Stigma to Sage: Learning and Teaching Safer Sex Practices Among Canadian Sex Trade Workers. NALL Working Paper.

A study interviewed 37 Canadian sex workers in 4 cities to determine how they acquire a working knowledge of safer sex practices and what that knowledge constituted. Findings indicated the vast majority exhibited high levels of knowledge and efficacy regarding safer sex practices; sex workers took the initiative to obtain information and engage in safer sex practices; and peer group educators advanced educational messages in their community. Staffed by current or former sex workers, the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) was established as a government-endorsed organization using state funding, infrastructure, and support services for sex workers, clients, and the public. The Canadian government might profit from lessons learned from the successful NZPC to recruit sex workers as peer educators and should consider the possibility of developing a prostitute-centered pedagogy of safer sex practices that affirms the right of women to control the conditions of work and recognizes the skills and knowledge of that work. Providing sex workers with an opportunity to have input into public policy and design and delivery of prevention programs would be a useful way to transmit their skills and knowledge to other sectors of the community. Such knowledge could provide sexual self-determination that might result in greater knowledge, resistance, agency, and empowerment in other aspects of women's lives. (Contains 87 references and 30 endnotes.) (YLB)