Refusing Surveillance, Reframing Risk: Insights from Sex-Working Parents for Transforming Social Work

Abstract

Social work has long operated at the intersection of care and control—nowhere is this more apparent than in its treatment of sex-working parents. This article draws on participatory research with thirteen sex-working parents in California to examine how the child welfare system, family court, and public benefit infrastructures extend punitive surveillance under the guise of support. Utilizing the framework of prison industrial complex abolition, the analysis identifies three key findings: first, family policing systems often mirror the coercive dynamics of abusive relationships that sex work helped participants to escape; second, access to social services is contingent on the performance of respectability, with compliance met not with care but with suspicion and deprivation; and third, sex-working parents enact abolitionist praxis by creating new systems of safety and stability through mutual aid when state systems fail. As social work reckons with its complicity in the carceral state, the everyday practices of sex-working parents offer a powerful blueprint for care rooted in trust, unconditional positive regard, and self-determination.

1. Introduction

Sex work1 refers to the consensual exchange of sexual services for money, goods, or survival needs such as housing and drugs, encompassing a broad spectrum of erotic labor that may include in-person services, online work, and other types of erotic labor (Fuentes 2023). Sex work is frequently chosen by undocumented immigrants, people with disabilities, transgender and gender nonconforming individuals, and Black, Indigenous, and people of color due to many unique benefits. This includes higher hourly pay, flexible hours, and a lack of barriers to access for those who are barred or discriminated against in the formal economy (Blunt and Wolf 2020; Fitzgerald et al. 2015; Capous-Desyllas and Loy 2020). However, in Los Angeles, California—where this research is situated—these same populations face heightened criminalization under two primary statutes. California Penal Code § 647(b) makes it a misdemeanor to engage in, agree to engage in, or solicit prostitution, while Penal Code § 653.23(a)(1) targets those who are suspected of supervising, assisting, or receiving earnings from another person engaged in prostitution. These laws are disproportionately enforced against street-based workers and contribute to the increased persecution of Black, Indigenous, undocumented, and transgender individuals. The compounding effects of race, gender identity, immigration status, and labor type result in heightened surveillance, arrest, and exposure to violence, making these communities especially vulnerable under current criminalization regimes.

As individuals conscious of their status as criminalized laborers (or for strippers and cam workers, highly stigmatized laborers), there is immense pressure to keep their occupation under wraps from health providers (Lazarus et al. 2011; McClelland and Newell 2008; Sawicki et al. 2019; Sloss and Harper 2004), friends and family (Bellhouse et al. 2015), other sex workers (Fuentes 2023), and above all, the police (Fuentes et al. 2025; Struyf 2022). Sex workers’ hesitancy and refusal to seek help from law enforcement is hardly surprising when several studies have documented persistent harassment, blackmail, coercion, doxxing2, and other forms of victimization from law enforcement, making them the primary aggressors of sex workers (Boittin 2013; Dewey and St. Germain 2014; Wong et al. 2011). Furthermore, criminalization not only jeopardizes sex worker safety but also adversely affects the financial health of the family because it decreases the mother’s abilities to meet their family’s needs and increases the financial pressure on the child to support the household (Cameron et al. 2021).

Before proceeding, it is essential to clarify what this paper means by “abolition,” as this term shapes the conceptual framing of the analysis that follows. While “abolition” appears in both prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition and sex work abolition—commonly referred to as the Nordic or “End Demand” model—these frameworks are rooted in fundamentally different political commitments. PIC abolition is grounded in a liberatory praxis that seeks to dismantle policing, surveillance, and incarceration while building non-carceral forms of care and accountability (Critical Resistance n.d.). Sex work abolition, by contrast, repurposes the language of abolition to justify the criminalization of sex work through methods other than outright criminalizing sex work, such as criminalizing their clients under the banner of “ending demand” (Bateman 2021). These efforts ultimately aim to eliminate the sex trade altogether. This use of abolitionist rhetoric to advance punitive moral agendas is deeply contradictory: while presented as a form of liberation, sex work abolition relies on police intervention, surveillance, and coercive “rescue.” These methods are precisely the carceral mechanisms that PIC abolition and abolitionist social work scholars seek to dismantle. For the purposes of this paper, abolition refers explicitly to PIC abolition as both a political vision and organizing practice committed to ending carceral violence and building alternative systems of care.

Sex work and parenthood commonly intersect either when parents become sex workers or when sex is work that is necessary to provide for their children (Basu and Dutta 2011; Fuentes et al. 2024). However, the literature paints a rather narrow image of who we understand sex-working parents to be. Research largely centers on the experiences of cisgender women (Bungay et al. 2011; Elmore-Meegan et al. 2004; Feldblum et al. 2007), and the experiences of sex workers engaging in street-based work (Basu and Dutta 2011; Lazarus et al. 2011; Praimkumara and Goh 2015; Sloss and Harper 2004) who may also use drugs (Beard et al. 2010; McClelland and Newell 2008; Sharpe 2001). There are currently no social services in the United States beyond sex worker-run nonprofits that specifically target sex workers (much less sex-working parents) in their service provision. Any services that may exist are in regard to prostitution diversion programs (court-affiliated behavioral reform programs for individuals arrested for sex trade), domestic violence, anti-trafficking, or HIV/AIDS-related programs that require either an admission of victimhood or discarding of their agency to consent to services (Shdaimah et al. 2023; Sloan and Wahab 2000). More importantly, current social work education programs do not educate their pupils on the existence of people consensually engaging in the sex trade, so when sex workers arrive at social services they are primarily seen through the lens of being victims of trafficking, which reinforces stigma (Panichelli 2018).

The stigma and infantilization that plagues sex workers is magnified when they are also parents or caregivers. Mellor and Benoit (2023) caution that we must resist homogenizing knowledge gathered on sex workers, especially when it comes to our understanding of sex workers as parents, as different lives are led according to the type of work, position in the whorearchy3, and relationship to their children (Fuentes 2023). Studies have exposed the negative perceptions that sex workers have against themselves due to societal stigma, making them act harshly toward themselves in the already daunting task of parenting (Dodsworth 2014). This is typically due to the preconception and pathologizing framework that assumes that people only enter sex work due to a series of unfortunate events, including, but not limited to, childhood abuse, parental neglect, isolation from “normal” social networks, and a lack of resources that left with them few options to know better (Dodsworth 2014; Miller and Neaigus 2002; Rosen and Venkatesh 2008). These pathologizing views persist even when discussions with sex workers reveal more agentic reasons for entry, such as personal appeal of the work, life course adversity involving alienation from public institutions such as schools and discrimination in the job force, and having to pay their bills (of which we are all subject to) (Benoit et al. 2017). The danger of hearing “sex worker” and flattening out all experiences into one identity is particularly harmful to sex-working parents because perceived risk becomes the greatest decision-making factor when they intersect with child welfare systems (Duff et al. 2015).

The literature makes clear that for sex workers, losing one’s family is heartbreakingly common, a pain as relentless and sanctioned as the violence they endure at the hands of police (Dewey and St. Germain 2014; Fuentes et al. 2025). Fear of incarceration and the surveillance consequences it triggers disrupts a sex-working parent’s ability to be as present in their child’s life, threatens their parental claim, and can threaten family reunification efforts (D’Andrade 2018; Swavola et al. 2016). Even without formal conviction of a crime, the criminalization of sex-working parents destroys the ability for maintaining social networks that are necessary for new and expecting parents and families. This is in part due to sex workers’ valid fear of being outed and not knowing who to trust or being outed and ousted from family and support networks (Beard et al. 2010; Fuentes 2023; Sawicki et al. 2019). Sex work involvement is routinely weaponized against parents in child custody and protection proceedings, where courts in several jurisdictions evaluate parental fitness based solely on a parent’s engagement in the sex trade (DeWolf 2020). In a review of 19 child protection cases involving current and former sex workers, DeWolf (2020) found that only one parent regained full custody of her child. Former sex workers were more likely to regain partial custody or access, whereas those engaged in sex work at the time of trial uniformly lost full access to their children. This pattern reflects a broader systemic trend. In a national survey of 510 sex workers in Canada, 399 were parents (Duff et al. 2015), and among 466 Indigenous sex workers, 38.6% had experienced child apprehension (Kenny et al. 2021). In a U.S.-based study of street-based sex workers, only 29.7% of participants’ 52 children lived with their mothers (Murnan and Holowacz 2020). Elsdon et al. (2021) found that all six of their participants had experienced involuntary child removal, with women describing deep feelings of powerlessness and enduring regret over how their work was used to delegitimize their parent–child relationships. Across domestic and international contexts, these cases highlight a consistent judicial pattern: in determining the “best interest of the child,” courts frequently cite a parent’s engagement in sex work as evidence of instability or risk, often relying on stigma-informed assumptions rather than concrete evidence of harm (Beckham et al. 2014; DeWolf 2020; Dickson 2019; Nestadt et al. 2021).

Previous studies have called for greater recognition and support for sex-working mothers, albeit not because sex workers should be supported but out of concern for their children (Elsdon et al. 2021). Sex-working parents face a conundrum: while they are deemed unworthy of social support systems and state protection because their profession is seen as forfeiting respectability, their children remain a top priority for child protective services (Benoit et al. 2017). When the “risk thinking” (Rose 2000, p. 332) that guides social workers’ decision making “localizes danger within individual choices and assumes a certain level of control” (Leotti 2020, p. 459), the pathologizing of sex workers as a whole entirely compromises their ability to make decisions in the best interest of their child. This thinking therefore allows us to jump to the conclusion that sex workers are unfit parents due to their assumed individual deficit and deviance and establishes that a child is in need of protection. This distortion of structural realities constructs a procedural landscape where the risks to which sex workers are exposed due to the lack of policy protections are framed as personal failings. This framing does not take into account the lack of accessible and equitably available resources to support individuals and centering intervention efforts on expanding services (Gilham 2012). Sex work organizers have long brought attention to the gross misrepresentation of the actual economic and political forces at play in the police state, especially in the ways that trans and gender nonconforming, undocumented, and Black and Brown sex workers face the brunt of criminalization due to the heightened surveillance in the carceral apparatus (Blunt and Wolf 2020; Capous-Desyllas and Loy 2020; Fuentes et al. 2025).

Scholars have further documented and critiqued social workers’ investment in the carceral structures that promote punishment through family separation and social banishment despite their ethical obligations to do otherwise (Rasmussen and Suslovic 2025). In truth, social work as a profession has a harrowing history of controlling the reproduction of those that society has deemed to be deviant and unfit to be parents first through eugenics—namely the forced sterilization of Black and Indigenous women (Pendleton and Dettlaff 2024). Forced separation (too sterile of a term for kidnapping children) is yet another legally-backed tool of social control that was utilized against those who would not bend to forced “civilization” (Lajimodiere 2021). Incarceration also severely limits or concedes one’s right to parent their child (Hayes et al. 2020). Copeland and Dettlaff (2024) have brought attention to the harm of a criminal record to families, arguing that the child welfare system is not only complicit in following carceral logic but that it functions as a key facilitator of the carceral apparatus, trapping families in its system of surveillance where their only option is to comply. The “family policing system’s” entitlement to family separation is further defended in our profession’s own articulation of our rights and responsibilities, whereby self-determination of a client is a privilege, not a right, that can be stripped away at a social worker’s discretion (Murray et al. 2023).

Foucauldian concepts of biopower and governmentality offer a useful lens for understanding how carceral feminism and child welfare systems operate through the regulation of bodies, reproduction, and family life (Foucault 1995). These systems do not merely punish but also produce norms of legitimacy, parenting, and femininity that render certain populations—such as sex-working parents—especially governable through surveillance and intervention. Currently, social work’s engagement with sex-working parents is governed by a carceral logic that individualizes blame and pathologized non-normative forms of care, framing poverty and survival strategies as personal failings rather than structural injustices (Interrupting Criminalization 2023; Kaba and Ritchie 2022). Under the guise of protection, child welfare and family court systems deploy surveillance, coercion, and conditional services that demand compliance with heteronormative, middle-class ideals, obscuring the state’s role in perpetuating punishment and undermining reproductive autonomy. Although these interventions claim to “treat” families in crisis, they function to punish deviations from prescribed norms, shifting responsibility for systemic inequities onto those most marginalized (Kim et al. 2024). This study aims to examine how sex-working parents navigate systems of care and control—including child welfare, family court, and public assistance programs—within a broader context of criminalization and social stigma. The primary objective is to interrogate how these systems reproduce carceral logic under the guise of support, and how sex-working parents respond with practices of resistance and care. Grounded in an abolitionist framework and informed by feminist participatory research methods, this study builds on a growing body of literature critiquing the punitive dimensions of family policing, as well as emerging work that centers sex workers’ lived experiences as sources of knowledge and political insight (Hassan 2022). By contributing empirical data to conversations about the entanglement of social work with carceral systems, the research seeks to inform alternative non-punitive models of care. In doing so, this paper illuminates pathways for social work to move beyond surveillance toward solidarity, material support, and respect for parental self-determination.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Research Philosophy and Study Design

This study emerged from a community-based collaboration initiated by organizers within the Sex Worker Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOPLA), a sex worker-led organization grounded in mutual aid, harm reduction, and prison industrial complex abolition. In response to the lack of services tailored to sex-working parents (SWPs) in Los Angeles County, the author, Kim Ye, and Sophia Coleman initiated a participatory action research (PAR) study to gather collective knowledge about the needs, struggles, and strengths of SWPs. Our research team is composed of three organizers with lived experience in the sex trade, one of whom is a sex-working parent themselves. A PAR approach is grounded in the belief that those most affected by overlapping systems of criminalization and stigma hold essential knowledge for transforming these systems. This philosophy is aligned with the research team’s commitment to ensuring that knowledge production serves a tangible and immediate benefit to the community.

The team designed this study in accordance with feminist participatory research principles and care ethics, a framework that is inherently political and centers collective knowledge production with the aim of challenging extractive research models and amplifying knowledge produced within sex worker communities themselves (Cahill 2007; Elsdon et al. 2021). Feminist care ethics guided the development of the focus group instrument by emphasizing the emotional wellbeing of our participants by not assuming that sex work was causing issues for their parenting, asking them to reflect on instances that they felt affirmed in their dual identity, and practicing care for our parents in the placement of emotionally challenging questions. Furthermore, our research questions integrated principles of intersectionality. Even though the research aims centered on the intersection of sex work and parenthood, we inquired about how overlapping identities and positions within structures shaped their experiences of oppression and resistance.

Recognizing the longstanding distrust many sex workers hold toward academic institutions and formal research (Shaver 2005), the research team foregrounded relationship building, transparency, and shared ownership of data throughout the study with sex-working parents. The academic researcher on the team supported peer researchers during IRB protocol development, methodological documentation, group facilitation, recruitment, and analysis processes. In addition to the formal focus groups described below, three critical community actions resulted from this project: (1) an in-person gathering of study participants and their children, (2) a support group space for sex-working parents organized by the lead author, and (3) a radical self-publication zine led by participants titled ProMomme: A Sex Worker’s Guide to Parenting. Both emerged organically from the research and realized the PAR framework into practices of community continuity and movement building.

2.2. Recruitment

The participants in this study were thirteen parents who engaged in sex work while being the primary caretaker of at least one child under the age of 18. All participants lived and worked in Los Angeles County and were recruited through a mix of social media outreach and outreach at in-person events for the sex worker community facilitated by SWOPLA. The study was conducted in accordance with the UCLA Institutional Review Board (IRB#22-000510). Recruitment materials were also distributed via SWOPLA’s mailing list and flyers left at five local community-based organizations. However, most eligible participants were referred directly through trusted community connections. We encouraged participants to vet us just as much as we were vetting them. Vetting, a common practice where sex workers screen potential clients before deciding to engage with them, was also applied to us as community researchers for this study due to well-documented sex worker distrust of researchers (Ferris et al. 2021; Preble 2015). During the participants’ vetting process of us, the research team emphasized SWOPLA’s values—especially our refusal to participate with carceral entities such as law enforcement or child protective services. This was especially reassuring for the parents who chose to participate.

2.3. Participants

The eligibility criteria included: age 18 or older, experience with sex work in Los Angeles County (either working in Los Angeles or living in Los Angeles while engaging in sex work elsewhere), English fluency, access to internet-connected technology, and current or past parenting of a child under 18 while working in the sex trade. This criterion was important because sex work norms, legal frameworks, and available support programs vary significantly by region. We aimed to engage participants who could speak to a shared local context and potentially connect with one another, as the broader participatory goals of the project included fostering peer support and informing local advocacy efforts. Of the 45 individuals who filled out our screener, 32 were found ineligible due to being outside of our location parameters, and 13 were successfully enrolled in the study.

Participants’ ages ranged from 29 to 49, with children between 8 months and 17 years of age. Their sex work experiences spanned a wide range of modalities, including full-service sex work, sugaring/girlfriend experience, fetish work (domme/sub/switch), pornography (video or photo), webcam work, phone sex (sexting), and erotic dancing/stripping. Participants reflected diverse gender and racial identities: 70% identified as cis women, 15% as transmasculine, and 15% as non-binary; racially and ethnically, 53% identified as white, 15% as Black/African American, 8% as Latinx, 8% as Afro-Indigenous Caribbean, 8% as Indigenous (North, Central, or South American), and 8% as mixed race.

2.4. Focus Group Process

Informed consent for participation was obtained from all parents involved in the study. Before recording, the research team confirmed participants’ comfort levels, reviewed consent protocols, and created community agreements unique to each group to co-create norms for caring discussion. Facilitators also introduced themselves with personal disclosures around their own connections to parenting and sex work, further affirming the collaborative and horizontal nature of the research process.

Five focus groups were held via Zoom between May and July 2022, each consisting of two to four participants. Group composition was intentionally curated based on screening form responses to foster affinity among participants with overlapping work types, gender experiences, or parenting contexts. This approach prioritized emotional safety and deeper vulnerability, consistent with feminist interview methodologies that emphasize shared social location as conducive to trust-building (Madriz 2000). For example, one group included three parents with experience as professional dominas, prompting discussion on the specific tensions of performing highly controlled indoor labor while navigating parenting under stigma.

Each focus group was co-facilitated by two members of the research team and followed a semi-structured guide that emphasized open-ended exploration of the intersections between parenting and sex work. Questions covered family configuration, pathways into the sex trade, the effects of sex work on parenting and vice versa, perceptions of stigma and surveillance, and key unmet needs. At the end of each group, participants engaged in an art-based counter-messaging activity designed to synthesize their reflections and visualize collective insights. Participants were asked to create the cover of a magazine for SWPs via an online collage platform or materials at home that reflected the primary concerns and topics for this community. Their covers were then shared with the rest of the group, and the recurring themes were taken up by SWOPLA to inform programs such as a parent support group, a sex worker parents zine, and parent meetups. Participants were compensated for their time and all groups exchanged contact information to remain connected after the focus groups ended.

2.5. Data Analysis

All focus group audio recordings were transcribed using Otter.ai (2022 version of the web platform), manually deidentified, and shared among the research team. In response to potential breaches of confidentiality in uploading focus group audio to Otter.ai, participants were asked to provide pseudonyms during focus groups and not provide names of identifiable information. Any identifiable information still present at time of transcription was redacted. In alignment with the study’s PAR approach and small dataset, the team opted out of using qualitative coding software in favor of a communal coding process. Each of the four team members read all transcripts independently, generating preliminary codes based on emerging themes. The team then met collectively a total of five times, lasting approximately 90 min, to review and refine codes through a consensus-building process, addressing discrepancies through discussion and shared memo reflection (Saldaña 2021). To account for reader bias, each transcript was reviewed by at least two coders.

This early coding was explicitly grounded in Foucauldian theory—particularly the notion of disciplinary society—to trace how state and social surveillance reproduce stigma, shame, and isolation among sex-working parents (Foucault 1995). This lens helped the research team to trace the ways state and social scrutiny shape the lived experiences of SWPs—not only through criminalization, but also through informal systems of punishment such as stigma, shame, and isolation. These findings were synthesized and published in Fuentes et al. (2024). In the present study, the secondary analysis was guided by an abolitionist framework to expand on existing principles of radical care, autonomy, and resistance to conformity that was present among sex-working parents. Through this analytic framework, the study illuminated how SWPs navigate intersecting pressures of care, labor, and regulation, as well as their adaptive strategies for building safety, dignity, and community.

3. Results

Across focus groups, participants made clear that their experiences of parenting were not undermined by their engagement in sex work but by the carceral logic that surrounds both sex work and caregiving under racial capitalism. Although the original study centered on parenting practices, what emerged vividly were the harms enacted by systems that conflate non-normativity with neglect and treat autonomy as deviance. This study draws on an abolitionist perspective to explore these narratives not as evidence of individual risk but as critiques of the structural conditions that criminalize vulnerability while denying material support. First, participants described how systems intended to protect families—particularly child welfare and the courts—often replicated the control and coercion of abusive relationships, punishing sex-working parents for deviating from patriarchal norms. Second, they illuminated how state institutions demand obedience without delivering care, making rule following an often punitive process that deepens instability. Finally, participants reframed sex work not as something to be rescued from, but as a vital infrastructure of care—one that nurtured survival, cultivated healing, and sustained their presence in their children’s lives, creating spaces of love and possibility where state systems could not control them.

3.1. Not Unsafe, Just Unacceptable: When Family Policing Mirrors Abuse

Participants illuminated how family policing systems (Vega-Brown and Stephens 2023)—far from protecting children—often replicate the dynamics of control, surveillance, and coercion they had previously experienced in abusive relationships. Parents described the unique vulnerability of being sex-working parents in systems that read non-normativity as neglect and survival strategies as pathology. “I’ve had to pay child support the whole time,” one mother shared. “And when I wasn’t able to pay child support my ex basically bogarted my son against me and just would not let him hang out with me and say, ‘Why don’t you be a real mom?’” (Hazel). This was not about safety; it was about punishment for deviating from an idealized vision of motherhood. Again and again, participants emphasized that they were not seen for the care they provided but for the stories others told about them.

Many described how abusive ex-partners—emboldened by stigma around sex work—weaponized systems like family court and child protective services to continue exerting control. Scarlett shared, “The worst thing to happen to my family since becoming a parent would be the attack that my son’s father is trying to pull on me now that he found out what I did, and he keeps pushing it and spreading it around.” In another case, a mother explained: “I called CPS [Child Protective Services] on my youngest’s father. He was very threatening about exposing what I do. And so I just came out and told [the CPS worker], ‘This is what I do… I’m very scared because he’s threatening me and I just need help’” (Stella). To her surprise, the worker responded that her work was a non-issue—an exception in a system where most assumed the opposite.

Others were not so lucky. One parent, navigating a custody battle in a “mediating county,” recalled how her hesitancy in sharing her sex work involvement became grounds for removal: “The mediator decided that [the father] should have custody because [the mediator] didn’t like the fact that I was very secretive about my work during the first mediation, and it was all downhill from there” (Hazel).

Surveillance—through CPS, the courts, diversion programs, or service organizations—did not feel protective to participants. Instead, it felt like an extension of the violence they were trying to escape. “It’s just been so fucked having to deal with getting arrested, going to diversion programs or any kind of court. I am so done with that shit—It creates such massive barriers, stigma, and it’s just unnecessary. I get it enough from my abuser” (Gianna). Here, the state does not interrupt harm but rather reproduces it under the guise of concern for the child.

Participants shared the emotional and logistical burden of constantly having to perform a palatable version of motherhood, even when that meant lying, hiding, and suppressing parts of themselves. “My kids don’t know what I really do. I need to explain to them what I do, because it’s going to be found out … I had to rush to pick up my child from my ex’s house, and he’s just looking at me like, ‘Why do you have all that makeup on?’ … I’m sorry that I showed up looking like a whore to come and do the majority of the work for our child but this whore work is helping me do that. I’m tired of lying” (Ivy).

Despite these challenges, participants emphasized that their sex work was not the source of instability—it was often the thing that enabled them to survive. “I was in a really abusive place … and I couldn’t flee. I was with a very abusive partner who held me captive. I had to find a way to escape for my son and build a life because I wasn’t getting paid that much. Sex work brought me back to a place of empowerment where I felt okay about myself again” (Scarlett).

Still, being a sex-working parent meant constantly navigating intense stigma and moral judgment—especially in encounters with service providers and institutions that claimed to offer support. Participants described a pervasive expectation to perform recovery, humility, or “gratitude” in order to be deemed deserving of help.

Luca: “[Social service providers] tell you, “you need detox” and sort of equate substance use to a measure of your parenting,” one parent reflected. “In some ways things can affect your parenting, but in other ways there’s people who use drugs who are great parents… You don’t have to be pious and fucking grateful. I’m grateful, but this is what this funding is meant to do.”

Nova: “Can I just say that using substances while parenting is glorified by Target? “It’s wine o’clock!” Like, it’s fine to have wine with your kids. And it’s cute but somehow when you mix it with sex work, like I had wine with the client then it’s fucking horrible.”

Sophia: “There’s this harm reduction coalition that has some great research about substance use and pregnancy. Basically, you’re better off being a parent to your child than not being a parent to your child. And that even means being somebody who uses substances while being a parent to their child.”

Luca: “And there’s this study I saw about how your adverse childhood experiences go up in the foster care system, so you’re being harmed, I think it’s six times more when you’re in care than when you’re not in care so you’re taking our children away because we’re “harming them” and then they’re being severely harmed in other ways. We could have just received resources and worked it out.”

Participants affirmed to each other how these gatekeeping practices reflected more than bureaucratic inefficiency—they mirrored the logic of punishment and conditional worth that structure these systems. Rather than meeting people where they were, institutions instituted double standards for SWPs, requiring them to conform to narrow norms of respectability.

As Athena put it, “There’s no being nice enough. There’s no trying hard enough. You will be in [other parent’s] circle if they deem you worthy … my kids are getting a great education, but I’m not worthy.” In this context, a parent’s worthiness is not measured by their love, care, or ability to provide—it is judged by how closely they align with dominant norms of whiteness and heteronormative domesticity, the very norms that sex work is often seen to defy. As a result, even strong parenting practices were overlooked or reinterpreted as risk. Participants laid bare the ways that systems meant to protect families can instead become proxies for abuse. Across the groups, sex-working parents described how abusive ex-partners leveraged stigma around sex work to weaponize institutions like CPS and family court. In these cases, state actors did not simply overlook abuse; they became its proxies. In the next section, we explore what follows when sex-working parents try to follow the rules, only to find that obedience, too, is met with punishment.

3.2. Obedience vs. Autonomy

Participants widely rejected the idea across groups that state-approved pathways to stability—employment, marriage, credit, and compliance—offered real safety. Instead, they revealed how these institutions demanded obedience without delivering care. Whether in welfare offices, family courts, housing applications, or child welfare investigations, sex-working parents described a world in which compliance was not rewarded with care but punished with suspicion, delay, and deprivation. Delilah said “I had to apply for benefits. It’s just been a little tricky because I don’t have much of a paper trail … and sometimes it can be a little bit difficult because [social service providers] need to see that you’re looking for jobs or the little cash assistance you do get is cut off.” Following the rules did not protect them. In many cases, it prolonged violence, deepened poverty, and threatened their ability to parent.

Navigating bureaucratic systems meant constantly proving their worth, often through paperwork that sex-working parents were structurally excluded from producing. Attempts to access benefits were experienced not as sites of support but of surveillance, where eligibility for assistance depended on one’s ability to perform respectability and conceal survival.

Isla: “For EBT I feel like I always have to prove things, and I don’t always have the proof [social service providers] are looking for … sex work is all I’ve known for 10 years so it’s really difficult for me to apply to vanilla jobs and then promise a schedule that I don’t know that I can even deliver because I’m a single parent with no childcare. It’s always a lot of runaround to get these things from the state.”

Trish: “I don’t know if this situation is still like that with childcare, but you are welcome to use one of the closets at [my dungeon], if you’d like to keep stuff, you can lock it up, totally up to you. And if there’s anything you want to practice, I got a place where you can do that.”

Isla: [chuckles and holds back tears] “Like, don’t make me cry in the middle of an interview.”

These demands were not just burdensome; they were experienced as punitive and deeply out of touch with the material realities of parenting without institutional support. One of the most frustrating elements was realizing how easily some of these concerns could be remedied through mutual aid once they were able to be honest about their needs. Other SWPs described lying on benefit applications or hiding assets like vehicles (Gianna), simply to ensure continued access to their children’s medicines, a form of necessary disobedience that laid bare the absurdity of the systems meant to “help.”

Participants described sex work not only as a means of survival, but as a practice of autonomy—an intentional departure from the systems that had failed them. “I don’t get any support from my ex husband. During the pandemic, I was actively looking for a place to move out to and had some issues with some student loans changing and all of a sudden, I had this really horrible credit after having worked for several years to improve it so diligently. No one would rent to me. And I had a client who was willing to cosign on my apartment for me. I moved to downtown LA and I knew we were going to be okay” (Willow).

Choosing sex work was often framed not as a last resort but as a refusal to sacrifice themselves or their children for a myth of respectable motherhood. One mother put it bluntly: “I got a divorce and I was financially in a bad place with two kids. After doing sex work as a parent, I’m gonna do what I have to do. I don’t care anymore what other people think, it’s nobody’s business. I am feeding my children, I’m paying my rent, I have flexibility, and I’m able to be there for them when they’re sick. I don’t feel ashamed” (Hazel). For many, autonomy was not a luxury—it was a condition for parenting. “I landed at LAX with two little kids, and no car, no job, no apartment,” recalled one parent. “But it was me and the kids, you know… At the end of the day, I provide for my kids, and I do not feel any regret about any of those sessions at all. Even the worst ones—not one, freaking one” (Trish).

Their narratives made clear that the state’s obsession with conformity came at the expense of actual wellbeing. Sex-working parents disrupted that logic by asserting care on their own terms. Luca explained how she had to avoid a paper trail in order to maintain a degree of economic stability: “There’s a lot of red tape, and a lot of things I feel like I can’t see … In some ways, sex work has made it easier, because I have this cash on hand, and I can receive some benefits that I probably shouldn’t be receiving” (Luca). These strategies often required bending or breaking the rules, not out of negligence, but out of care.

However, the punishment for refusing to follow state-sanctioned scripts was not merely surveillance but sometimes the risk of losing one’s children. Yet these parents persisted in forging alternative paths that often required breaking the rules to preserve the very thing they feared losing—their family. As one frustrated parent retorted, “If people are concerned about my children being left home alone and being neglected, why don’t they offer childcare?” (Delilah) Over and over, participants emphasized that what they needed was not policing or reform but material support and respect for their self-determination. What they asked for was simple: programs that support parenting, guidance for age-appropriate conversations with children, emergency childcare funds, and food security—without being treated as inherently suspect. “Some people are still working the streets … and some kind of a resource where young women can just learn more about parenting … I’d really appreciate some kind of emergency childcare or childcare fund” (Isla).

Importantly, this was not a rejection of support but of coercive care. “Organizations or people that try to help [sex workers] get out from this ignore our autonomy,” one parent said, “like, ‘We’re saving you from sex work,’ instead of just saying, ‘Hey, some people are just transitioning their career and they need support’” (Ivy). The parents in this study did not ask for rescue from sex work or from their children—they needed support for their families, the freedom to make decisions in their family’s best interest, and the resources to do so safely.

In this context, autonomy was not the opposite of care but its precondition. Moments of affirmation—whether from peers or providers—were rare but transformative. Trish described her encounter with a caseworker: “We did have a [caseworker]. I think it was with Medicare or one of the homeless emergency programs. I hadn’t slept for days on end … I said, ‘I’m an entertainer, I’m a dancer,’ and the caseworker stopped for a minute. It was really beautiful. She just kind of paused and said, ‘Okay, honey, I got it.’ I’ll love that woman till the day I die.” Being in community with other sex-working parents offered not just material resources, but a radically different paradigm of care—one that recognized refusal as legitimate, autonomy as essential, and motherhood as already complete. “Just being in community … gave me permission to be who I am unabashedly,” one mother shared. “Every time I am affirmed in that way, it lifts you up in a sort of holistic whole body way” (Luca).

Another parent spoke of the value of support she received from a local church: “I’ve been given $200 gift cards to Ralph. You just drive through and they just put your car full of food and cleaning supplies, and they’ve given us a lot of food over the past two years.” (Nova). These moments of empathy, where assistance was offered without conditions, disbelief, or shame, offered a glimpse of what affirming infrastructure could look like if it were guided by autonomy rather than obedience.

3.3. Sex Work as an Infrastructure of Care

For the sex-working parents in this study, sex work was not simply a form of labor—it was a counter-institution. In the absence of state care and in the face of systems designed to police, punish, and dispossess them, sex work became a vital infrastructure of care and resistance. It enabled participants to meet their families’ needs on their own terms—to stay housed, feed their children, and parent with intention and presence. Stella recounted, “I get to be home when my kids are sick. Right? That’s huge. My mom didn’t get to do that.”

The state, through child welfare, public assistance, and labor markets, frequently renders marginalized caregivers disposable—offering minimal support while criminalizing non-normative strategies for survival. Participants described sex work as one of the only forms of labor that allowed them to refuse this disposability. For one mother caring for an autistic child, the choice was clear: “She’s 13. And she’s autistic. So it’s a challenge. [My daughter] needs a lot of care. And sex work has just given me the opportunity to be able to be there for her and also make money” (Sage).

Others emphasized how sex work enabled them to imagine and build lives beyond survival. It offered the flexibility to design educational options, parent with care, and be present in ways that would have been impossible under the rigid demands of conventional labor. “I feel pretty stable financially. And because of that I’m able to offer my daughter really cool things like a certain pedagogy for her schooling … [the teachers] work with who you are and what you bring to the room” (Delilah).

In contrast to state welfare programs or abusive partner dynamics riddled with surveillance and conditionality, participants described resourcing care through peer networks, client relationships, and informal economies. “My ex had made a lot of bad business decisions. He was broke. We weren’t divorced. So we were separated, he wasn’t helping me with anything. So I was supporting the two kids all on [sex work]. The family unit sustains itself with me” (Athena). These horizontal care systems allowed them to weather crises, avoid institutional intrusion, and hold their families together.

For some, sex work represented the most accessible path forward—especially when other industries closed doors: “I had tried different fields and I was just stuck but [sex work] was accessible to me and could make me the main breadwinner… Not anyone can do it, but it was accessible to me” (Nova).

These accounts collectively challenge the assumption that sex work inherently conflicts with caregiving; instead, they show how sex work can function as a vital support system under conditions of economic precarity and inflexible labor markets. Sex-working parents were not only resisting systems that sought to displace them—they were actively building something better. Beyond material security, participants spoke of profound emotional and relational transformations arising from their sex work practice—developments they credited with making them more present, confident, and attuned parents. Many credited their experiences in sex work with teaching them to confront trauma, model boundaries, and raise children outside of the shame-based paradigms that harmed them. In doing so, they enacted an abolitionist ethic of care—one that centers deep love and respect over punishment and control (Hwang 2019).

One parent described how learning boundary-setting through sex work empowered her to leave an abusive relationship and break cycles of harm: “Being able to set boundaries has grown into something that my kids can model for themselves … and having this sense of security is actually propelling that for the next generation even further. I was able to be real with her and say, ‘You have value’” (Gianna).

Similarly, another reflected on how sex work forced her to confront old wounds, cultivate warmth, and foster self-love: “Learning to be warmer has been my biggest struggle and accepting love for myself, which thankfully, I’ve learned through feeling the protection of other [sex workers] … I don’t think if I had become a sex worker, I would have loved myself the way that I’m able to love now” (Scarlett).

Several parents described how shedding shame around sexuality translated into more open, honest family communication. Sex work also facilitated parenting practices rooted in honesty and autonomy, rather than repression and surveillance. Parents spoke proudly of raising their children in environments where bodies, sexuality, and differences were not taboo. “They see healthy sexuality, and I’m not ashamed. My dildos are out and my young child’s like, ‘what’s this?’ I’m like, ‘it’s a massager for your muscle.’ My mom was very ashamed to even be in her underwear around me. I would never have been able to do that if it was not for what I do as a domme” (Nova).

For trans parents especially, sex work created space to live in their gender identities while maintaining meaningful caregiving roles. Leo, a trans masculine parent, explained how sex work supported his journey to embrace his gender identity and, in turn, deepened his relationship with his daughter: “I don’t think Mother has a gender but I think being able to find my gender identity through sex work by doing sex work as a trans person… allowed me to explain my gender identity and reintroduce myself to [my daughter]… it’s really improved my ability to parent for her in the ways that she needs.”

Finally, even in moments of crisis, such as moves and eviction threats, participants reported that the mindfulness and human connection cultivated through sex work strengthened their capacity to create calm environments for their children: “In our biggest emergencies where so much of what we experienced was out of urgency I had very little wiggle room for mindful parenting… sex work also contributed to a sense of mindfulness in what you do … so that I can give my kids, not per se, an easier life, but a more caring one even in the worst of circumstances and just being conscious of their needs” (Willow).

Participants observed that the very systems seeking to displace them as caregivers were incapable of replicating the levels of devotion and unconditional love they demonstrated for their children. If anything, sex work allowed them to be afloat enough to protect their children from these policing systems that prey on families experiencing poverty. Taken together, these narratives reveal that sex work can serve not only as a means of survival but as a profound source of fierce resistance and intergenerational care that should not be underestimated.

4. Discussion: Care over Control—Toward an Abolitionist Social Work

This study contributes to a growing body of abolitionist feminist research that interrogates the carceral reach of systems that claim to support families. From the vantage point of sex-working parents, the findings illuminate how child welfare, welfare assistance, housing authorities, and family courts often function not as sites of protection but as extensions of coercive control. Our participants did not describe isolated incidents of mistreatment; they mapped a pattern. What emerged was not simply a critique of punitive policy but a testament to survival in spite of it—and a call to social work to abandon the illusion of neutrality.

Social workers, case managers, and judges were not simply observers of harm—they were often its administrators. State systems framed these parents’ labor as deviant and their resistance as irresponsibility. In doing so, they enacted what abolitionist scholars have identified as “carceral care” (Kaba and Ritchie 2022)—a form of state “benevolence” that punishes nonconformity under the guise of concern. Echoing critiques advanced by Interrupting Criminalization (2023), these findings underscore how family regulation operates as a proxy for criminalization. This criminalization was not limited to surveillance. It demanded performance. Parents were forced to prove their “worthiness” through deference, self-erasure, and respectability. As one participant explained, “There’s no being nice enough. There’s no trying hard enough. You will be in their circle if they deem you worthy.” Their parenting was not evaluated by love or labor but by proximity to white, middle-class, heteronormative ideals. Refusal to conform—whether through queerness, sex work, or nontraditional family structures—was treated not only as suspect but as dangerous.

Obedience, when demanded by the state, is rarely neutral. Rather, it is often a call to participate in systems of harm that detach us from each other and further permit violence to begin and to repeat itself. In this way, obedience to these systems becomes not just submission but complicity. This distinction matters deeply for sex-working parents, who described disobedience not as defiance for its own sake but as a conscious and often necessary refusal to comply with institutions that endangered their families. Therefore, SWPs disobey in two distinct ways: their choice of work that flies in the face of acceptable forms of labor and either disengaging from social systems or engaging with them without disclosing sex work involvement. Rather than reinforcing a binary between the obedient and the deviant, an abolitionist lens reframes these dynamics altogether. At the same time, it is crucial to recognize that participants’ acts of resistance emerged within conditions marked by criminalization, economic precarity, and systemic violence—contexts that constrained choice even as they compelled creative strategies for care and survival. The parents in this study remind us that reclaiming agency—through whatever means necessary—is not a betrayal of duty but its most radical fulfillment. These parents did not simply navigate broken systems; they rejected them. Choosing disobedience on purpose was a daily survival strategy and act of radical love. Sex work was a site of income but, more importantly, a labor practice that allowed them to remain housed, stay present, and model care without shame. In doing so, they enacted what Davis et al. (2022) describe as “abolitionist mothering”: care practices that resist criminalization while building community-based infrastructures of support. These findings resonate with Kaba and Ritchie’s (2022) assertion that abolition is not just about dismantling punitive systems—it is about constructing new ones rooted in autonomy, interdependence, and radical care.

This research urges a transformation in social work’s professional ethics. However, this is not a call to provide kinder or “sex worker-affirming” services, as this has yet to be well explored. A focus on non-judgmental services reaffirms the idea that the issue is a few bad apples when the problem is systemic in nature (Murray et al. 2023). Our sex-working parents demand more than empathy; they require disobedience and greater attention to the systemic violence that shapes the lives of sex workers in criminalized states. The “Beyond Do No Harm” principles (Interrupting Criminalization 2023) provide a framework for this shift. Abolitionist scholars expand on this framework to remind us that “do no harm” is an insufficient principle when social workers are embedded in systems that criminalize the very people they purport to serve (Kim et al. 2024). Especially for micro- and macro-level providers, the mandate to end unnecessary data collection, cease collaboration with carceral systems, and practice solidarity with those resisting surveillance is more pressing than ever.

Refusing to report, surveil, or judge becomes an act of collective protection and care. Mandatory reporting, long upheld as a safeguard for children, is increasingly recognized by abolitionist scholars and organizers as a mechanism of surveillance, not safety. Rather than offering support, it often serves as a gateway into the family regulation system, disproportionately targeting families already marginalized by racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, and poverty (Dettlaff et al. 2020; Kim et al. 2024). These policies criminalize need, erode trust, and deepen the very traumas they claim to address (Piepzna-Samarasinha et al. 2020). We cannot ask practitioners to identify as “sex worker affirming” while still engaging in surveillance practices. Simply put, if we hope to receive honesty from each other we must follow the principles of informed consent, or “when I ask you for truth, I grant you the responsibility of how next what you tell me gets used” (Pepinsky 1998). Surveillance practices take this agency away from sex workers. Critiques of mandatory reporting reflect a broader concern with the carceral logic embedded in social work—a logic that responds to vulnerability not with self-determination but with regulation (Murray et al. 2023; Thuma 2019). As Amaka Okechukwu (2021) warns, these masculinized forms of security practices, often framed as protective, can reproduce state violence when rooted in a crisis of police legitimacy rather than genuine relationships of solidarity. Assuring parents that sex work involvement is a non-issue or providing services regardless of employment status go a long way in moments of disclosure that call for care (Richie 2012).

The findings reflect how sex-working parents are subject to what Foucault (1990) describes as the diffuse workings of biopower, where care becomes a site of control to enforce docility. Social workers, then, are not neutral actors; they are deputized by the state to enforce conformity through bureaucratic mechanisms that offer assistance only in exchange for compliance with surveillance. This dissonance has been widely noted by scholars, who observe how such practices often conflict with the profession’s stated ethical commitments to dignity and self-determination (Murray et al. 2023; Richie and Martensen 2019). From an abolitionist perspective, ending mandatory reporting is necessary to reject frameworks that collapse care into coercion. This perspective calls on social workers to move from mandated suspicion toward community accountability, from bureaucratic compliance toward relational, values-based engagement. In place of surveillance, abolitionist care demands consent, accompaniment, and collective safety—approaches that honor the self-determination of criminalized parents and center the supports they define for themselves.

This echoes what harm reductionists have long argued: that people deserve resources without the demand to perform shame or surrender autonomy. As the Perinatal Harm Reduction Coalition (2023) emphasizes in their harm reduction toolkit, “most of the problems our society links with drug use are not caused by use. For example, disease, crime, and violence are not related to substances themselves, but to structural racism and criminalization.” Within this framework, substance use is not inherently harmful to children. What harms families is the withdrawal of support and the deployment of surveillance in place of care. Children do better when they remain in the care of their parents—even those who use substances—so long as adequate resources, stability, and support are provided. However, this recognition must coexist with an understanding that parents who use substances—like those who engage in sex work—often do so within contexts shaped by structural violence, including poverty, criminalization, and trauma, which both constrain choices and heighten risk. This underscores the urgent need to decriminalize sex work and eliminate the legal and institutional penalties that prevent sex workers from safely reporting violence and accessing support.

A necessary tenet for harm reduction is unconditional positive regard, affirming that all people are inherently deserving of dignity, care, and respect. This regard stands against reducing individuals to any single identity, be it sex worker or parent. In a context where sex workers are often pitted against each other to earn relative respectability (Fuentes 2023), it is important to note that SWPs are not more deserving of empathy simply because their labor is framed as being in service of their families. While this article highlights moments of agency and care enacted by sex-working parents, this should not be read as suggesting that parenting in this context is uniformly mindful or free of struggle—nor does it have to be. Like all forms of parenthood, it is marked by contradiction, exhaustion, ambivalence, and imperfection—conditions often intensified by the structural constraints of criminalization, stigma, and poverty. The radicalism of sex workers’ resistance is not contingent on parental status; frameworks that valorize certain forms of care while delegitimizing others must be challenged. The act of accepting individuals as whole and complex beings across all sex-working lives constitutes a vital form of abolitionist practice. These questions must prompt a critical reflection within “caring” professions: What if support looked more like trust than triage? What if social care affirmed parents’ decisions instead of penalizing their strategies?

Sex-working parents are already answering these questions. They are building mutual aid networks and forming encrypted peer-led childcare coalitions. Delilah highlighted, Fundación Camino de Vida, a mutual aid network in Colombia started in 2004 that provides shelter, food, and childcare to children of sex workers to be cared for while their mothers work at night. In various contexts, sex worker-led community mobilization initiatives have shifted toward a more family-centered approach in response to the articulated needs and priorities of sex-working parents. These family-oriented services—including healthcare clinics, childcare, night education programs, cultural events, civic engagement and advocacy opportunities, shelters for children, financial inclusion initiatives, and the reinforcement of peer support networks—have been linked to improved outcomes for both sex workers and their children (Ali et al. 2021; Basu and Dutta 2011; Beard et al. 2010). In response to participant recommendations, organizers at SWOPLA applied for an arts grant to create more honest portrayals of SWPs. This complexity is echoed in the peer-led ProMomme publication, which resists romanticized portrayals and instead centers the messy, nonlinear, and often contradictory realities of parenting under surveillance and structural constraints. ProMomme: A Sex Worker’s Guide to Parenting is a zine involving sixteen SWPs who speak on navigating postpartum bodily changes while working in the industry, how to talk to one’s children about sex work, and how their dual roles “inform, strengthen, and poses challenges for the other.” This zine has sold over 300 copies since its release in October 2024 and a documentary is currently in production to further counteract sex-working parent stigma. For practitioners seeking guidance on non-judgmental services, it is time to take a page from our (sex-working) parents’ book.

Their stories compel us to reimagine social work’s role in the carceral state and to shift from agents of assessment to accomplices in care. In the face of stigma, criminalization, and abandonment, these families insist care is already here; it simply may not always look like the kind social workers have been trained to see. This means pushing beyond advocacy for policy reform and enacting daily practices of abolitionist care: declining to report, refusing to stigmatize, and supporting the infrastructures of survival that marginalized families have already built. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, radical mothers of our movement, modeled this ethic when they created STAR House, engaging in sex work to house and feed their families (New York Historical Society 2019). They did not wait for policy change. They practiced care with no strings attached in defiance of systems that rendered them disposable, albeit not without immense carceral threat.

To stand with sex-working parents (and sex workers broadly) is to reject the illusion that safety comes from surveillance or that respectability and “rightness” are earned. We must affirm that care rooted in autonomy, trust, and material support is not only possible but already exists. While sex workers have long understood that survival sometimes requires breaking the law, social workers must now ask what rules they are willing to break in solidarity. Sex workers will continue to care for themselves and their families, by any means necessary. What are we willing to do to support them? In a field shaped by regulation, risk aversion, and professional gatekeeping, choosing to disobey on purpose is a necessary path to build alternative futures. Abolition demands nothing less.