HOW DO SOCIAL WORKERS WORK WITH PROSTITUTION? A case study on social work in the work with prostitution and perspectives on the sex purchase law from social workers. PERNILLA ELOFSSON MARIA AHLQVIST Elofsson, P. & Ahlqvist, M. How do social workers work with prostitution? A case study on social work in the work with prostitution and perspectives on the sex purchase law from social workers. A thesis in social work, 15 points. Malmö College of higher learning: Health and Society, The Unit of social work, 2009. Our purpose with this study is to examine how social workers describe the purpose and the ambition with social work targeting prostitution and how they see the opportunities to meet this ambition. We also want to examine what they think about the sex purchase law and the debate that have arisen around it in the recent years. Our issues are: What’s the goal and purpose of the work with prostitution and how are the social workers working to achieve it? How do social workers that work with prostitution reason about the sex purchase law and the debate about it that has been and is still going on? In order to answer our issues we have done qualitative interviews with social workers. One of them was a group interview with two social workers and the other was a case study with four social workers. The social workers in the group interview works with prostitution on the street. The social workers in the case study works with prostitution on the Internet and with the persons who buy sex. The interviews have focused on the social workers perspectives, thoughts and the reasoning about their work with prostitution and the sex purchase law. We’ve tried to create an understanding for what the sex purchase law has and the experiences from it have meant for their work. The theories we have used are social constructivism and queer theory. We’ve briefly come to the conclusion that it is clear what the social workers are supposed to do in their work with prostitution but not how there are supposed to do it. This creates an uncertainty in what direction they're working in. The social workers think that the debate about the sex purchase law isn’t leading anywhere and that the law has done both good and bad for the women that sell sex. They also think that the law is an attitude law that let’s the society know the difference between right and wrong but it creates categories of people, victim and offender.