Project Description
SPACES stands for Sex, Power, Agency, Consent, Environment & Safety and was a research study about people of all genders involved in the off-street sex industry in Vancouver as service providers (sex workers), clients and third-party facilitators and support staff.
This study (2012-16) aimed to help us better understand how the physical, organizational and managerial contexts of the off-street work environment interacted to affect the health and safety of sex workers in Vancouver. to enable us to make recommendations for addressing self-governance and informing public health interventions dedicated to improving the health and safety of sex industry workers.
Recognizing that sex work, and its coordination and facilitation, is a legitimate form of labour, we used ecological approaches to situate the findings and to generate the recommendations detailed in the third (final) report. This approach was fitting because we recognize that if people are to have opportunities to engage in the sex industry in safe and health promoting ways, change beyond the levels of either individual behaviour and decision making or structural conditioning are required. In other words, we sought to employ a framework that allowed us to recognize the simultaneous contribution of micro/agency and macro/structure influences.
KxMob
- Publication: Recommendations from the Off-Street Sex Industry in Vancouver
- Publication: Intersections of Stigma, Mental Health, and Sex Work
The Team
This project partnered and succeeded from the involvement and guidance of those from varying sectors of the off-street Vancouver sex industry community. These efforts took the form of: an advisory of community experts that was influential at all stages of the research process; focus groups with sex industry and community actors undertaken throughout the project; community feedback on reports; and, a community forum held near the end of the project with industry actors, community members, policy makers, and allies to review the data and develop expert-driven and evidence based recommendations intended to inform advocacy efforts, enhance community capacity, and to promote dignity, respect, safety, health and people’s rights to self-determination.
Contact Information
Principal Investigator
Dr. Vicky Bungay
604.822.7933
vicky.bungay@ubc.ca