Digitally Mediated Narratives of Sexual Harassment : Perspectives from the Sex Work Industry

This monograph uses critical discourse analysis to examine warning posts shared within an online community of self-identified escorts in the UK.

This monograph uses critical discourse analysis to examine warning posts shared within an online community of self-identified escorts in the UK. Combining the discourse-historical approach with the narrative practice paradigm it examines how escorts position clients and themselves across three levels: as characters within stories, as members of a professional community, and in relation to broader societal discourses surrounding sex work. The monograph shows how escorts collectively name, categorise, and circulate knowledge about problematic client conduct from boundary violations and economic harm to verbal abuse and privacy violations, developing sophisticated community practices for managing occupational risk in the absence of formal institutional protection. It examines both stories that explicitly name harassment and those describing experiences that align with legal and scholarly understandings of sexually harassing conduct, identifying what the book terms the grey areas of sexual harassment in sex work: forms of conduct that constitute significant violations of dignity yet remain inadequately captured by existing frameworks. Moving between the specificity of individual linguistic choices and the broader structures of stigma, legal precarity, and gendered inequality within which escorts’ narratives are embedded, the monograph ultimately argues for a contextually grounded and community-informed understanding of workplace sexual harassment and contributes to broader conversations on gendered violence, labour precarity, and sex worker rights.