Friday, 14 January 2005 - 10:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Substance Abuse, Mental Health and Prostitution

A Qualitative Evaluation of Salt Lake City’s Prostitution Diversion Project

Purpose: The primary objective was to qualitatively evaluate Salt Lake City’s Prostitution Diversion Project (PDP). The inquiry aimed to attain a hermeneutic phenomenological understanding of the project by collecting the plural voices of the stakeholders involved in the PDP. The secondary objective was to contribute to the creation and provision of services, particularly those that intersect the disciplines of social work and law, to commercial sex workers. A final objective was to contribute to the body of literature on “restorative justice”, and the role of social work within prostitution diversion programs. Given the absence of published evaluations on prostitution diversion programs, this study may provide a springboard for future studies of such programs.

Methods: The sample consisted of stakeholders in the PDP including women enrolled as participants, women who had already graduated from the PDP, case managers from Criminal Justice Services (CJS), Harm Reduction Project staff, PDP panel review members, judges, vice officers, mental health counselors who provided counseling to the participants of PDP, and staff from the City Prosecutor’s Office involved in PDP. Purposive and snowball sampling were utilized to recruit study participants. Stakeholder narratives were collected to describe, explain, and interpret the meaningfulness and usefulness of the PDP project. Semi-structured qualitative interviews, on site extended observations, field notes, and literature about the PDP comprised the data collected for the study. The coding and analysis processes were informed by critical theory in order to acknowledge and explore the different social, political and economic locations from which the participants spoke. The systematic data analysis process was informed by grounded theory and narrative analysis. A computer software program, Atlas- ti, was utilized for data management and analysis.

Results: The SLC PDP reflects a “marriage” between two unlikely institutions, Criminal Justice Services (CJS) and the Harm Reduction Project (HRP). Commercial sex workers enrolled in the SLC PDP reported various benefits to participating in the program including access to resources, diversion from jail, support for sobriety, and the opportunity to talk about their work and experiences with other commercial sex workers in an environment where they felt safe and accepted. Challenges resulting from participation in the PDP included managing the different and sometimes contradictory objectives of CJS and the HRP. The ideological differences between these two primary stakeholders resulted in tensions and operational challenges for every stakeholder. Despite significant attempts on behalf of the stakeholders to negotiate these differences, the findings raise intriguing questions concerning agencies’ ability to maintain ideological integrity across paradigmatic differences.

Implications for Practice: Findings from this study provide social workers with additional information regarding the needs of drug addicted female commercial sex workers. While prostitution diversion programs may not be successful at “getting women out of the sex industry”, they may provide an avenue for social workers to provide needed services to sex workers. In addition, as social workers increasingly practice across disciplines, we may give serious consideration to how our collaborative relationships, particularly those that traverse ideological and value differences, inform service delivery and accessibility.

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