PhD Graduate Kat Kolar on Regulating Sex Work

May 28, 2018 by Jada Charles

Ph.D. graduate Kat Kolar, in collaboration with Professor Bill McCarthy, Professor Cecilia Benoit, and Professor Mikael Jansson, has published an article in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, entitled, "Regulating Sex Work: Heterogeneity in Legal Strategies." The article reviews the recent developments in legal strategy that regulate the selling and buying of sexual services.

Kat Kolar obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Toronto in 2018. Her dissertation is titled Differentiating the Drug Normalization Framework: A Mixed Methods Investigation of Substance Use among Undergraduate Students in Canada. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at UBC researching the social integration of substance use and health inequities impacting people who use illicit drugs.

I have posted the citation and abstract below. The full article is available here.

In this article, we examine various legal strategies used to regulate the sale and purchase of sexual services. We use three broad categories to structure our discussion: full criminalization, partial decriminalization, and full decriminalization. In each section, we discuss laws directed toward the control of sellers, buyers, and third parties. We focus on legislation and practices at the highest level of aggregation (i.e., the national, state, or provincial level), and due to limited data, we concentrate on high-income countries. We present a critical assessment of each legal approach and conclude with a call for future research on the consequences of different legal strategies for sellers, buyers, and third parties.