Browsing by Author "Ilola, Marianne"

Objectives. Sex work stigma portrays sex workers merely as victims of some kind of external pressure, coercion or even their own bad choices, which is not the truth for all sex workers. Stigma has been proven to be associated with elevated symptoms of different mental illnesses among many stigmatized populations. Therefore this bachelor thesis aimed to examine if the same association exists among sex workers and what would be the possible effect of stigma on mental health. Instead of automatically victimizing all sexworkers it might be more useful to target help to the most vulnerable sexworkers while leaving those with less attention who like doing sexwork. Methods. Literature search was carried out using Google Scholar in spring 2021. At the beginning search focused on a general level about mental health of sexworkers using keywords such as ’sexwork’, ’prostitution’, ’prostitute’, ’mental health’, ’psychiatric disorder’, ’depression’ and ’anxiety’, which resulted in 59 studies for a later evaluation. Selected 59 studies included 10 studies regarding the association between stigma and mental health, of which two studies got later left out at random. Literature search was continued with a focus on stigma and mental health among sexworkers. After ’stigma’ was included in keywords, additional two studies were found. In total 10 studies were selected in this thesis. Results and conclusions. The prevalence of depression or elevated depressive symptoms were significantly higher among sexworkers compared to other low-paid people. Studies showed a positive significant association between sexwork related stigma and depressive symptoms. There were many limitations of this thesis that impacted the interpretation of results. Unfortunately the selected studies were not comparable due to many differences in samples and methodology, all studies were cross-sectional and most of them lacked a control group. Hence, these results aren’t generalizable to all sexworkers and conclusions can’t be made about the stability of depressive symptoms or the causal connection between them and stigma.