Governing Sex Workers Through Social Work

Description

In this project, I investigate strategies and policies for social programmes targeting sex sellers in Denmark. The focus, however, is not on performing a traditional evaluation. Instead, Foucauldian theories and concepts are used to understand the strategies as potential attempts to govern sex sellers towards goals that are beneficial for society. Particular emphasis is placed on how the strategies can be said to make certain so-called subjectivities available to the sex sellers. In this context, the concept of subjectivities can be said to direct attention to how sex sellers are expected to change their self-understanding and identity to live more productively and healthily. This perspective opens up the possibility of asking: What subjectivities are the sex sellers expected to internalize? By coming up with possible suggestions on how this question may be answered, it also becomes possible to raise the issue of whether these expectations are realistic, and if they might contribute to social justice.

From a Foucauldian perspective, Denmark is particularly interesting to study. Foucault emphasized that Western societies tend to govern through our freedom rather than by limiting it. From this perspective, laws and prohibitions seem to play less of a role in governing people’s behaviour. Instead, many other governing techniques aim to influence people to voluntarily transform their behaviour. In Denmark, both selling and buying sexual services are decriminalized. At the same time, sex selling is regarded as a significant social problem that seriously risks the health and well-being of sex sellers. Politicians have, therefore, taken an interest in social work as a possible way to reduce sex selling or, at least, help sex sellers sell sex in a safer way. Denmark may subsequently be understood as one of the Western countries that relies most heavily on voluntary governing techniques to achieve social policy goals concerning sex selling. This project can be seen as an attempt to understand how these social policy goals are meant to be achieved through social work.

Supervisors: Docent Maritha Jacobsson and Professor Katarina Alexius.