Abstract
No matter what type of sex work researchers study and the depth of their efforts to protect their research participants, sex work researchers operate in a politically and ideologically charged environment in which they must remain constantly attuned to the legal and public policy implications of their work. The passage of U.S. federal anti-trafficking legislation as well as its numerous international counterparts in the past decade has created a legislative and public policy environment that frequently conflates all forms of sex work with trafficking, broadly defined as the use of force, fraud, or coercion to induce one’s participation in sexual labor.
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Notes
- 1.
For more information on the critique of the dominant anti-trafficking discourse with ethnographic accounts of women’s lived experience around the globe, please see Zheng (2010).
- 2.
Sex work researchers such as O’Doherty (2011) have proven with their detailed, sound research that it is the criminalization that facilitates violence against sex workers and that sex work is not inherently violent and dangerous.
- 3.
Sanders (2006) discusses the predicament and indeed, the rejection, that she encountered seeking approval from the review board for her research proposal during her graduate school years.
- 4.
Shaver (2005) provides a long list of precaution techniques for sex work researchers to maintain their safety in different contexts, including street sex work and indoor sex work.
- 5.
Irwin (2006, p 171) notes that we all “do structure” when we conduct our research and when we write. She maintains that fieldwork relationships between researchers and research subjects can reinforce gender and other inequalities, just as “experimental texts and taboo topics can support and perpetuate larger practices that perpetuate historic inequalities.”
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Dewey, S., Zheng, T. (2013). Ethical Research in a Fraught Environment. In: Ethical Research with Sex Workers. SpringerBriefs in Anthropology(). Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6492-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6492-1_3
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