Business Women and Exit Programs

Abstract

Contemporary research on prostitution tends to treat it either as a social problem that needs to be solved by criminalizing customers and supportive social programs (exit programs) or as a manifestation of female agency. This article analyzes Danish ethnographic interview and observations with the so-called dominatrices. The theoretical concepts, boundary markers and body schema, are applied to identify dominatrices' perception of themselves as businesswomen not representing a social problem. The dominatrices are used to discuss tailoring of exit programs, and the article concludes that core elements in these programs need to change if the dominatrices should be provided relevant opportunities to pursue a different profession.

Reducing sex work by targeting ‘vulnerable’ sex workers: A post‐structural analysis of policies regulating Danish exit programmes directed at people involved in sex work

“…In this sense, the programmes appeared to be about more than the provisioning of various social services. Finally, Kofod (2018) criticised the tailoring of these programmes for not meeting the demands of dominatrices, which typically had acquired skills in terms of business expertise that they could transfer into other careers.…”

“…The central idea was to divert the sex workers from punitive measures to professional social work interventions aiming to help and guide them to other sources of income (Wahab, 2005). Since then, exit programmes have increased in popularity and have spread, not only across the USA (Oselin, 2014), but also to Canada (Lewis, 2010), the UK (Scoular & O'Neill, 2007), India (Wilson et al, 2015), the Netherlands (Ministry of Security and Justice, 2011) and Denmark (Kofod, 2018). However, as these programmes may deeply affect the subjected sex workers, a critical scrutiny is called for concerning how the problem of sex work is represented, how this problem is supposed to be solved, and how the subjected sex workers are constituted as subjects.…”

“…This study argues that Denmark is the most interesting country to start with for two reasons. First, the country has deployed various help and support programmes aiming to help and guide sex workers out of sex work for several decades (Bjønness, 2012; Kofod, 2018; Spanger, 2011). Second, in 1999, the country decriminalised sex work as long as third parties were not organising and profiting from the trade (Bjønness, 2012).…”