293 - Female Sex Workers and the Police
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 12 April 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Susan Sherman talks with Lindsay Smith Rogers about her 2016-2017 research on the relationship between female sex workers and police, including how abusive policing practices directly and indirectly put the health and safety of the women at risk. They then discuss Dr. Sherman's recommendations for a different approach. Note: After this podcast was recorded, Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that the city will permanently stop prosecuting prostitution, drug possession, and other low-level offenses—a move that began during COVID-19 as a way to dedensify prisons and jails.
KEYWORDS: decarceration; substance use; gender equity
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:19.6 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence |
| 0:22.4 | and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists, |
| 0:27.8 | community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas |
| 0:34.4 | or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question |
| 0:38.8 | at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:47.3 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, the producer of public health on call. Today, I speak with Dr. Susan |
| 0:53.2 | Sherman, a professor in health behavior and |
| 0:55.4 | society at Johns Hopkins and the founder of the Spark Women's Center in West Baltimore. We talk |
| 1:01.5 | about the impact of law enforcement on a population not often discussed female sex workers. |
| 1:08.0 | Let's listen. Dr. Susan Sherman, thank you so much for joining me. Today, we're |
| 1:13.5 | going to talk about some of your research about sex workers and their experiences and interactions |
| 1:19.1 | with police in Baltimore. So your research found that for every abusive interaction that |
| 1:25.1 | female sex workers had with police, there was 1.3 times the risk |
| 1:29.8 | of experiencing client violence. So I want to unpack this a little bit. Can you explain this connection? |
| 1:36.4 | Well, thank you so much for having me. I think it's important first to talk about how we defined |
| 1:41.9 | an abusive practice and the context of this research. |
| 1:45.5 | We conducted a study among 312 street-based sex workers, |
| 1:49.6 | the majority who were cisgender and trans women, |
| 1:55.2 | looking at the role of police on their risk environment |
| 1:58.6 | with outcomes of interest being violence, HIV and STIs, because |
... |
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