Female Sex Workers’ Perceptions of Front-line Police Officer’s Ability to Ensure Their Safety in St. John's, Newfoundland

The influence of stigma and discrimination on sex workers’ perceptions of safety is not well documented outside of Canada’s three largest provinces—Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec. This qualitative preliminary study examines sex workers’ perceptions of front-line police officer’s ability to ensure their safety. This research draws on four semi-structured in-depth interviews with female-identifying sex workers in X. Guided by an anti-oppressive social justice framework, our thematic analysis of the interviews identified three major findings. First, police and public stigma impacted sex workers’ ability to work safely, to interact with law enforcement, and to combat the interpersonal violence committed against them. Second, the need for alternative means of safety outside of police protection was expressed. Specifically, sex workers often depended on personal safety plans and the help and support of other sex workers to reduce their risk and exposure to violence. Third, existing provincial and federal legislation impacted sex workers’ ability to remain safe at work. Findings suggest the need for ongoing research to understand the challenges and barriers to sex workers’ safety, so that they can be addressed through evidence-informed, stigma reduction strategies

The animal voices of Edgar Allan Poe

There are prominent animal figures and graphic moments of animal imagery in several of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. These animals are at the heart of the action; they are often main characters. Poe’s animals have voices and these voices challenge the dominant monologue of the narrators and undermine the prevalent ideologies that the stories enact. Poe’s animals shriek, wail, and scream and their voices enable political critiques of some of the central issues at the heart of antebellum America. Without these animals, the marginalized voices could not be heard. The animal denizens in Poe’s stories speak: the cat of “The Black Cat” screams, interrupting and condemning a patriarchal narrator and the orangutan of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” shrieks, shaves, and murders like a human, challenging the dehumanization of slaves in America. Animal imagery also speaks in the final two stories, but not in the same way; animalizing another being capitalizes on a hierarchy of classifications. By categorizing their oppressors as animals, the patients of “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” open up a discourse with the narrator in a place where the psychology of madness would silence the voices of the insane and the jester of “Hop-Frog” subverts the monarchical dominance that would oppress the court fool. Poe’s fictional animals reveal how the categories used to construct American ideologies could marginalize, abuse, and exploit different beings. These animal voices force these categories into crisis, destabilizing the definition of the human and problematizing the treatment of a variety of subhuman beings. Poe is not an animal rights advocate, but his animal figures are able to show us the problems and power of the categorical systems we use to structure our lives