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.