Ethical Research With Sex Workers

This volume is the result of the many years the authors have spent conducting ethnographic field research with sex workers, conversing with other researchers, and, perhaps most importantly, developing a deep sense of empathy for the sex worker participants in the research as well as the colleagues who carry out this work with the goal of advancing social justice. They have a combined total of twenty-five years’ experience carrying out research with sex workers, and this extensive period of time has given them ample opportunity to reflect upon the topic of ethics. Sex work, defined as the exchange of sexual or sexualized intimacy for money or something of value, encompasses a wide range of legal and illegal behaviors that present researchers with key ethical challenges explored in the volume. These ethical challenges include: · Research methodology · Distinguishing research from activism · Navigating the politically and ideologically charged environments in which researchers must remain constantly attuned to the legal and public policy implications of their work · Possibilities for participatory sex work research processes · Strategies for incorporating participants in a variety of collaborative ways Sex work presents a unique set of challenges that are not always well understood by those working outside of anthropology and disciplines closely related to it. This book serves an important function by honestly and openly reviewing strategies for overcoming these ethical challenges with the end goal of producing path-breaking research that actively incorporates the perspectives of research participants on their own terms. Ever attuned to the reality that research on sex work remains a deeply political act, Ethical Research with Sex Workers: Anthropological Approaches aspires to begin a dialogue about the meanings and practices ascribed to ethics in a fraught environment. Drawing upon a review of published scholarly and activist work on the subject, as well as on interviews with researchers, social service providers, and sex workers themselves, this volume is an unprecedented contribution to the literature that will engage researchers across a variety of disciplines, such as academics and researchers in anthropology, sociology, criminal justice, and public health, as well as activists and policymakers.

This book presents a vivid description of the solutions that researchers have discovered for ethical dilemmas that pose themselves at studying disadvantaged, vulnerable and victimized populations. Ethical codes prescribe that the scholar should in all circumstances avoid potential harm, that informed consent is necessary and that the limits of confidentiality should always be respected. However, in the practice of research among women involved in prostitution, illegal immigrant workers, enslaved children, people who sell their organs and all the traffickers thereof, the ethical rules cannot always be followed. This book shows that there is a surprising variety of arguable possibilities in dealing with ethical dilemmas in the field. Authors reflect on concrete experiences from their own fieldwork in a wide variety of settings such as the USA, Singapore, Kosovo and The Netherlands. Some choose to work on the basis of conscientious partiality, others negotiate the rules with their informants and still others purposely break the rules in order to disclose and damage the exploiters. Researchers may find themselves in a vulnerable position. Their experiences, as presented in this volume, will help field workers, university administrators, representatives of vulnerable groups, philosophers of ethics and most of all students to go into the field well-prepared. This is a book that every researcher planning to do fieldwork in the difficult field of hidden, illicit and victimized people should read in advance. Dr. Frank Bovenkerk, Professor (Emeritus), Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands This book allows a peek in the kitchen of empirical fieldwork, going into not only “best practices,” but mistakes made, in a frank, courageous and honest way. Dr. Brenda C. Oude Breuil, Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands

The starting point for this book is the question of how we research sex for sale and the implications of the choices we make in terms of epistemology and ethics. Which dilemmas and ethical aspects need to be taken into account when producing qualitative data within a highly politicised and moral-infected realm? These two questions are exactly what Spanger and Skilbrei aim to unpack in this unusual interdisciplinary methodology book, Prostitution Research in Context. The book offers contributions from a number of scholars who, based on their reflections on their own research practice and the existing knowledge field, discuss ongoing methodological issues and challenges representative of international research on sex for sale. Some chapters deal explicitly with methodological dilemmas in research; others thematise the encounter between prostitution research and general texts on epistemology. Other chapters again actively engage with the ethical dilemmas that research on the topic of sex for sale can entail. The authors represent different disciplines, but share an interest in engaging in reflexive research practices informed by feminism and feminist epistemologies. An authoritative contribution to the field, this innovative volume will appeal to international scholars and students from across the social sciences and humanities in areas such as sociology, anthropology, criminology, media studies, feminist studies, human geography and history.

Sex work continues to provoke controversial legal and public policy debates world-wide that raise fundamental questions about the state’s role in protecting individual rights, status quo social relations, and public health. This book unites ethnographic research from China, Canada, and the United States to argue that criminalization results in a totalizing set of negative consequences for sex workers’ health, safety, and human rights. Such consequences are enabled through the operations of an exclusionary regime, a dense coalescence of punitive forces that involves both governance, in the form of the criminal justice system and other state agents, and dynamic interpersonal encounters in which individuals both enforce and negotiate stigma-related discrimination against sex workers. Chapter Two demonstrates how criminalization harms sex workers by isolating their work to potentially dangerous locations, fostering mistrust of authority figures, further limiting their abilities to find legal work and housing, and restricting possibilities for collective rights-based organizing. Criminalized sex workers report police harassment, seizure of condoms, and adversarial police-sex worker relations that enable others to abuse them with impunity. Chapter Three describes how sex workers negotiate these restrictions on their rights and personal autonomy via their arrest avoidance and client management strategies, self-treatment of health issues, selective mutual aid, rights-based organizing, and entrenchment in sex work or other criminalized activities. Chapter Four describes how researchers working in countries or locales that criminalize sex work face ethical concerns as well as barriers to their work at the practical, institutional, and political levels.

Unravelling Research is about the ethics and politics of knowledge production in the social sciences at a time when the academy is pressed to contend with the historical inequities associated with established research practices. Written by an impressive range of scholars whose work is shaped by their commitment to social justice, the chapters grapple with different methodologies, geographical locations and communities and cover a wide range of inquiry, including ethnography in Africa, archival research in South America and research with marginalized, racialized, poor, mad, homeless and Indigenous communities in Canada. Each chapter is written from the perspective of researchers who, due to their race, class, sexual/gender identity, ability and geographical location, labour at the margins of their disciplines. By using their own research projects as sites, contributors probe the ethicality of long-established and cutting-edge methodological frameworks to theorize the indivisible relationship between methodology, ethics and politics, elucidating key challenges and dilemmas confronting marginalized researchers and research subjects alike.

This book is a collection of fictionalised case studies of everyday ethical dilemmas and challenges, encountered in the process of conducting global health research in places where the effects of global, political and economic inequality are particularly evident. It is a training tool to fill the gap between research ethics guidelines, and their implementation 'on the ground'. The case studies, therefore, focus on 'relational' ethics: ethical actions and ideas that emerge through relations with others, rather than in regulations. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

The starting point for this book is the question of how we research sex for sale and the implications of the choices we make in terms of epistemology and ethics. Which dilemmas and ethical aspects need to be taken into account when producing qualitative data within a highly politicised and moral-infected realm? These two questions are exactly what Spanger and Skilbrei aim to unpack in this unusual interdisciplinary methodology book, Prostitution Research in Context. The book offers contributions from a number of scholars who, based on their reflections on their own research practice and the existing knowledge field, discuss ongoing methodological issues and challenges representative of international research on sex for sale. Some chapters deal explicitly with methodological dilemmas in research; others thematise the encounter between prostitution research and general texts on epistemology. Other chapters again actively engage with the ethical dilemmas that research on the topic of sex for sale can entail. The authors represent different disciplines, but share an interest in engaging in reflexive research practices informed by feminism and feminist epistemologies. An authoritative contribution to the field, this innovative volume will appeal to international scholars and students from across the social sciences and humanities in areas such as sociology, anthropology, criminology, media studies, feminist studies, human geography and history.

Prostitution is often referred to as "oldest profession." Critics of this expression redescribe it as "the oldest oppression." Debates about how best to understand and regulate prostitution are bound up with difficult moral, legal, and political questions. Indeed, it can be approached from numerous angles--is buying and selling sex fundamentally wrong? How can it possibly be regulated? How can sex workers be protected, if they are allowed to work at all? In this concise, for-and-against volume, ethicists Lori Watson and Jessica Flanigan engage with each other on the nature and consequences of sex work, revealing new and profound ways in which to understand it. The volume opens with a joint introduction, before Lori Watson first argues for a sex equality approach to prostitution in which buyers are criminalized and sellers are decriminalized, also known as the Nordic model. Watson defends the Nordic Model on the grounds that prostitution is an exploitative and unequal practice that only entrenches existing patterns of gendered injustice. Full decriminalization of prostitution only stymies existing occupational health and safety standards and securing worker autonomy and equality. Further, to Watson, drawing a distinction between sex trafficking and prostitution is irrelevant for public policy; what underpins them is demand, which fuels the inequalities of both. That is what needs to be addressed. In a rebuttal, Jessica Flanigan contends that sex work should be fully decriminalized because restrictions on the sale and purchase of sex violate the rights of sex workers and their clients. She argues that decriminalization is preferable to policies that could expose sex workers and their clients to criminal penalties, and leave them at the mercy of public officials. Putting these two views on sex work into conversation with one another, and opening up space for readers to weigh both approaches, the book provides a thorough, accessible exploration of the issues surrounding sex work, written with both sympathy and philosophical rigor.