**Preface to "Understanding Exploitation in Consensual Sex Work to Inform Occupational Health & Safety Regulation"**

The impetus behind this Special Issue emerged from a quest to move beyond binary thinking in the contemporary period about people who sell sexual services, including recent disputes about "sex trafficking v s. p rostitution" a nd " criminalization v s. d ecriminalization", t o encourage theoretical and empirical scholarship by exploring how sex work actually operates under different regulatory regimes. The volume includes contributions from scholars of different social sciences backgrounds based in five countries—New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Brazil, the United States and Canada. The article topics range widely, and both quantitative and qualitative research methods are showcased. The empirical evidence presented adds to our current understanding of the complexity of this phenomenon of sex commerce/prostitution, which is found to be largely a problem of social inequality within and across capitalist societies. The authors call for policies to address occupational and societal wide inequities faced by sex workers across many countries.

> **Cecilia M. Benoit** *Editor*
