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Tuesday 10th July 5.00 pm
Professor Graham Scambler
Professor of Medical Sociology, Department of Medicine, UCL
‘Sex Work Stigma as a Health Barrier’
The stigma attached to sex work is ubiquitous, although always a mix of the global and the local, and always embedded in political and social structures (themselves a mix of the global and the local). The capacity of sex work stigma to enhance the vulnerability of female sex workers (FSW) and their clients to disease, to impede their ‘rights’ and to undermine health interventions is well documented. In this paper a lapsed sociological distinction between stigma and deviance is re-presented, and a novel conceptual apparatus comprising notions of felt, enacted and projected stigma and deviance presented. The explanatory potential of this conceptual frame is illustrated empirically and a typology of sex work careers developed. Reference is made in this paper to the author’s own study of migrant FSW from Eastern Europe working in central London, and to the published research of colleagues on FSW in both developed and developing societies.

Location:
This seminar will be held at UCL