A Social Work Intervention Study On The Bottomed Female Sex Workers’ Social Support System

With the development of society, the marginalized groups have attracted increasing attention. Sex workers, as a special marginalized group with distinctive features on aspects like social life, working conditions, health and sanitary conditions, psychological conditions and social resources, is now facing with numerous difficulties and social problems because of its illegal status.Sex workers, based on their working contents, can be sorted from high to low into mistresses, kept women, call girls, brothel workers, escorts, massage girls, hairdressing girls, streetwalkers, and lot lizards. As the group of sex workers has an internal layering structure, it is the level that determines different life and service conditions. In terms of social resources, sex workers at a lower level have far less advantages and access to resources than those at a higher level. In addition, the living conditions and working environment of the bottom is extremely simple. It is the same with the aspect of social support, in which the lower-level sex workers have less resources, simpler social network and interpersonal relationship, as well as more problems on interactions and social support.This research mainly investigated13female sex workers about their conditions of obtaining social support on four aspects like formal social support, quasi-formal social support, professional technical support, and informal interpersonal. Besides, it focused on the relationships among sex workers at lower levels, managers, communities, boss and staffs of social work agencies, and clients.The research further explored the reasons of the social supporting conditions of female social workers at lower levels-a lack of external social support due to social stigma and discrimination, few internal group connections, and low group cohesion. The research also discovered resources of social support that female sex workers at lower levels can take advantage of, carried out four experiments on improving their social support by connecting more supportive resources, and provided experience and references for related social work agencies.The13bottomed female sex workers investigated in this research mainly come from KTVs, hair salons, pedicure salons and streets. Therefore, the research is limited by a small sample size, leading to several defects and deficiencies which request for further improvement and endeavors in future researches. Moreover, many details and aspects of the group activities carried out among those interviewees need to be further improved and perfected.