Editorial introduction

Historically, researchers focusing on sex workers have viewed them and their work through a lens of deviancy and psychopathology (Koken, 2006; Pheterson, 1990). Researchers with no ties to the sex working community biasedly approached their studies by asking “What’s wrong with them?” and “What led them into this life?” both of which exposes the researchers’ assumptions about sex workers, their motivations to enter into the sex industry, and their experiences within it.

Additionally, researchers of the past have treated the population of sex workers as a homogenous group, not recognizing or acknowledging the diversity of the workers, their work, and their working conditions (Vanwesenbeeck, 2005). Can a study’s results involving street-based sex workers in Jakarta, Indonesia generalize to online-based sex workers in Monterey Bay, California in the United States? Probably not. Each segment of the sex work population has unique characteristics that make generalizing results challenging, if not impossible. Furthermore, it has been suggested that researchers studying sex work may not even be studying sex work, but some other shared characteristic among the studies’ samples (Pheterson, 1990).

More recently, sex work is becoming increasingly conflated with sex trafficking (Bernstein, 2007; Jackson, 2016; Saunders, 2005). This conflation is the result of ideologies believing all sex work is exploitative (for a review, see Weitzer, 2007), vague definitions of sex trafficking (Meshkovska, Siegel, Stutterheim, & Bos, 2015), and labor double standards placed on sex workers (Agustín, 2007). This conflation harms everyone in the sex industry including those working by force or fraud, and those working by choice or circumstance (Vanwesenbeeck, 2017).

Due to this history of sex work research, the purpose of this special issue is to allow sex workers to speak for themselves and to present their own research. All papers have at least one contributing author who is a current or former sex worker. The contributing authors were recruited from the sex work community (both inside and outside academia) and provided a simple prompt: “What do you want sex and relationship therapists and researchers to know about sex workers and sex work?” From personal narratives to empirical data to guidelines for therapists, the result of the aforementioned call for papers is this collection of articles examining the personal and professional lives of sex workers.

Even though this special issue centers the voices of sex workers, however, we still need to be cautious to not repeat the mistakes of the past by overgeneralizing the experiences of a few. Workers in the sex industry are an extremely diverse population, and a single issue in an academic journal will not be able to represent that diversity. What segments of the population saw the call for papers? Who among them had the ability and time to perform unpaid labor to write an academic manuscript and undergo the submission and revision process? These barriers undoubtedly limited the scope of representation.

Nevertheless, we, the editors believe this is a step in the right direction for sex work research. By having sex workers tell their own stories and conduct research on their own community, we begin to correct the errors of the past in our understanding of serving the needs of marginalized populations.