Understanding the Experiences of Sex Workers Within Continuum of Health Care in the United States
Bella Robinson & Melanie Goodman Dante, MA | September 22 | 3:15-4:15 PM
Topic: Experience, Healthcare | Knowledge Level: Intermediate
This presentation strives to expand healthcare providers’ understanding of what sex work is and how to provide effective, comprehensive, compassionate care. Sex workers are a group of patients incredibly varied in their backgrounds, experiences, and needs. Studies and collected oral narratives have proven sex workers in the United States have a difficult time accessing healthcare and caring for their health. This disparity is largely the result of their criminalized status and stigma. “Sex Work” is an umbrella term that describes trading economic markers of value for sexual or erotic labor through performance or physical engagement. Some forms of sex work are legal, other forms are criminal. Legal forms include pornography, stripping, BDSM, phone sex, and camming. Illegal services in the United States include escorting, working in a brothel, massage, and other similar exchanges of sexualized services for money that may leave individuals vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases, hepatitis, and HIV/AIDS. As a previously incarcerated felon defined as a child bride and youth sex trafficking victim, Bella Robinson knows all too well the barriers sex workers face. In the 1980s in foster care, she experienced classism and stigma as a result of poverty. As an adult, she was at the mercy of prison doctors and emergency response triage teams. The stigma sex workers face accessing non-judgmental, compassionate care weighs heavily on her heart and hits very close to home. Her Continuing Medical Education (CME) modules teach service providers best practices for helping “people involved in the sex industry” access non-judgmental and compassionate health care services.
Presentation Objectives:
· Show CME video module material while speaking about the content
· Expand outreach for sex workers
· Create national access to non-judgmental and compassionate medical services
· Allow for sex work-friendly services to be implemented