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Prostitution and Sex Work, Who Counts? Mapping Local Data to Inform Policy and Service Provision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2022

Alba Lanau Open the ORCID record for Alba Lanau [Opens in a new window]  and
Andrea Matolcsi
Alba Lanau*
Affiliation:
Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED-CERCA), UAB, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: alanau@ced.uab.es
Andrea Matolcsi
Affiliation:
School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. E-mail: andrea.matolcsi@bristol.ac.uk
*
Corresponding author: Alba Lanau, E-mail: alanau@ced.uab.es.
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Abstract

Data on the sex industry is notably hard to obtain. Existing evidence points towards an increase in the number of people selling sex, particularly through the online industry. The growing and increasingly diverse population poses challenges to service provision, as new groups are less visible and less likely to be in contact with specialist services. Simultaneously, there are increased calls for policies regulating the sex industry to be grounded in evidence. Relying on systematic literature and data reviews, this article provides a synthesis of the evidence on the prevalence of sex work and prostitution in England and Wales. It shows that no existing source allows producing reliable estimates of the size and characteristics of sex markets. As a result, policy is informed by partial pictures. The article proposes local mapping, an underused approach, to inform both policy development and service provision.

Keywords

Sex workmappingservice planningprostitution policy
Type
Article
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 23 , Issue 1: THEMED SECTION: Social Policy Responses to the Cost-of-Living-Crisis , January 2024 , pp. 71 - 85
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

‡

The original version of this article was published without the funding statement. This has now been added and a notice detailing this has been published and the error rectified in the online and print PDF and HTML copies.

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