From the turn of the new millennium academics have increasingly reported that students in higher education (HE) are engaged in sex work (Rosenbloom & Fetner, 2001; Sanders 2002). Academics have also warned against the lack of intentional institution protections, decrying salacious headlines exposing students and staff discovered to be working in the legal sex industry and the consequential public stigma and discrimination these headlines can entice (Cusick et al., 2009). While recognizing the contested nature of the term sex work (Watson, & Flanigan, 2020) the speaker adopts the generally accepted definition of sex work put forward by Weitzer (2010) whereby material compensation is exchanged for sexual services. When the speaker refers to ‘students’, she specifically refers to those students post 18 who are engaged in a post-secondary education at a HE institution. In 2015 Swansea University undertook the first large-scale study, The Student Sex Work Project (TSSWP), which collected data and demographic information on student participation in the sex industry in the United Kingdom (UK). The findings estimated that approximately 5% of students in HE in the UK were engaging in sex work with 22% having considered it (Sagar et al., 2015). The estimated prevalence rates were similar to the findings of an earlier smaller-scale study (Roberts et al., 2007), and a 2011 study in Germany with 4,386 students indicating that 1/3 of students may be involved in various types of sex work (Ernst et al., 2021). In 2022, the presenter partnered with the TSSWP’s principal investigator to evaluate the status of protections for students working in the sex industry, identify differences between United Kingdom (UK) and United States of America (USA) samples, and examine student support service providers’ perceptions of and readiness to work with these students (Lancaster & Sagar, 2025). Data were collected in 2023, at a time when the scholarly literature was, and remains, saturated with accounts of students expressing concerns that university staff may be neither prepared nor willing to support them. Contrary to these concerns, our findings revealed more varied perspectives among student support service providers and provided the foundation for developing an evidence-based higher education training (Lancaster et al., 2025). Our ongoing efforts to deliver the first USA-based training focused specifically on supporting student sex workers have also expanded to include an invitation for universities to use the training as a mechanism for informing institutional policy change (Lancaster et al. 2026).

In this presentation, the presenter will review the academic literature on students working in the sex industry, present findings from the first cross-national study examining student support service providers’ readiness to work with students in the sex industry, and discuss future aims for advancing institutional policy protections through a policy transference model.

Presented by Julia L. Lancaster, PhD, LPC, ACS

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