Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Sexology and sexuality/Sex work task force

Task force talk page

In order to improve accurate information about Sex Trafficking, Sex Slavery, Human Trafficking topics in Wikipedia, the following major news report information should be included in the discussion:

In order to improve accurate information about Sex Trafficking, Sex Slavery, Human Trafficking topics in Wikipedia, the following major News report information should be included in the discussion:

Village Voice Media News in the March 24, 2011 issue have a story about the controversial statistics used to calculate sex trafficking and Sex Slavery victims: By Nick Pinto – Village Voice Media:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-03-23/news/women-s-funding-network-sex-trafficking-study-is-junk-science/

March 2, 2011: In the Dallas News March 2, 2011 By JESSICA L. HUSEMAN -Staff Writer FBI report on Super Bowl Sex Trafficking:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/super-bowl/local/20110302-top-fbi-agent-in-dallas-praises-super-bowl-security-effort-sees-no-evidence-of-expected-spike-in-child-sex-trafficking.ece

January 31, 2011: Dallas TV News WFAA show about super bowl sex trafficking: by JASON WHITELY Dallas WFAA news:

http://www.wfaa.com/sports/football/super-bowl/Super-Bowl-prostitution-prediction-has-no-proof--114983179.html

About Super Bowl Sex Trafficking: Dallas Observer Newspaper: By Pete Kotz January 27, 2011: http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-01-27/news/the-super-bowl-prostitute-myth-100-000-hookers-won-t-be-showing-up-in-dallas/

Dallas Observer Newspaper: By Pete Kotz March 3, 2011: http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-03-03/news/super-bowl-prostitution-100-000-hookers-didn-t-show-but-america-s-latest-political-scam-did/

Merging sections on legal models of sex work

I see there is a lot of overlap between various articles about sex work / prostitution that all relate more or less the same story of the legal models of sex work, that is, Prohibitionism, Abolitionism, Neo-abolitionism, Legalisation/Regulation, and Decriminalisation. It concerns at least the following sections:

1. Decriminalization of sex work#Legal models of sex work
2. Forced prostitution#Voluntary vs involuntary prostitution
3. Prostitution#Laws
4. Prostitution law#Legislation models and Prostitution law#Worldwide laws
5. Sex work#Legal models
6. Sex workers' rights#Legality of prostitution
7. (maybe) Feminist views on prostitution#Legalization or decriminalization

Per WP:OVERLAP, this information shouldn't be presented in this fragmented and inconsistent manner, but rather uniformly covered in a single place, to where other articles may link (e.g. through a Template:Excerpt, or a "Main article"/"Further information" construction). I'm therefore preparing a draft, User:Nederlandse Leeuw/Legal models of sex work, where I will try and merge all these texts into a new separate article that adequately explains all models in a central location. (Not all of them will necessarily be merged, e.g. #7 is about the debate between feminists which model is the best; those debates are probably best represented there, while explanation of what those models are can be transferred to the new Legal models of sex work article). This will hopefully help everyone to literally be 'on the same page'. I recently carried out a similar operation on Talk:Eighty_Years'_War#Merger_proposal, where a lot of overlapping information fragmented across four articles was agreed to be best merged; I think a similar solution would be a good idea here. If there are any objections, suggestions, or questions, I'll happily hear it. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 12:35, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

I think there is serious risk of this turning into an WP:ESSAY, because there just isn't a high level of agreement about some of this stuff. The table at the top is, if more or less accurate, simplistic and the summaries plain opinion. The "commonly used 5 models" sourced to one single citation just isn't the case: although it's a better breakdown than I've often seen in places, many people with many of these views would object vociferously to that categorisation. It is cited to a very small and relatively hand-picked batch of sources. There is a lot of "they believe that" simplifying complex, varied and nuanced positions into a questionable quick sentence, especially on the anti-sex work side, but also in terms of neo-abolitionism, it adopts their (hotly disputed) framing that "sex workers themselves commit no crime" as fact. It's also not necessarily that accurate on some of the less-common jurisdictions in international discourse: it is no longer the case that "most of Australia" has legalisation (three states/territories have decriminalisation, three states/territories have legalisation, one state has criminalisastion, one state has (not-neo) abolitionism. Other descriptions seem confused: "The Netherlands, is an example of full legalization" is an oxymoronic description. The discussion around "pimping" laws (being that the American-style concept of "pimping" is not a global phenomenon) has the nuance of a brick. Farley's studies have been widely criticised, but they're quoted as undisputed fact. The list of "reasons based on studies done on the effects of prostitution in countries where it is legalized or decriminalized" is phenomenally controversial/contested. Why is Ronald Weitzler the most prominently-cited voice for decriminalisation? (Who is Ronald Weitzler?) The list under "decriminalisation" is similarly problematic - it fundamentally caricatures (to an offensive extent) a number of positions in ways that do not accurately represent major viewpoints. The "Those who are in favour of legalization" paragraph hopelessly mangles supporters of legalisation and decriminalisation. In short, it's a bit of a mess. The Drover's Wife (talk) 02:06, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Hello @The Drover's Wife:, thank you for your response. I agree with most of what you say. Most of the problems that you're pointing out were already there when I began to gather and merge these texts yesterday, and I intend to address each of them.

• Yes, there is widespread disagreement about which models there are, how many there are, how to call them, how to distinguish them etc. I mention all of that in the 'Introduction' section, which I plan to expand further.
• It may well be that the 5-fold model isn't as commonly used as the 2011 Barnett et al. paper suggests, and if so, I will find that out as I read and write more (feel free to suggest me literature to read!). But I'll use it for now, because much of the writing on Wikipedia and the mapping is based on it. There is no shortage of alternatives out there (I've provided Östergren (2020) as an example), but we gotta start somewhere. Articles already exist on two of them (decriminalisation of sex work and Nordic model approach to prostitution), while regulated prostitution is currently a redirect to Prostitution law#Regulation prostitution; in my view, the latter could also become its own stand-alone article about the legalisation / regulationist model.
• The summaries are based on Barnett and other sources, I will cite them as I move forward, and update them as needed. Obviously these are approximate representations of commonly held opinions associated with each of the models, I'm not claiming that anyone of these is a fact; the whole point is that each of these points of view is disputed. (In particular, I concur that proponents of the neo-abolitionist model often say it seeks to save women and regards them as innocent victims, but in practice it may criminalise them, e.g. migrant workers without a permit, because there is no way for them to work (safely) without breaking the law in some way). I could rephrase have rephrased it as something like 'Sex work is viewed as a job like any other. Therefore, it is argued that sex workers need labour rights, but no special protections or restrictions.' etc. Might Does that solve (most of) your objections?
• I haven't yet gotten around to the rest of the article; all I've done is merge all the texts by model, with the Outline of models section dedicated to the characteristics of each model, and the Arguments section dedicated to the arguments in favour or against each model. At least, that's the idea. I'm not sure yet if this will be a tenable format. I completely agree with you that it's a bit of a mess. Many of these texts contain outdated, incorrect or generalising claims, but more than 90% of that is not mine. This is what is currently out there, and nobody has fixed so far. That's why I'm trying to fix it. My goal is not just merging all these sections into one article and removing all the duplicates, but also critically re-examining and correcting/updating every part of it.
• That includes removing less reliable sources (e.g. many are just websites of interested groups whose opinions are stated as fact, or of news media who oversimply the issues without understanding them), and replacing them with recent, scholarly sources. Major shifts have also occurred in recent years (the 2010s) as leading human rights organisations adopted decriminalisation as their preferred model, whereas they previously had not taken a stance, or supported legalisation/regulation or the Nordic model etc.. Many of the sources date from the 2000s, however.
• Finally, my post here is mostly about my proposal to merge these existing sections into a proper article so that information doesn't overlap, while fixing all the current texts' problems in the process. It seems that you're okay with that overall goal, or at least don't object to it, just to the current contents. Is that correct? Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 16:30, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

I think a key part of the problem here is that most of the discourse on this issue isn't academic in nature and is contentious as hell (and hugely regionally variable), and so it's necessarily dangerous to rely on a handful of academic sources as if they're authoritative or representative by definition in general, let alone as applied internationally.

• I agree re: regulation being a good candidate for its own article.
• I think the "The way the public or the authorities understand commercial sex, and how they want to treat it" column of the table is by definition POV and I think would be no matter what was in each column. These positions just aren't that clear cut. I'm a bit undecided as to the rest of the summary table: I think it's generally good and holds up surprisingly well (to the extent that such a summary is possible!), but am unsure whether the edge cases in the middle three categories make the summaries too inaccurate to use.

In terms of the broader merge itself, I'm open to it but a lot of the information in those articles is contextualised, summary-style breakouts. The draft essentially replaces #4 (prostitution law) in full; #1, #3, #5 and #6 would need similar summary style sections breaking out to the draft article, and an attempt to cleanup those sections would seemingly need a draft summary section rather than a full article. #2 is not really about law at all but about attitudes and not a candidate for replacement in either context, although replacing its nonsensical title would be a definite plus (and #7 would also be about attitudes, except that it's patent nonsense in full and should be deleted if not rewritten). The Drover's Wife (talk) 07:32, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

I agree that much of public discourse on the issue is not academic in nature, and some of that has crept into these texts over the course of years (the most dubious material tends to date from the early days of Wikipedia in the 2000s). I intend to remove all unsourced statements, misleading statments, and unreliable sources from this draft.

• I have been expanding the number of academic sources that appear useful in clarifying the various models and their issues, and the arguments used in public discourse in favour of this policy or against that policy, sometimes replacing less reliable or unreliable or outdated sources in the process. By definition, nothing is 'authoritative' in science or scholarship; the goal is to obtain reliable evidence and establish a consensus on what the evidence says. But you're right that it is difficult to approach a representative statement of affairs.
• I think the evidence is pointing towards the five-fold model with these five terms as being increasingly accepted amongst scholars since 2002/2003, and that alternative classifications and names (such as 'neo-prohibitionism' or 'licensing') do not really seem to catch on. Most discussions I'm seeing are about the theoretical demarcation and practical usefulness of the models, and whether country A follows model X, Y or Z. Despite criticism of the models by many scholars, they still consider them 'useful starting points' (e.g. Skilbrei & Holmström 2013). (Östergren 2020 is an exception to that rule, rejecting all existing models, starting from scratch and introducing a new taxonomy. I found it interesting, so I included it, but it may not be representative enough). In that same way, I think we need to start somewhere. As an analogy: a book needs to have a title. You cannot put 20 pages of text on the cover just because the title might be misleading, inaccurate, not representative and lacking in nuance. The rest of the book should serve to explain the title. Therefore, the summaries I have written in the lede section are just starting points, to give people an idea what the most commonly roughly agreed models are, and then the rest of the article has plenty of space for nuance, explanation, criticism, examples and counter-examples, regional variation, differences between theory and practice, and so on. As you'll see with the references I have added, scholars tend to roughly agree that this is the attitude that the public or the authorities seem to take with respect to each model. The only one who seemed to disagree was Scouler 2015, whose description of 'abolitionism' strikes me as indistinguishable from 'neo-abolitionism', and far removed from how 'abolitionism' is defined in most other academic sources.
• It may well be that the result of the draft article would amount to a replacement of the entire article #3 prostitution law, depending on how we define the latter's intended scope. Because a lot of sections in that article appear to be out of place. E.g. as we agreed already, the Regulated prostitution section should be its own article. Prostitution law#Worldwide laws overlaps so much with prostitution by region that they should arguably merge. Prostitution law#Views of prohibitionists could be the basis of a separate article on the prohibitionist model. Prostitution law#Economic and health issues might as well be merged into Prostitution#Socio-economic issues. And so on.
• Could you explain what you mean by 'draft summary section'? I'm not sure what you mean, but you may well have a good proposal.
• I agree that #2 and #7 are not to be fully replaced, because they are rather summarised of debates within certain demographics about what sex work / prostitution is and what one should do about it. I intend to only keep the useful parts, and then add a 'See also' template at the top of both sections pointing to the draft article when it's published. Removing or replacing the nonsense in either section seems like a good idea. Would you like me to do it, or would you rather do it yourself?

Thanks for the feedback, it helps me a lot. Cheers, ~~ Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 16:08, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm generally wary of prioritising academic sources on this subject because of their relative lack of prominence on it: unlike other issues where academic voices may well hold weight in public discourse around an issue, these academic voices are generally, with a couple of exceptions, people that nobody much on any side of the debate have ever heard of. However, I take on board what you've said about the dominant categorisation in academic literature, and it may well be a means of overcoming the extent to which nobody agrees on language for anything (especially because it seems to me to be fairly accurate). As for your other points:

• I honestly don't think the last column of the summary table is salvageable in any context. The summary, in that context, is just a WP:NPOV breach by definition.
• I think, along the lines you suggest, Prostitution by region is basically poorly-sourced nonsense that could be tossed in full and replaced by a rewritten Prostitution law#Worldwide laws focusing on models rather than regions, not least because there's no consistency in the regulatory approach of most regions. Similarly, Prostitution law#Economic and health issues duplicates Prostitution#Socio-economic issues and doesn't have any overriding relevance to the law article.
• What I meant in terms of "draft summary section" is that the material you're talking about replacing does generally belong in most of the articles you originally listed in some summary format (as in, like a section rather than an article), and so a full article (as you're drafting) by definition can't replace it. If you want to replace it, it would seem that you'd need a much shorter draft section instead that would replace the sections across most of the articles you flagged initially, and point to the full article you're writing in a Wikipedia:Summary style format.
• I think Feminist views on prostitution#Legalization or decriminalization needs a complete rewrite separately from this process, because its content doesn't overlap with the other articles listed and there's not much in the draft that would be useful there. Forced prostitution#Voluntary vs involuntary prostitution is less problematic now that I changed the title to reflect what the content actually was.

For what it's worth, I generally try to avoid actually editing articles on overly-contentious topics where possible because I find it too painful, but I appreciate the work you're trying to do and hope I can at least contribute a bit here given it's a subject I actually do know a lot about. I think your general approach has real potential to clean up some pretty terrible content. The Drover's Wife (talk) 05:08, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for this elaborate response, it is quite valuable and useful for coming up with practical solutions to problems that Wikipedia texts around this topic have had for around two decades. A key point in doing that successfully is not relying on one's own knowledge and understanding of the topic, but read what actual experts in the field or apparently well-informed activists in whatever camp are saying. I constantly operate under the assumption that I could be uninformed on misinformed on the topic, and that I should be open to learning from people and sources who appear to be better informed, and you appear to be such a person.

• I'm glad we can agree (at least for now) that taking the five models (P/N-A/A/LR/D) is a useful starting point. Even if they remain contentious, and some authors seek to discard them all and come up with a whole new set of models (Wagenaar 2019, Östergren 2020), it seems that they are here to stay. Some still seek a three-fold or four-fold classification, or a different five-fold classification, but they usually seem to mix up two approaches in one (e.g. prohibitionism and abolitionism, abolitionism and neo-abolitionism, or legalisation and decriminalisation; there are also many mutually exclusive definitions of 'criminalisation' across studies). Or they distinguish two separate policies that feature elements that are usually taken together in a single policy (e.g. yesterday I read the English summary on page 2 to 6 of this Aparici 2020 Spanish study, which described the neo-abolitionist approach as 'abolitionism', the decriminalisation approach as the 'pro-rights model', and made a rather weak attempt to distinguish a 'regulatory model' from a 'legalistic model'; the latter description contains vague statements that could apply to both regulationism and/or decriminalisation, and doesn't seem to constitute a separate model). Coming up with new models and classifications could also create more problems than it solves (reminds me of a cartoon). Whenever attempts to introduce new names, models or classifications fail to catch on, it de facto confirms the five-fold classification of P/N-A/A/LR/D, and I think we're seeing evidence of that happening.
• Could you explain why the table summaries would be a breach of WP:NPOV? I think the summaries comply to WP:VOICE, lthough we might replace both 'prostitution' and 'sex work' by 'commercial sex' here per 'Prefer nonjudgmental language'; also because I already use it in the heading, complying to WP:POVNAMING. I think the sources I am using comply to WP:BESTSOURCES and are used in WP:PROPORTION, give WP:DUE weight, work for WP:BALANCE, and have an WP:IMPARTIAL tone. I am very much open to rephrasing it (as I have done myself many times before I arrived at the current texts), but I don't think it is fundamentally incompatible with WP:NPOV.
• I'm glad we agree on merging Prostitution law#Economic and health issues into Prostitution#Socio-economic issues, I'll carry that out soon. Edit:  Done
• I agree that Prostitution by region is quite badly written, sourced and structured, and a rewrite is a good idea. But could I suggest a different approach to rewriting prostitution by region on the basis of Prostitution law#Worldwide laws? Rather than either by region (i.e. continent) or by model, I think the article will benefit most from a 'by country or territory' approach, similar to Marital rape laws by country (although not in the form of a Template:Wikitable sortable, but plain text similar to Sexual consent in law to allow for nuance). Geography is fairly constant, but policy and interpretation of policy is not. Scholars, activists, politicians and media constantly disagree whether a country's policy fits model X, Y or Z. I foresee many Wikipedians editwarring, e.g. about whether Germany belongs in the regulationist or neo-abolitionist section. Although Wagenaar (2019) is right that commercial sex policies often do not coincide with national borders, the national or territorial level is far more legally relevant than the regional/continental ('because there's no consistency in the regulatory approach of most regions' as you said), and far more tangible, constant and less in dispute (except territorial disputes) than the formulation and interpretation of models seems to be. I think it is probably better to write about the way each country or territory's policy, legislation and public attitude have changed over time, and order the article alphabetically by country or territory. In that sense, Decriminalization of sex work#Practical comparison may be a much better basis for the rewrite than Prostitution law#Worldwide laws. Arguably, this section is out of place in the Decriminalisation article, as it analyses all models simultaneously and therefore goes beyond the article's presumably more limited scope, and the current juxtaposition/context could give undue weight to favouring decriminalisation because the rest of the article is dedicated to explaining this model. (I do think we would need to restructure these country/territory descriptions according to geographical alphabetical order instead of by model for the reasons I've given. By comparison, LGBT rights by country or territory does take the regional/continental level into account, but in practice also orders its content alphabetically by country or territory, even in its article title. By contrast, Sexual consent in law is able to make fairly noncontroversial distinction between legislation based on consent or coercion, which cannot be said about the contentious legal models of sex work).
• Ah, thanks for explaining! Yes, I agree with you. I had initially suggested to automate these summary sections through a Template:Excerpt that links to (and thus reproduces) the draft article's lede section, to keep the content of these summary sections consistent across the #1, #3, #5 and #6 sections to be replaced. Do you think that would be a good idea? Alternatively, we could manually write a summary section for these four sections.
• Thanks for changing the #2 section title, that is an improvement already. I agree the #7 section needs a separate rewrite, but let's save that for later and focus on the rest first.

I appreciate your feedback very much; I'm glad I raised this issue here at this task force in hopes of finding someone more familiar with the topic than I. Incidentally, just before I did so, I made some edits to Prostitution in Australia (and created a new map), as it also had 'some pretty terrible content'. You seem to be especially familiar with Australia, so perhaps that is another article where you could make improvements, or where we could cooperate? Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 12:47, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

I went over it again and I think with the additional framing ("is viewed as/is argued") and specific sources the last column of the summary table might be alright. I'm not terribly comfortable with summarising complex positions in one sentence in that way (especially for models like legalisation where the rationales are wildly varied and at times contradictory) but the labels do seem uncontentious enough as broad descriptors. I think your approach to prostitution by region (reframing it as by country, using those other topics as examples) makes a lot of sense. As to using Template:Excerpt: it's a bit hard to say without a lead section that achieves the same purpose as a summary section. The actual lead section is too brief (and I don't think the summary table, alone, is a good fit to replace prose content) and the introduction jumps deep into the issues in a way that's perhaps not so useful for a quick run-down of the various models.

I'd be happy to cooperate on the Australian article if you're keen - it really has three major problems: the Victorian section (and coverage of Victoria elsewhere in that article) is completely outdated and needs a complete rewrite, it mischaracterises the SA laws (which are effectively criminalisation), and the Queensland section a bit outdated in respect of a recent fairly loud public campaign about the failings of their current laws. The Drover's Wife (talk) 15:14, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

• I'm glad the wikitable is okay with you now.
• About the prostitution by region article, unfortunately I have begun to doubt after I read its talk page. It is essentially one big disambiguation page now, little more than a large navigation template (even though there are continental navigation templates at the bottom already, making the whole thing redundant), because there is a "Prostitution in country X" article for virtually all countries in the world now. I guess we could turn it into a summary section article so that the side-by-side comparison function of Decriminalization of sex work#Practical comparison stays intact, but does that have much added value?
• I agree that a manually written summary section, it's better than an excerpt solution in this case.
• I'm a bit stuck with what to do about the Arguments section. The original setup equated "criminalisation", P, N-A and A on the one hand, and LR and D on the other, as if it is a binary choice. Not so. LR and D proponents disagree about which laws are necessary to protect sex workers, and whether they should be criminal or civil (labour) laws. P and N-A proponents disagree about whether selling sex should be criminalised, i.e. whether sex workers should be targetted by law enforcement or not. A and N-A proponents disagree about whether unregulated sex work without third party involvement is okay. etc. The ProCon website is quite an interesting and valuable overview, and yet it creates the same false binary perspective. Usually the quote rejects one/two specific model(s) in favour of one/two specific other model(s). E.g. on the Con side, Jimmy Carter is specifically arguing against LR and in favour of N-A; he doesn't seem to consider D, A or P to be options. Shevchenko is explicitly arguing against D and LR, but it is not entirely clear what she is arguing for (implicitly it seems to be N-A). Moran explicitly says 'the sale of sex' should be/remain illegal, which is a P stance. Pedigo's argument is so generic that I can't situate it in favour or against any specific model(s). Kastoryano (the quote about tippelzones, which is put on the Pro side here) is arguing in favour of LR, but only implicitly arguing against A (and possibly against D), not P or N-A. What Malek (also on the Pro side) is specifically arguing for and against is also so vague that he may be arguing against P and N-A, but in favour of A, LR and D. Malek and Kastoryano appear to contradict each other about A, but they are both on the Pro side. I'm afraid that ProCon is therefore not a very good source to compare various models, because it presents what we roughly understand to be about 5 choices to be just 2 choices.
• I'd be happy to work with you on Australia after we're done here. The Victoria section is also the one that I changed most because of its many issues. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 17:32, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Hello, I want to introduce myself and weigh in on a few points. I am a Professor at UC Berkeley and write about racialization, sexuality, and sex work. I want to echo the point about how local context is both complicated and important in this area. I worry that a chart, that require these shortened definitions, attempts to simplify legal models that are often quite nuanced even within individual countries. I fear it will lead to misinterpretation. Juamari (talk) 15:12, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

I think merging many of these articles (and the portal sex work/prostitution for that matter. The content is clearly overlapping. I see ideological contention though over final name of each article whether it is sex work, full service sex work or prostitution. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:22, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the support. I agree that the title name could be a point of contention, but as it is most encompassing, I chose 'sex work' for now. I have included in Note 1 an explanation for the usage of the terms and the technical and semantic differences. In the article itself I use the words interchangeably (as scholars do), and respect the choice of words in a given quotation. In the table on top, I chose "sex work" for the decriminalisation and legalisation models, and "prostitution" for the other three for that reason, even though in reality these lines are not that clear-cut and "tribal". A potentially neutral alternative would be "commercial sex", or "(the) sex industry", but they are far less frequently used in this context. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 05:41, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

I agree that it's a potential source of contention (the fact Wikipedia has separate articles for prostitution and sex work is a fascinating solution to this dilemma). Wouldn't object to "commercial sex" if it came to it, but "the sex industry" isn't really appropriate for an article about the legal position of individuals. The Drover's Wife (talk) 07:32, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, on second thought, 'the sex industry' doesn't quite fit our purposes here. Another option would be to simply (largely or fully) replace the current prostitution law article with the draft article's text (as you suggested above), and split off irrelevant parts to existing or new separate articles (as I suggested above). Then we won't need to search for a new title, we're only overhauling the contents. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 17:18, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I think that makes sense. The Drover's Wife (talk) 05:08, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Sorry to come in late here. Agree with the comments above and support your efforts. --John B123 (talk) 17:05, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

@John B123: Glad to see you here, thanks for your support! Unfortunately, I'm a bit stuck with how to proceed. Any ideas? Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 22:13, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

I've boldly deleted Prostitution law § Worldwide laws in favor of directly linking to prostitution by region. I think the immediate next step is to finish/publish (not yet) the draft of User:Nederlandse Leeuw/Legal models of sex work. When that is published, we can insert {{Main|Legal models of sex work}} into both Prostitution law#Legislation models and Sex work#Legal models. I'll continue my thoughts/edits on User:Nederlandse Leeuw/Legal models of sex work. Thank you for doing the heavy lifting! ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 23:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that! And you're welcome, you or anyone else here is who has taken part in this discussion is free to work on my draft in order to get it up to quality. I'm not sure whether it needs to be published or that it's best used as a replacement of most of the prostitution law article, as The Drover's Wife and I tentatively agreed above. We should think about the long-term division of contents across articles, and under which article-titles contents should be put in order that readers can find the information they are looking for. (This is the point where I got stuck, because there are many possible solutions to the issues we have identified, and every solution has pros and cons). Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 07:01, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

@Shushugah: I don't follow your logic in deleting Prostitution law § Worldwide laws. The lists of countries by legislation model is a reflection of the map. If the lists are POV, then the map is also POV. The image on right hand side is sufficient assumes the average reader's geography is good enough to identify countries on a world map. Whilst most readers could probably identify Australia or the US, I doubt many could identify say Kazakhstan.

@Nederlandse Leeuw: My initial thoughts were that your draft should form the basis of a rewrite of Prostitution law. However, the draft is already lengthy, adding in the peripheral information contained in Prostitution law would push the article towards WP:TOOBIG, so I'm now swaying towards a standalone article. Regards. --John B123 (talk) 00:17, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Oh, well, there is still a lot of duplicate or useless material in the draft to be merged or removed. Especially the arguments section contains a lot of SYNTHing of various models (criminalisation/abolitionism v. decriminalisation/legalisation) as if they say the same (quod non). The eventual length of the draft is not yet known. Besides, as The Drover's Wife and I agreed above, a lot of sections in the Prostitution law article do not belong there and should be split off or merged elsewhere. So I'm not as worried about WP:TOOBIG. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 00:49, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Editing prostitution laws itself definitely seems worthwhile. It has an active history/talk page. Article title not withstanding, we can make everything else in article more eneyclopedically neutral. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 07:53, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Representation of positions and empirical claims

Question: I've been trying to do some more work on User:Nederlandse Leeuw/Legal models of sex work by removing all the duplicate materials (especially if they are unsourced), and integrating sourced statements that say the same. This requires a lot of verification, and it often turns out that the sources have been misrepresented (perhaps misintrepreted?) on Wikipedia. In some cases I resort to directly quoting the source to prevent misrepresentation. In other cases, a certain author cannot be clearly said to represent an identifiable position, e.g. if they say bad thing X is a consequence of criminalisation, you still don't know if they favour regulation or decriminalisation. Or if they say bad thing Y is what happens if we decriminalise sex work, you still don't know whether their own position is prohibitionist, abolitionist, or Swedish model. Such conclusions would be WP:SYNTH.

What I find more difficult is trying to accurately portray some of the views of authors, such as Melissa Farley. I don't think relevant advocates for any position should be left out, as long as their claims are not presented as statements of fact (WP:ADVOCACY, WP:UNDUE). Farley appears to be a relevant advocate for a certain position or attitude in this debate. But, even though her claims are published in several reputable journals, I find it difficult to take her claims seriously, because I think her methodology is flawed, and that she distorts certain data. E.g. in her 2004 Nine Countries study, she asked sex workers if they wanted to 'leave prostitution', and then said about the affirming respondents that they wanted to 'escape prostitution', as if they are all "trapped" in it, which may not be the experience of all the people who said "yes". Another one is her and her co-authors' a priori assumption that prostitution is violence against women by definition, regardless of what individuals experience. Farley et al. 1998, page 405: "From the authors' perspective, prostituion is an act of violence against women; it is an act which is intrinsically traumatizing to the person being prostituted". Strangely, the conclusion of the paper is 73% of respondents reported having experienced physical assault in prostitution, 62% reported having experienced rape since entering prostitution, and '67% met criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD' (although it's unclear whether this was caused by their experiences in prostitution or not, a criticism levelled against Farley by presiding judge Susan Himel during the 2009-2010 Bedford v. Canada trial). Assuming for the sake of argument that these data are accurate and representative, these experiences still do not apply to a large minority of sex workers (over a quarter), and therefore can hardly be said to prove that prostitution is 'intrinsically violent and traumatising' (another criticism of Himel).

I want to mention Farley as an apparently prominent public figure in this debate (although her position is variously described as 'abolitionist', 'Swedish model' and 'criminalisation'). But I feel uncomfortable to have a Wikipedia article "host" a claim that is clearly not supported by the evidence of the source itself. How do we deal with this? Should we just leave out empirical claims, because this article is not so much about about empirical research, but legislative approaches? Or is the work of Farley just so unreliable in general that she doesn't even deserve to represent certain positions in this debate? I think her voice deserves to be heard, not her data, but maybe it's just impossible to separate them. I want to inform our readers, not mislead them. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 17:35, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Update Participants Section

I propose updating the Participant section so it has an active members and a former members list as many other WikiProjects do. An example is here for WP Football. My recommendation is that we if editors have not participated in any editing of sex work articles in over 12 months, or are banned, that we move them to the former member list. If we agree on this, I am willing to help with the update, I would just like to have a consensus first. Demt1298 (talk) 17:02, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Sounds a good idea. Is there any easy way to check if an editor has edited a sex work article over the last 12 months? --John B123 (talk) 05:25, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Honestly I was having the same thought, so the answer is I don't know. Demt1298 (talk) 14:14, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Made the changes based on quick reviews of the last 12 months of editing by each editor. If someone was mistakenly added to the former member list, please move them onto the active member list. Demt1298 (talk) 16:35, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Well done. --John B123 (talk) 22:21, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Userbox

Hello, I just wanted to let members know there is now another userbox available for those who are participating in this project. I know this isn't a WikiProject, but referring a task force as a WikiProject could possibly bring more attention to a task force, hopefully. thank you.

Wikitext	userbox	where used
{{User WikiProject Sex work}}	This user is a member of WikiProject Sex work.	linked pages

- Jerium (talk) 19:45, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Possible split

I believe anal fingering should have its own article split from Fingering (sexual act) as anal fingering comes with its own techniques and risks. Do I have to be patient when it comes to consensus? Autisticeditor 20 (talk) 20:13, 1 April 2024 (UTC)