Human Rights and Research Ethics: Methods for Sex Work Scholarship

• In Event: Up for Interpretation? Reflections on Methods, Concepts, and Policies

Abstract

Nothing about us, without us!” is a common rallying cry for the sex workers’ rights movement internationally. Historically, research on sex work has ignored sex workers’ perspectives, sometimes yielding unethical scholarship and practices that reinforce stigma and shape harmful policies. Often, this results in regulatory policies that reinforce stigmatized gendered ideologies of what sex work is (i.e., inherently exploitative) and who sex workers are (i.e., victims or criminals), even in locations where sex work is legal and regulated. As a result, sex workers have demanded more reflexive, inclusive and collaborative research practices that include perspectives and experiences from those within the sex working community.

In this paper I demonstrate the strength and utility of human rights based-research methodologies and research practices that are inclusive of sex workers’ experiences and testimonies, with a specific focus on the methodological principles central to Feminist Grounded Normative Theory such as open-ended interviews, rapid ethnography, participant observation, and participatory action research. Critical analysis of the data I collected through these methods provide substantial supportive evidence that active-listening, participant-centered and activist informed research is richly generative and essential in terms of analyzing and problematizing sex workers’ experiences of stigma. Overall, these modes of data collection afford the ability to not only uncover and better understand rights violations of sex workers that were previously rendered “invisible,” but also how to effectively and ethically respond in solidarity with those whose rights have been violated.

Author

• Erica MacDonald Laplante, University of Connecticut