An Epidemic of Virtue: A Review of Social Work's Complicity in “Prostitution” Interventions

Abstract

This article engages with the field of social work's role in humanitarian and criminal legal responses to sex work in the United States over the last century. Our historical review reveals that, through interdisciplinary collaboration in the criminalization and rehabilitation of sex workers, social workers have contributed to the transformation of “prostitution” from an issue of sex workers’ rights to a psychological, criminal legal, and medical phenomenon. This has exacerbated the harm and stigma experienced by sex workers. In exploring social work interventions on sex work from the Progressive Era through the rise of neoliberalism, this article places its modern iteration, prostitution diversion programming, within the context of social work's carceral history with sex workers. We choose these periods not for their chronicity, but rather for the salient themes in these historical interventions that characterize modern diversion programming: power and control, punitive service provision, patriarchal rescue, and carceral feminism. To align with social work's mandate for social justice and client self-determination, this article offers policy and practice implications grounded in the decriminalization of sex work and divestment from the police and courts. Alternative service approaches spearheaded by sex workers are explored and placed within the context of labor, racial, gender, and immigration justice.