Confidence in the police is fundamental to citizens' willingness to report unlawful behaviour, share intelligence about crime, seek help when victimized, and generally comply with the law. Marginalized groups overwhelmingly report a lack of confidence that police will apply the law fairly. Although sex work research reports a wide range of negative experiences with the police, it is not known how common these experiences are because most research focuses solely on street-based sex workers and does not include quantitative measures. We report on confidence in the police through the analysis of relevant data gathered from in-person interviews with sex workers from six census metropolitan areas of Canada. Under the pre-2014 legal regime, our non-random sample of sex workers had lower confidence in police than estimated for other Canadians by the General Social Survey and were particularly unlikely to see police as treating sex workers fairly. Thematic analysis suggests this is primarily driven by stigma and discrimination. We also found a significant minority who reported the police to be a source of aid, suggesting that appropriate policy and program regimes could be developed to improve sex worker–police relations.

The challenges involved in the design of ethical, nonexploitative research projects with sex workers or any other marginalized population are significant. First, the size and boundaries of the population are unknown, making it extremely difficult to get a representative sample. Second, because membership in hidden populations often involves stigmatized or illegal behavior, concerns regarding privacy and confidentiality are paramount and difficult to resolve. In addition, they often result in challenges to the validity of the data. Third, in spite of evidence to the contrary, associations between sex work and victimization are still strong, dichotomies remain prevalent, and sex workers are often represented as a homogeneous population. Drawing on three research projects in which the author has been involved-all grounded in a sex-as-work approach-as well as the work of others, this article provides several strategies for overcoming these challenges. Clear guidelines for ethical, nonexploitive methodologies are embedded in the solutions provided.

Theories of human sexuality have proposed that two factors reduce the double standard of sexuality and lead to a convergence of male and female sexual behavior: the degree of social benefits and amount of power women have in basic societal institutions and the extent to which a society accepts permissive sexual norms. As these factors increase, the strength of the double standard will decrease and the convergence between male and female behaviors will increase. Compared to the United States, Sweden has instituted more policies to promote gender equality and has been thought to accept more permissive premarital sexual attitudes. The focus of the research reported here is to examine country and gender differences in sexual attitudes and sexual behavior for a sample of university students in the United States (N = 407) and Sweden (N = 570). Results indicate that Swedish students endorsed more similar sexual standards for women and men and reported more accepting attitudes than did American students. For sexual behavior, American men reported the most sexual experience, Swedish men the least, with the women of both countries generally in the middle category. Notwithstanding this more permissive behavior on the part of American men, gender convergence with respect to sexual behavior is stronger in Sweden on several of the dimensions examined: age of first engaging in partner-related sexual activities for those who were sexually experienced, relationship with first partner, number of partners both in the last year and in their lifetime, and affective reactions to first coitus. Gender convergence, however, is weaker in Sweden than in the United States with respect to the incidence and frequency of various sexual activities and the degree of satisfaction with current sex life. Findings are discussed with respect to the questions they raise about the current theories that framed this research and the differential amount of sex education provided in the two countries.

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The variable "gender" rarely appears in prostitution research. Its inclusion raises the same questions brought up with respect to other areas of work: Is there a gendered perspective with respect to the work and are gender inequalities reflected in it? This study examines gender differences in the work of 140 sex workers in the San Francisco Tenderloin. As well as women and men who are workers, we include transgender workers (genetic males who present themselves as women), further accentuating differences by gender. Looking at work-specific characteristics, we find that women do not suffer inequities of income. They are, however, more prone to occupational hazards. Transgenders, who suffer the most societal discrimination, are closer to women than men in their work situation. Examining the sexuality of sex workers, the women are the least likely to enjoy sex with clients. Men report more sexual enjoyment with clients and transgenders are closer to the men in this regard. Few differences are, however, found in sexual pleasure in the personal lives of the women, men, and transgenders. A gender difference that stands out is that the men have more noncommercial sex partners than the women. Again, transgenders are more like the men, although various aspects of their condition make for some unique differences.