Walking the Tightrope: Ethical Dilemmas of Doing Fieldwork with Youth in US Sex Markets

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore how we traversed the “carnivalesque” atmosphere of underground sex markets. This term was claimed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) and depicts “unofficial” worlds, where, if you are not looking from the vantage point of a “world turned upside down,” you may see nebulous rules, loose social boundaries, and changeable hierarchies. We use this concept to examine how we approached ethical dilemmas in doing fieldwork with young sex workers and pimps. While we keep a foot in both “unofficial” and “official” worlds, we approach the dilemmas with the view of a “world turned upside down.” We critically explore the more relevant concept of exploitation, especially coercion, in light of the idea that sex-market-involved youth are inherently exploited due to age-related constrained agency, e.g., immaturity, naiveté, or traumatic upbringings (Dank 2011; Lloyd 2011). The themes of constrained agency manifested in unexpected ways, that is, in ways that were alternative to how some scholars and the public culturally and socially construct their lives. Further, we examine themes of constraint in the contexts of the sex market, the licit market, and the research sphere, which are worlds that can collide, but also hold important intersections. As researchers, we walk the moral/ethical line of doing fieldwork with young participants, and we also illustrate the balancing act involved in near missteps.

The findings are based on our fieldwork experiences in the Atlantic City, New Jersey, and New York City sex markets (2010–2013). We chose the initial concepts of constraint and constrained agency based on our fieldwork in Atlantic City and developed these using the more recent research on New York City sex markets. The study in Atlantic City was ethnographic and included interviews with more than 150 young sex workers (2010–2011). The first New York City study involved 85 in situ interviews with male pimps/traffickers in Harlem housing projects (2011–2012). The young pimps worked with similarly aged sex workers, often legally classifying them as traffickers. In the second New York City study, 19 female and 15 male-to-female transgender street sex workers, many of whom were under the age of 21, were interviewed extensively about their life experiences (2012–2013).