Risk, Resilience and Reward: Impacts of Shifting to Digital Sex Work

TL;DR

This study explores how the shift to online-only sex work during COVID-19 affected workers' conditions, risks, and rewards, highlighting increased financial and physical benefits alongside new digital and mental health risks.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into the impacts of digital transition on marginalized sex workers, offering design and governance recommendations for safer online work environments.

Findings

Online work improves financial and physical well-being.

Digital and mental health risks increase with online-only work.

Visibility and explicit content sharing are key risk factors.

Abstract

Workers from a variety of industries rapidly shifted to remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing work has examined the impact of this shift on office workers, little work has examined how shifting from in-person to online work affected workers in the informal labor sector. We examine the impact of shifting from in-person to online-only work on a particularly marginalized group of workers: sex workers. Through 34 qualitative interviews with sex workers from seven countries in the Global North, we examine how a shift to online-only sex work impacted: (1) working conditions, (2) risks and protective behaviors, and (3) labor rewards. We find that online work offers benefits to sex workers' financial and physical well-being. However, online-only work introduces new and greater digital and mental health risks as a result of the need to be publicly visible on more platforms and to share more explicit content. From our findings we propose design and platform governance suggestions for digital sex workers and for informal workers more broadly, particularly those who create and sell digital content.