Sure- all research has bias. There’s no way to avoid it and I tend to think that it’s better to acknowledge the bias and the limits of the generalizability of a particular study. I suspect that on that point, at least, you & I would agree.

Assuming that this particular study is using an internet survey as the primary or only recruitment method, I think it’s pretty obvious that the folks who participate will be English speakers who have access to the internet. That’s a bias. And there are various ways that a researcher can deal with that. Depending on what analytic tools and methods she uses, she can work to minimize the effects of that bias on her analysis. When she’s writing up her results, she can make that bias explicit and make it clear that she’s not generalizing her results to a larger population. She can include information in her literature review that shows that there are different populations with different experiences and needs in order to help readers who are less familiar with issues around sexwork and sexual labor to understand that there are limits to this research.

All of those steps are essential parts of well-planned and -executed research. I don’t know the researcher personally, so I can’t say anything about whether she’ll do any of that. If you’re interested in contacting her, you can get her email address from the survey webpage and ask her yourself.

There’s a whole lot of range in the industry and actually, a lot of women across a broad portion of the spectrum have access to the internet these days. It’s not just the women making $5000 a night who have internet access- all you need to do is look at the folks posting on craiglist (which requires the ability to speak English and internet access) to see that. So while we agree that there is a limiting factor, I don’t think the limit is as tight as you seem to think. Whether women across that range are willing to take the time to participate, that’s an issue in all research with consenting participants.

If you look at the survey itself, though, you’ll see that the goal is “to examine the emotional support and mental health help seeking behaviors of female sex workers.” While that may sounds as if there’s an implicit bias in that, since not all people seek emotional or mental health support, if someone clicks on the “no, I don’t seek professional help”, there’s a series of questions about other strategies that one can use when dealing with emotional challenges. Given the many ways that being a sexworker can affect one’s mental and emotional well-being, I still think that having a better understanding of how people try to respond to them is a positive thing. Even if it’s not applicable to all sexworkers, even if it’s not relevant in all situations, it’s got to be better than what we have now, which is propaganda, misinformation, myth and prejudice.

I’ll fully acknowledge that I made a sweeping statement about who will benefit from the survey. Despite the fact that I try to do my best to avoid them, they still pop out sometimes.

1) The poll is skewed deeply because it is custom-tailored to the needs of the most privileged segment of those in prostitution. You seem to get this and acknowledge it.

2) I see absolutely no indication that this is about creating diverse approaches at all. Your call for responses and the survey itself present themselves as being about all people in prostitution and then successfully exclude those who are not in the very small, extremely privileged minority. I imagine that if the poll were about creating diverse approaches so as to provide better therapy to rich people with spare time (I’m deeply touched by your concern for this overlooked group btw) it would have mentioned anything at all about being for the benefit of “English-speaking internet-accessing sex workers.” Instead, it just pruports to be for the benefit of “sex workers,” by which I get the impression the researcher means all people in prostitution.

3) This research is deeply irresponsible and your posting it to your blog just increases the degree to which it is a total farce, as you enforce the targeting of the survey which appears to be claiming it isn’t targeted.

4) Telling me that other propaganda disguised as research has been done before does not make this any less egregious.

Further, I don’t think that therapists and other mental health professionals need to follow a model “centered around English-speaking clients with spare time and internet access who prefer to call themselves ’sex workers’.” I think that mental health professionals needs to have the skills and resources to work with their clients to support their growth and well-being. Different people in different situations will need different help around that.

Yes, there is a wide range in privilege around sexwork. Some folks are doing it out of relatively more choice and freedom and others are doing it because they are forced to, economically and physically. Given that there is a range of experiences, it follows that there will be a range of effective responses. Similarly, a therapist who is working with someone around issues of work will have different responses if the client is talking about a job that they’ve chosen relatively freely versus a job that they are forced into.

If you take a look at the survey questions, you’ll see that the researcher is trying to tease out what impact being a sexworker has on the therapy relationship and how it affects the outcome of therapy. One of the things that is fairly well-known is that if the client doesn’t feel free to share the details of their life with their therapist, the therapy will be less effective. That’s pretty consistent, whether the details that are being withheld are around sex, drugs, eating disorders, money, or anything else. For therapy to be effective, the clinician needs to be able to meet their clients wherever they are.

Diversity of experience means diversity of approach.

You’re going to get a lot of responses from the sort of ’sex workers’ who read your blog, skewing any information gathered in the direction of favoring the sort of ’sex worker’ who

1) knows what the term is and doesn’t find the term vaguely insulting, meaning that you’re only going to get the most politicized group of ’sex workers,’ which means that you’re going to get the ones who read a lot and have the spare time/energy with which to organize
2) agrees with your politics
3) speaks English
4) has internet access and the time to goof off on blogs

That is, it’s a great way to over-represent the most privileged segment of ’sex workers’ while gathering confirmation for the standard-fare ’sex-positive’ viewpoint, simultaneously rendering that confirmation meaningless because it came as part of an immensely flawed piece of pseudo-research.

And I’m downright horrified that what you seem to think psychiatrists need to do is learn to deal with clients in prostitution by following a model centered around English-speaking clients with spare time and internet access who prefer to call themselves ’sex workers’. It honestly comes off as deeply racist/classist.

If my psychiatrist had tried to address me with the platform points of the Desiree Alliance or some such, I wouldn’t have been able to switch psychiatrists because the state was paying, and I would absolutely have killed myself.