersectional feminist approach to social work that is rooted in anti-criminalization, self-determination, sex positivity, and liberation-based perspectives. This chapter demonstrates the need for an anti-carceral feminist approach to the sex trade by examining how racism, classism, colonialism, militarism, and globalism shape our understanding of sex work.
