Marketing

Demography

Engineering

Service (business)

Female sex

Service provider

Public relations

Sex workers

Economics

Business

Mechanical engineering

Political science

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)

Public economics

Work (physics)

Population

Family medicine

Internal medicine

Sociology

Medicine

Sex work

Research methodology

Social Policy and Society

Data on the sex industry is notably hard to obtain. Existing evidence points towards an increase in the number of people selling sex, particularly through the online industry. The growing and increasingly diverse population poses challenges to service provision, as new groups are less visible and less likely to be in contact with specialist services. Simultaneously, there are increased calls for policies regulating the sex industry to be grounded in evidence. Relying on systematic literature and data reviews, this article provides a synthesis of the evidence on the prevalence of sex work and prostitution in England and Wales. It shows that no existing source allows producing reliable estimates of the size and characteristics of sex markets. As a result, policy is informed by partial pictures. The article proposes local mapping, an underused approach, to inform both policy development and service provision.

Prostitution and Sex Work, Who Counts? Mapping Local Data to Inform Policy and Service Provision