200 Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan
populations who are making voluntary or involuntary life changes around
stigmatized identities or activities is to try to understand the full impact of
these transitions. What are the communities that people may (be asked to)
leave behind? How do these changes impact relationships with family, friends,
and partners? How are people received if and when they may seek to make
new contacts and to join new communities?
Changes to people’s self-image, both physical and internal, may also be
ongoing as people reframe their past. It is important to help people balance
a need to grieve over trauma and loss in the past while seeing themselves
as capable of a present and a future where they accept themselves as wor-
thy of respect and love. Since we know that prostitute women often draw
support from one another, fostering opportunities for women who graduate
from courts and treatment programs to meet and exchange advice and sup-
port should be a priority. As experts in their own experiences, creating paid
positions for peer counselors not only provides employment, but reframes a
stigmatized past as a wealth of experiences that recognize women as valuable
resources for one another.
Policy and programs must also be constructed and implemented with
an eye toward understanding the full range of unintended and intended con-
sequences. For example, if PDC participants are asked to stay away from the
“person, places, and things” that “trigger” them, what can the court do to
minimize the negative impact this might have on housing, or their ability to
see their children? Program design and training of staff can work to avoid or
mitigate these potential losses. Further, they can then help women cope with
those losses and subsequent needs for community when and if they do occur.
We can also learn from “unintended” consequences. If reframing that leads
women to feel further stigmatized is, in part, caused by our societal attitudes
toward prostitution, perhaps we should reexamine prostitution policy that
so adversely impacts vulnerable populations. If staying away from “people,
places, and things” means that women have no options for housing, perhaps
we should reexamine the policies that shape the availability of affordable
housing. In this way, some of the losses that women experience as they transi-
tion out of street-based sex work can serve to educate us in ways that allow
women to reframe their experiences not only as individual tragedies, but as a
vehicle to broader systems change.Summary Kudu
The main theme that emerges from the literature and the case studies about
losses encountered by young adults is that they are off time. Young adults do
not expect to suffer losses of health, such as breast cancer or infertility, nor
losses of spouses, partners, parents, children, colleagues, and friends. Young
adults do not receive adequate support from their peers who are usually inex-
perienced with such losses.