Lessons Learned: Ontario Sex Worker Experiences of Federal and Provincial COVID-19 Policy

Using content analysis methodology, we explore sex work policies at 255 U.S. colleges and universities as articulated in codes of student conduct to understand the potential impact of those policies on college student sex workers. The findings indicate U.S. colleges and universities largely do not articulate clear policies for students involved in sex work. However, many policies include language and framing that potentially governs some sex work. These articulations often rely on flattening differences in sex work, trafficking, and carceral logics, which result in misalignment between research, rhetoric, and policy at some institutions. Such ambiguities in institutional policy may result from the conflation of sex work with sex trafficking at the federal or state policy level. In addition to the marginalization imparted to student sex workers, unjustified exposure to stigma and shame on their respective college campuses negatively impacts students’ well-being. We recommend the current laissez-faire approach by institutional policymakers be replaced with a more intentional approach whereby the well-being of all students is maintained at its core and unclear policy language clarified.

In most countries, sex-work is criminalized and frowned upon. This leads to human rights abuses, especially for migrant female sex workers. The burden is heavier on migrant female sex-workers whose gender and foreign citizenship intersect to produce a plethora of adverse health, social, and legal outcomes. This phenomenological study explores the intersectionality of individual factors leading to human rights abuses among migrant Cameroonian female sex workers in N’Djamena, Chad. Ten female sex workers and two key-informants were interviewed, and being a small sample, they gave detailed information about their experiences. The data was later analyzed using thematic analysis. Participants narrated experiences of social exclusion, exposure to diverse abuses, and health risks due to gender, immigrant status, and illegality of sex work. The experiences of female migrant sex workers, within contexts of sex work criminalization, are exacerbated by the intersectionality of these factors. Women endure several vulnerabilities in many African countries, more so when they have to survive on sex work as foreigners in a country where the act is illegal.

Work is a significant occupational transition that occurs with immigration and resettlement. Problems finding work and regaining economic capital are multi-factorial, differentiated by gender and mediated by specific contexts. Surprisingly, past education and work experience are unreliable predictors of successful employment outcomes. Critical theory and ethnographic concepts informed the methodological approach. Data were generated primarily through in-depth interviews, conducted in English, with 14 well-educated women who immigrated to Canada as adults and sought employment in their professions. The thematic findings were analyzed using Bourdieu's [7] concepts of capital, field and habitus. The theme Compromised Careers describes the downward occupational (work) mobility that occurs despite expectations that education, credentials and work experience are transferable to desirable employment. A devaluation of foreign qualifications and no relevant Canadian work experience function with gendered responsibilities, less social support, and time spent in resettlement activities to create negative work trajectories. The role that federal policies and professional organizations play is examined to reveal the tension between individuals' efforts to find employment and institutional barriers that impede these actions. A critical inquiry approach examined the ruling relations to show how power and privilege function in relation to migrants' occupational transitions.

Decriminalisation is arguably essential to protecting the human rights of sex workers. Nonetheless, there are suggestions that decriminalisation has less influence on sex workers’ experiences of working than many assume. This paper explores management practices in brothels in the context of decriminalisation in New Zealand, focusing on sex workers’ employment status, managerial control and agency. We interviewed 14 brothel operators and 17 brothel-based sex workers in this study. The findings suggest that there remain challenges for sex workers in that brothel operators treated them as employees rather than independent contractors. Brothel operators retained control over shift times and pricing of services, and working conditions were unclear. Most sex workers understood their rights, but when operators impinged on their rights, it was often more expedient to move place of work than make an official complaint. However, decriminalisation did have a meaningful impact on the way sex workers negotiated potentially exploitative dimensions of brothel-based work. Decriminalisation has provided the context where it is possible for sex workers to experience safer and more supportive work environments than they otherwise might, where they can (and sometimes do) contest managerial control.

ABSTRACTThe barrier HIV-stigma presents to the HIV treatment cascade is increasingly documented; however less is known about female and male sex worker engagement in and the influence of sex-work stigma on the HIV care continuum. While stigma occurs in all spheres of life, stigma within health services may be particularly detrimental to health seeking behaviors. Therefore, we present levels of sex-work stigma from healthcare workers (HCW) among male and female sex workers in Kenya, and explore the relationship between sex-work stigma and HIV counseling and testing. We also examine the relationship between sex-work stigma and utilization of non-HIV health services. A snowball sample of 497 female sex workers (FSW) and 232 male sex workers (MSW) across four sites was recruited through a modified respondent-driven sampling process. About 50% of both male and female sex workers reported anticipating verbal stigma from HCW while 72% of FSW and 54% of MSW reported experiencing at least one of seven measured forms of stigma from HCW. In general, stigma led to higher odds of reporting delay or avoidance of counseling and testing, as well as non-HIV specific services. Statistical significance of relationships varied across type of health service, type of stigma and gender. For example, anticipated stigma was not a significant predictor of delay or avoidance of health services for MSW; however, FSW who anticipated HCW stigma had significantly higher odds of avoiding (OR = 2.11) non-HIV services, compared to FSW who did not. This paper adds to the growing evidence of stigma as a roadblock in the HIV treatment cascade, as well as its undermining of the human right to health. While more attention is being paid to addressing HIV-stigma, it is equally important to address the key population stigma that often intersects with HIV-stigma.

Reviewed by: Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction by John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov Theodore J. Karamanski (bio) Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction. By John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Pp. 310. Cloth, $55.00.) During the last twenty years the boundaries of Reconstruction-era historiography have expanded well beyond the states of the defeated Confederacy. This change has flowed from the recognition that federal policies in the South were inexorably linked to political support in the North and the realization that the trauma of Civil War had repercussions throughout American culture and society. As a result, the cast of characters in the Reconstruction drama has expanded greatly from the familiar struggling black freedpeople and resistant white landowners to include Indians battling reservation confinement, grasping urban industrialists, beleaguered western farmers, and an urban working class trying to adjust to the revolutionary changes the Civil War brought to the American economy. It is to this latter group that John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov turn their attention in a detailed local study that adds much nuance to our understanding of the Reconstruction era in the urban North. The Civil War dramatically affected Chicago. Although it was located far from the battle lines, the city, which was already a leading commercial center, was transformed by the war into an industrial powerhouse. During the decade of the 1860s the city population more than doubled and the number of factories tripled. The famous Union Stock Yards were opened and Chicago foundries rolled the first steel rail made in the United States. Production for the operation and expansion of the nation’s growing railroad network played a large role in the transformation of the city’s economy and the experience of work in Chicago. At the heart of Jentz and Schneirov’s study is the story of how workers and capitalists struggled to adjust their actions and ideology to the conditions of an industrial workplace that became by necessity larger and more impersonal. The authors focus on what they call the “wage-labor question” from the late 1850s through the 1870s. They contend that the Emancipation Proclamation sparked a shift in working-class political alignments in Chicago. The old “free (white) labor” ideology lost relevance once slavery was to be ended and the workplace industrialized. Jentz and Schneirov argue that a new labor coalition emerged, made up of former Democratic Irish, Republican German, and Anglo-American workers united under an ideology they call “transnational social republicanism” (4). For a time the alliance identified with the liberalism of the Republican Party, but this political association began to erode with the 1867 strike for [End Page 425] an eight-hour workday and the rise of the probusiness stalwarts in party circles. However, it was the depression that began in 1873 and continued until 1878 that caused the complete defection of northern labor from the Republican coalition. In this finding Jentz and Schneirov disagree with historian David Montgomery’s pathbreaking argument in Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (1967) and support the broad analysis of northern labor offered by Eric Foner in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988). Jentz and Schneirov do not confine their study of the rise of class consciousness in Chicago to the working class. Their narrative follows Chicago’s burgeoning capitalists down a parallel track. Local events like the Great Fire of 1871 and a second major fire in 1874 combined with the 1873 panic to raise the specter of severe social disorder on the scale of the Paris Commune. Fear drove business competitors together to form the Citizens Association, which attempted to use the organs of municipal power to protect property and coerce the working class into order. Nonetheless, it is clear that the authors’ real interest is with the story of working-class politics. Their study does not detail the regional and national social, financial, or organizational networks that undergirded the rise of industry in Chicago. That subject remains largely unexplored for nineteenth-century Chicago. Jentz and Schneirov have...

Sex workers health: time to act

Set in the southeastern corner of Colorado, Douglas Sheflin's history of the Dust Bowl is a careful reconstruction of how US policymakers, bureaucrats, and farmers responded to ecological and economic crises during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Despite the breadth of scholarship covering the Dust Bowl, Sheflin maintains that we have yet to fully appreciate its long-term impact on systems of land use, agriculture, and federal policy in the region. To correct for this shortcoming, Sheflin extends the chronology beyond the 1930s and into the 1950s and ’60s. In so doing, Sheflin shows how World War II and its aftermath firmly secured structural changes that had been set in motion during the so-called Dirty Thirties and continue to inform US agricultural policy today.Organized chronologically, The Legacies of Dust explores why farming on the Great Plains was so challenging, addressing three key themes in particular: land, water, and labor. Sheflin traces these themes through microstudies of two counties in Colorado, which remains a relatively under-studied area of the Dust Bowl. Although it's not clear how the Colorado focus might change or shape our understandings of this history, this two-county approach reveals how distinct material conditions determined divergent responses to crisis. In Baca County, water scarcity and soil erosion were especially intense, leading farmers to embrace the soil conservation policies that were championed by federal officials and New Dealers. In contrast, farmers in the neighboring Prowers County had better access to the Arkansas River and generally favored policies to maintain their water supply with dams and reservoirs.Sheflin is attentive to these differences but also sheds light on common patterns, including the Dust Bowl's profound impact on the social organization of labor, property, and federal power. In both counties, dust storms and debt squeezed out farm tenants and small operators. Landowners who weathered these storms tended to expand and diversify their farms, and in the process, they grew increasingly dependent on migrant laborers. This workforce arrived in no small part because the federal government stepped in to stabilize agricultural production in the late 1930s and especially during the war. Thus, with significant logistical, technical, and financial help from the federal government, Colorado farmers reorganized production to grow “food for freedom,” to quote propaganda from the Office of War Information (203). Farmers would continue to embrace this kind of support after the war's end, as they faced recurrent issues of water and labor scarcity. The response to crisis and war during the 1930s and ’40s thus forged a lasting relationship between a newly consolidated agricultural sector and the federal government. Although it has taken different forms over time, this relationship remains intact today.Running through this story are the complicated dynamics between federal, state, and local forces—the subject that most interests Sheflin. These shifting and often tense relationships were evident in the history of soil conservation efforts, to take one example. Federal agents had long been concerned with soil erosion, but it wasn't until the 1930s that erosion's calamitous effects finally compelled officials to take decisive action. Even then, it was no simple task to convince farmers to reduce their acreage or to adopt different farming techniques. The formation of soil conservation districts helped to resolve these tensions over federal power and local autonomy, while encouraging farmers to prevent erosion and repair damage. Although the policy was crafted at the national level and drew on federal money and expertise, it was passed by the state legislature and encouraged farmers to exercise power locally within self-organized districts. Establishing their own governing boards, farmers could, for example, discourage one another from breaking new sod and even seek damages from those who broke district rules. These soil conservation districts ultimately helped federal agents overcome a thorny political challenge: making changes on privately held property without appearing to encroach on local property rights themselves.On these questions of policy formation and the intricacies of local implementation, Sheflin's research is rich. His ability to reconstruct how agricultural and conservation policies actually worked is impressive. Partly because the story is focused so intensely on these policies, the experiences of individual tenants and workers play a lesser role. Although labor and labor scarcity are central themes of the book, the characters who most come to life are federal agents of the New Deal, whose environmental and economic thought drive the narrative forward. We learn less, for example, about the interned Japanese farm laborers who helped to sustain agricultural production during the war and whose lives were deeply affected by decisions at the level of policy. Nevertheless, Sheflin successfully tracks how structures of political economy changed over time, and in this regard he makes a valuable contribution.Bearing in mind its careful attention to these questions of long-term structural change, it is worth noting that this book does not explore the connections between colonialism and ecological degradation on the Plains. To be sure, Sheflin gestures toward the colonial context of this agricultural history, referencing land dispossession in the nineteenth century and Native farm workers in the twentieth; he also describes the formation of the Comanche National Grasslands, an expanse of submarginal land that federal agents removed from production and that happened to be named after the Indigenous polity that occupied parts of Colorado for centuries, until the late 1800s. In these brief gestures, the Legacies of Dust points to possible directions for future research. What would this history look like, for example, if we understood colonialism less as a discrete event and more as an ongoing structure, which intersected with capitalism to shape the organization of land, labor, and power? By encouraging us to think about long-term historical processes, Sheflin opens new questions not only about the Dust Bowl itself but also about systems of power and resource consumption, including the ongoing history of colonialism on the Plains. For environmental historians and those interested in the political economy of agriculture in the twentieth century, this is a worthwhile book.

This study examines the occupational health and safety experiences of migrant workers employed as live-in caregivers in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Interviews with and surveys of caregivers identify four categories of common occupational hazards, including fatigue, psychosocial stress, physical hazards, and exposure to harassment and abuse. These hazards are systemically perpetuated, made invisible, and rendered irremediable by intertwined (im)mobilities. At the macrolevel, they include highly circumscribed and precarious conditions of transnational care migration such as indenturing to private and underregulated recruiters, federal policies that tie status to employers and employment, and changeable, rule-bound pathways to permanent residency. At the mesolevel, we find a volatile mix of mobilities and immobilities associated with employment in the oil economy of Fort McMurray, such as high population mobility and turnover, long work and commuting hours, and remoteness. And, at the microlevel, we find the everyday immobilities and highly circumscribed conditions and complexities of working and living with employers in private homes.

As the history of capitalism has garnered increased attention over the past decade, scholars of gender and sexuality have found themselves wondering: Where are all the women in the history of capitalism? In Bawdy City, Katie M. Hemphill has crafted a stunning response. While it might be tempting to see prostitution as an illicit and shadowy enterprise—one that exists on the marginal edges of the “real” economy—Hemphill convincingly argues that commercial sex was not peripheral to the development of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. Instead, sex workers provided much of the labor, services, and capital that fueled economic development in American cities. While most scholarship on prostitution focuses on either the antebellum period or the Progressive Era, Bawdy City provides a connective thread between these two historical moments, effectively balancing a sweeping change-over-time argument with a nitty-gritty analysis of prostitution as a social practice, legal category, and economic phenomenon.The narrative begins in Baltimore during the 1790s, when prostitution was still a “largely informal, subsistence trade” (7). The situation changed in the late 1820s, as brothels began to dot city streets and sex work attained a new degree of centralization. By the mid-nineteenth century, illicit sex had become an immensely profitable enterprise—one that was financed by real estate speculators, wealthy landlords, and genteel men of the middling and upper classes. Because prostitution was so lucrative—and so central to Baltimore's budding market economy—city officials did not attempt to eradicate it entirely. Instead, they tried to “contain, control, and monitor” it (120). Although they prosecuted women who sold sex on the streets, they typically tolerated those who plied their trade behind brothel walls. Bawdy-house proprietors occasionally got slapped with fines, to be sure, but they rarely struggled to pay them. Even when madams found themselves short on cash, “they could usually count on their wealthy, real-estate owning landlords to bail them out” (122).The Civil War was a further boon for the commercial sex trade in Baltimore. When the Union Army took over the city, a crop of occupying soldiers provided sex workers with a new base of customers. By the 1870s, however, city officials had begun to crack down on prostitution, and the enterprise “came to be understood as inflicting injury on the economic, social, and health interests of the urban middle class” (172). Never mind that sex workers had helped to build the city's market economy. And never mind that the city's wealthy investors and landlords had been handsomely profiting from the commercial sex trade for years. Middle-class Baltimoreans increasingly decried prostitution as a “moral blight” and grumbled that the mere presence of brothels decreased property values in their neighborhoods (141). The courts backed them up, pushing brothels into red-light districts that were usually located in the city's poorest areas and inhabited by Black Baltimoreans. The result was a racialized geography of sex work.By the turn of the twentieth century, prostitution underwent a process of recasualization. The rise of “cheap amusements” resulted in a more informal social and sexual culture where men could “treat” women to drinks and food “in exchange for dances, company, or sex” (240). By the Progressive Era, though, an alliance of moral reformers, public health officials, women's rights activists, and “social purity campaigners” combined to launch an assault on the commercial sex trade (275). City commissioners started evicting brothel inhabitants, shutting down red-light districts, and passing laws that made prostitution less profitable and more dangerous for those who engaged in it. As Bawdy City reveals, these social and governmental “reforms” almost always ignored the voices and experiences of sex workers themselves.By illustrating the connections between the illicit sex trade and Baltimore's nascent industrial economy, Hemphill deftly exposes the intersections between the history of capitalism and the history of prostitution. Despite decades of high-quality scholarship by historians of gender and sexuality, many economic histories continue to privilege the stories of male investors, artisans, factory owners, clerks, and low-wage laborers. Bawdy City, by contrast, emphasizes the experiences of female workers and the men they forged social, sexual, and economic connections with. In this book, brothel landlords become real estate speculators who wrung profits from the bodies of marginalized women. Madams emerge as middle managers who supervised the time, labor, and behavior of their employees. And sex workers come into focus as working-class people who increasingly found themselves monitored by the scrutiny of intrusive employers.Hemphill also reminds readers that madams and their employees were not just laborers but also consumers who funneled money into a developing urban economy. Sex workers expended large sums on elegant apparel, and they hired people to cook, clean, and launder their clothing. Madams furnished their parlors with extravagant furniture and purchased food, alcohol, and luxury goods from local merchants. Because of the social stigma attached to prostitution, brothel managers often rented rooms at inflated prices. Through all these activities, sex workers propped up a vibrant and often exploitative urban marketplace.Bawdy City simultaneously depicts sex workers as vulnerable women and as complicated people with a wide array of personal, economic, and erotic priorities. As Hemphill points out, many women engaged in sex work because they had no other choice, but many others sold sex to gain access to independence, excitement, or luxury goods. While the book provides passing vignettes of women's stories, readers may find themselves longing for a more human portrait of how sex workers experienced the legal, historical, and economic developments that Hemphill so beautifully outlines. Of course, the voices of marginalized women are notoriously difficult to uncover in the archives, and Hemphill has produced a carefully researched, lucidly written, and well-argued book that will appeal to legal historians, historians of capitalism, and scholars of gender and sexuality. By depicting prostitution as a uniquely gendered form of labor, she has given us an important reminder: the history of capitalism is entangled with the history of gender and sexuality—and sex work is, above all else, work.

An ethical and forward-looking health sector response to sex work aims to create a safe, effective, and non-judgemental space that attracts sex workers to its services. Yet, the clinical setting is often the site of human rights violations and many sex workers experience ill-treatment and abuse by healthcare providers. Research with male, female, and transgender sex workers in various African countries has documented a range of problems with healthcare provision in these settings, including: poor treatment, stigmatisation, and discrimination by healthcare workers; having to pay bribes to obtain services or treatment; being humiliated by healthcare workers; and, the breaching of confidentiality. These experiences are echoed by sex workers globally. Sex workers’ negative experiences with healthcare services result in illness and death and within the context of the AIDS epidemic act as a powerful barrier to effective HIV and STI prevention, care, and support. Conversely positive interactions with healthcare providers and health services empower sex workers, affirm sex worker dignity and agency, and support improved health outcomes and well-being. This chapter aims to explore the experiences of sex workers with healthcare systems in Africa as documented in the literature. Findings describe how negative healthcare workers’ attitudes and sexual moralism have compounded the stigma that sex workers face within communities and have led to poor health outcomes, particularly in relation to HIV and sexual and reproductive health. Key recommendations for policy and practice include implementation of comprehensive, rights-affirming health programmes designed in partnership with sex workers. These should be in tandem with structural interventions that shift away from outdated criminalized legal frameworks and implement violence prevention strategies, psycho-social support services, sex worker empowerment initiatives, and peer-led programmes.

Female sex workers are highly mobile, which may influence their risk of experiencing physical and sexual violence. However, there remains a paucity of research, particularly longitudinal, from Sub-Saharan Africa exploring mobility and gender-based violence among female sex workers. To address this gap, this study examined the longitudinal relationship between work-related mobility and recent experience of physical or sexual gender-based violence from a client or partner among female sex workers in Iringa, Tanzania. A secondary data analysis was conducted using baseline and 18-month follow-up data from Project Shikamana, a community empowerment-based combination HIV prevention intervention. Responses from 387 female sex workers aged 18 years and older participating in both baseline and follow-up were analyzed. Unadjusted and adjusted Poisson regression models with robust variance estimations, accounting for clustering of female sex workers’ responses over time, were fit. Final models adjusted for socio-demographic characteristics and aspects of participants’ living situations and work environments. Recent physical or sexual violence from a client or partner was common (baseline: 40%; follow-up: 29%). Twenty-six percent of female sex workers at baseline, and 11% at follow-up, had recently traveled outside of Iringa for sex work. In the final adjusted longitudinal model, female sex workers recently mobile for sex work had a 25% increased risk of any recent experience of physical or sexual gender-based violence when compared with their non-mobile counterparts (adjusted incidence rate ratio: 1.25; 95% CI: 1.03–1.53; p<0.05). Interventions must identify ways–such as mobile support services, linkages and referrals to health and other social services while traveling, or the use of mobile or digital technology–to address mobile female sex workers’ unique needs while traveling. Future quantitative and qualitative research is needed to understand the context of female sex workers’ mobility and how and why mobility influences risk environments and experiences of gender-based violence.

BackgroundHIV prevalence among female sex workers (FSWs) in high burden countries in sub-Saharan Africa varies between 24 and 72%, however their access to HIV services remains limited. This study explored FSWs’ perspectives of the barriers and opportunities to HIV service access in Uganda.MethodsThe cross-sectional qualitative study was conducted between October and December 2013. Twenty-four focus group discussions were conducted with 190 FSWs in 12 districts. Data were analysed using manifest content analysis, using Atlas.ti software, based on the socio-ecological model.ResultsFSWs indicated that HIV services were available and these included condoms, HIV testing and treatment, and management of sexually transmitted infections. However, access to HIV services was affected by several individual, societal, structural, and policy related barriers. Individual level factors included limited awareness of some prevention services, fears, and misconceptions while societal stigma was prominent. Structural and policy level barriers included inconvenient hours of operation of the clinics, inflexible facility based distribution of condoms, interuptions in the supply of condoms and other commodities, and limited package of services with virtually no access to lubricants, HIV pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis, and support following client perpetrated violence. Policies such as partner testing and involvement at antenatal care, and using only one facility for antiretroviral drug refills hindered HIV service uptake and retention in care. FSWs had major concerns with the quality of services especially discrimination and rude remarks from providers, denial or delay of services, and potential for breach of confidentiality. However, some FSWs reported positive experiences including interface with friendly providers and participated in formal and informal FSW groups, which supported them to access health services.ConclusionDespite availability of services, FSWs faced major challenges in access to services. Comprehensive multilevel interventions targeting individual, societal, structural and policy level barriers are required to increase access to HIVservices among FSWs in Uganda. Policy and institutional adjustments should emphasize quality friendly services and expanding the package of services to meet the needs of FSWs.

Introduction:Unsafe abortion is a significant cause of maternal morbidity and mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Female sex workers in Ethiopia are exposed to unwanted and unplanned pregnancy and subsequent abortion. In the absence of access to quality abortion care services, the chances of experiencing unsafe abortion are high. However, limited evidence is available on female sex workers’ experience with abortion services and their exposure to unsafe abortion.Objective:To explore the lived experiences of female sex workers who underwent unsafe abortion in Gedeo Zone, Southern Ethiopia.Methods:The study was conducted among female sex workers in Gedeo Zone, Southern Ethiopia, from April to June 2024. The study was employed among female sex workers who had a history of unsafe abortion in the past 2 years. Both establishment-based and street-based female sex workers were selected using the snowball sampling method. Face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with participants in locations of their preference to ensure privacy. Data saturation was achieved after interviewing 18 participants. The collected data were transcribed verbatim, translated into English, and analyzed thematically using the Open Code 4.03 software. Trustworthiness was ensured throughout the data analysis process.Design:A qualitative study with a phenomenological design was employed.Results:The findings of this study revealed that poor knowledge of safe abortion services and poor socioeconomic status are the main causes for seeking unsafe abortion services by commercial sex workers. Unsafe pregnancy terminations were mainly experienced using commercial medications from private pharmacies and using traditional practices through herbal and mechanical techniques. Sex workers resorted to traditional methods and self-induced medication abortions, leading to adverse health, psychosocial, and economic consequences.Conclusion:The study highlights the poor information literacy and limited access to abortion services for sex workers, leading to unsafe practices and subsequent physical and psychological suffering. Therefore, stakeholders should collaborate to increase female sex workers’ knowledge and access to safe abortion services.

I n the 1980s, youth unemployment and discontent with schooling persist as problems facing educators. Numerous programs and recommendations to create school-based, work-experience programs have attempted to address these problems. The report of the Panel on Youth of the President's Science Advisory Committee advocated a closer union of school and community by creating more opportunities for youth to participate in the life of the community. The report of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education cited a number of reform proposals calling for less schooling and more work experiences for youth. The Youth Employment Demonstration Projects Act of 1977 encouraged local education agencies to place school-age, low-income youth in jobs. These programs hoped to impact upon the future employability of youth, to make schooling more relevant and interesting to them, and thereby to ease the transition from school to work. While adult employment status is the decisive measurement of program success, such a long-term outcome is expensive to document and difficult to assess. Other indicators of program effectiveness are needed for immediate evaluations of current and proposed programs to provide federal, state, and local policy makers with guidelines for decision making. Analytic principles from the curriculum field can serve as one source for indicators of current program effectiveness. These principles of curricular form and content embody both empirical and theoretical knowledge of human learning. Although they have usually been applied to classroom instructional programs, they can provide criteria for evaluating the quality of work experience programs. In order to analyze such programs for policy purposes, one needs to assess the quality of the day-to-day activities that youth encounter, because it is the cumulative effect of these activities over time that offers hope of easing unemployment and reducing inequality. Program planners and proposal reviewers could make use of these principles to evaluate the probable effectiveness of programs in the planning stages. As programs are implemented, these principles can help local program personnel make further choices when faced with reality constraints. A work-experience curriculum is a set of learning activities centered around the work experience. Part of the task of this study is to generate activity categories that describe what youth do in the programs. This definition stresses that the activities should have some relationship to learning. In The Boundless Resource, W. Wirtz emphasized that the learning should have an application beyond particular job tasks, to life in general: