Academia’s “whorephobia” undermines research on sex work

Co-production and participatory research are increasingly recognised as a way of building equitable outcomes in research projects. However, as Carolina Are argues, since sex workers continue to be excluded from academic research on sex work due to whorephobia in the academy, there would be much to gain from integrating their lived experiences and expertise into academic research.

Sex workers are an over-researched and misrepresented category in academic studies. Stuck between research that advocates for their or their clients’ criminalisation and attempts at centring their perspectives that reveal their survival strategies, or approaches that ask them to perform free labour for academics, sex workers’ expertise is either ignored or exploited by the academy.

Different governments have attempted to criminalise sex work as a job, or sex workers’ clients. The latter, known as the Nordic or End Demand Model, is widely implemented by Sweden and other Northern European countries. End Demand models  persist, even though research and sex workers’ lived experiences show that criminalisation does not keep this category of workers safe. In fact, they risk pushing them further underground, especially when their choice to embark upon this profession is triggered by poverty, the main driver of sex work.

To address this, UCL-based PhD researcher Carmela Morgillo brought together sex workers, academics, and academics with lived experience of the sex industry, as part of a roundtable set to create a co-authored position statement and methodological guide. Our aim is to improve the academy’s representation and engagement with sex workers, because collaborative work can produce better informed, more useful and fairer research outcomes and perhaps even better policy. The paper comes hot on the heels of the European Sex Workers Alliance (ESWA)’s Gold Standard Guidelines for Safe and Ethical Sex Work Research in Europe and wider attempts to frame sex work research under the principle “nothing about us, without us”.

Countering whorephobia in academic spaces

Involving participants in study design may be seen as controversial by some researchers. However, it has been a staple of many fields for decades. As a digital criminologist researching online harms and censorship, I believe in treating participants as collaborators, and not as mere research subjects. One of my first papers on shadowbanning, a practice widely denied by social media companies at the time, would not have existed without the collaboration of sex workers. Their continued pioneering work in digital rights activism has greatly inspired me and helped me continue investigating under-researched content moderation techniques from an informed perspective.

Research is valued on its impact on the communities it observes and reaches, on its potential to change law, or raise awareness about key issues. At the same time, as Jessica Simpson describes, the academy is a whorephobic space: characterised by the “the hatred, disgust and fear of sex workers—that intersects with racism, xenophobia, classism and transphobia”.

By excluding sex workers from student and professional academic spaces research into sex work or topics of a sexual nature can effectively be blocked. Exclusion can in turn facilitate research that stigmatises sex workers and pushes for criminalisation. As one of the co-authors, Eccy, argued during our roundtable paper, whorephobia in education also pushes the idea that sex workers are just “not smart” or “not academic”, while in reality their work requires great communication, business and emotional skills.

Research for communities, not the academy

We want to challenge this status quo by centring the expertise of those ignored by the academy on these grounds. The sex workers and academics with lived experience in our roundtable paper agreed that researchers’ role is not strictly to produce knowledge – sex workers have knowledge that they use to survive, to earn a living, to network, to communicate, to organise. Our role as researchers should be akin to that of a translator and amplifier, identifying, as one of the co-authors, Maddie, says, “what research sex workers actually want” instead of building their own profiles out of research that seems untapped. Only this way can we have a meaningful impact on policy, challenging stigma without acting as saviours.

To do this, we make the following recommendations:

1. Opening up spaces: Too often, sex workers are not invited to consultations, roundtables, events with key stakeholders that may affect their future. Researchers’ first step should be to ensure they are invited and platformed, but if this is not possible, they should act as translators and amplifiers of their voices and needs.
    
2. Making positionality the standard: Disclosing one’s positionality is a key part of qualitative and ethnographic research. However, this is often required of research that centres sex workers and not of research that advocates for criminalisation. This double standard should end.
    
3. Interrogating why the research is being conducted: Well-meaning researchers or students can sometimes get involved with research about sex workers without considering that this can be extractive, that it could risk outing their survival strategies or otherwise harm them. As Alex suggested, it’s worth asking them, as supervisors or as reviewers: “Why are we conducting this study? Who gains from it? Who is being heard and who is not?”
    
4. Making participation worthwhile: A clear research aim that sets to benefit the community may go a long way to help sex workers accept to participate in a study. Still, taking part in research may mean taking time out of their day and working hours to speak to academics for many sex workers. The least we could do is offer payment for participation. When budgets do not allow this, it is worth offering advocacy support, directly asking sex workers about what change they hope to see in systems that affect them, to make their participation worthwhile rather than simply extractive.
    
5. Avoiding intrusive questions: Whorephobia in the academy has resulted in many of our co-authors being asked to disclose experiences in the industry to justify their line of research, resulting in heightened stigma for those who did. This excessive scrutiny is, once again, not applied to academics researching in other fields, and should be avoided. The validity of one’s research should be found in their methodologies and findings, and not in their personal lives. 
    
6. Be flexible: Co-authors mentioned that the nature of sex work means that workers may not be able to join a study in real time, during academic working hours. Finding alternative, asynchronours ways for them to participate as we did can ensure their perspectives are included.
    
7. Cite directly: When possible and when they consent to, citing sex workers directly either as co-authors or creators of specific ideas helps create a space where their knowledge is valued and credited in the academy, whether they themselves decide to continue pursuing a career as academics, or as good referencing practice.

Precisely because it’s important to hear from sex workers directly, I recommend reading our roundtable paper, where you can benefit from the expertise of our participants in their own words.

My thanks to the organiser and lead author of this project, Carmela Morgillo, and all co-authors of the paper: Dr AJ Bravo, Aoife Slater-Parry, Alex Bruno, Eccy, Dr Helen M. Rand, Dr Leander/Stiven Di Costa, Maddie Adore, our paper, A justice-oriented sex work studies roundtable towards research for the community, not the academy, is published open access in Porn Studies.

Text Carolina Are

Dr Carolina Are is a LSE100 Fellow in Interdisciplinary Social Science teaching a module on how to control artificial intelligence at the London School of Economics. A digital criminologist focusing on the intersection of online harms and freedom of speech, her work has an emphasis on digital rights in the observation of social media platform governance, AI, online abuse and conspiracy theories. It has been published in high-impact journals such as New Media & Society and Social Media + Society, Information, and it has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC and Wired.

Published on 27^th of July 2026 on the portal blogs.lse.ac.uk