Evaluating the Usefulness of a Prostitution Diversion Project

Abstract

As social workers are increasingly collaborating with the criminal justice system through diversion programs to create and provide alternative approaches to working with legal offenders, practitioners and researchers must consider evaluating such projects. While there exist numerous prostitution diversion programs for both sex workers and clients of commercial sex workers, often referred to as ‘John Schools’, throughout the USA and Canada, there have been no published evaluations, until now, of any of the programs for commercial sex workers. This article presents the research methods and discussions concerning some of the study findings of a qualitative evaluation of Salt Lake City's Prostitution Diversion Project (PDP). This article explores the usefulness of the PDP by discussing the program's objectives, its strengths and limitations as perceived by the stakeholders. The author discusses how the various stakeholders perceived and experienced the PDP. Discussions in this article pay particular attention to the stakeholders’ experiences of working with and across significant theoretical and practical differences.