Of course that’s not meaningful. You already know that. That’s denying their experience. The fact that they can hold themselves together for 55 minutes doesn’t negate what they describe at the end.

All would be known and shown if time were but gone wrote Yeats. Until then we need to work with knowledge we have. Which means not denying prostituted women’s experiences, which have been quantified by peer-reviewed research.

If a hospital decided to treat infectious meningitis with placebo rather than antibiotics, we’d think they were insane. And yet one could make all kinds of intellectual arguments about mind and body and the placebo effect, etc. What is healing anyway? What is death? Why not embrace it, yada yada. The bottom line is that in a life and death situation we must work with the knowledge we have to help others. Even when the centuries gather at the horizon like strange storms.

I think your post does raise interesting questions: Why is there such a strong desire to deny the violence in prostitution? No one is saying that a million out of a million women in prostitution experienced rape and beatings but we know the majority have. So why deny it? What’s the motive? Who benefits from denial?

Certainly not the women in prostitution.

But those making money off those women definitely benefit from this denial don’t they? And the Johns benefit, because it lets them lie to themselves about what they’re doing.

“In truth we are each responsible to all for all, it’s only that men don’t know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once.”
(from the Brothers Karamazov)

“My point was just that I don’t see that you need to commit yourself to a problematic relativism to pursue that interest (*). For that matter, I don’t really see why you need to accept relativism in order to avoid attempts at arriving at moral bottom lines. I can see that such attempts would be most unhelpful and not very interesting!”

(*) Laura: [As you say: ‘My interest is in facilitating dialogue, not requiring that everyone involved agree but instead accept each other’s differences in order to find common ground.’].

- Lo mismo que esta persona parece estar diciéndote, creo que para posibilitar esa comunicación que tú -en tanto que investigadora- buscas entre l@s diferentes participantes en tus investigaciones no es necesario que tengas que adoptar ningún relativismo ético que esté basado un un cierto ‘relativismo metodológico’ de investigación que a tí como investigadora sí parece servirte.
A mi juicio, no es posible hace ciencia, ni antropológica ni sociológica, de una manera neutral. La ciencia siempre está orientada por valores morales del científico, querámoslo o no. Esto en sí mismo no considero que sea nada negativo.

Cierto es que con una ética universalista como puede ser la de I. Kant (1724-1808) no se llega demasiado lejos a la hora de plantear una investigación antropológica o sociológica, pero una ver reconocido esto, se puede perfectamente pensar y realizar una investigación sobre la prostitución partiendo de la idea de que pueden haber una serie de valores o principios “morales” más o menos compartidos por prácticamente cualquier otro ser humano nuestra época, y es a esto a lo que podemos llamar ética.

Trabajos que aborden y problematicen la ética kantiana, pero sin renegar del universalismo sí que existen y se pueden encontrar en forma de libros o de artículos científicos (“clásicos” y recientes). Te pongo uno de ellos como mero ejemplo:

Kant y Marx: un diálogo entre épocas/ Oskar Negt

I’m a sex work researcher myself (in the later stages of a PhD, looking at street sex work), and a big fan of your work. This is a really interesting piece, covering a few issues I’ve been grappling with quite a bit lately.

I agree with Hart’s idea of multiple interviews; I myself found that, on the second or third conversation, most sex workers I interviewed seemed a lot more relaxed, and a number of points/issues were clarified. It felt like they stopped trying to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear, and instead just started talking; they’d sussed me out, thought I was ok and worked out I wasn’t trying to ‘save’ them, but was just interested in what they had to say. The conversations in follow-up interviews where always more engaging, enlightening, and challenging, than in the first interview. This has now made me question every piece of research I’ve read that interviews sex workers; in particular, I now notice that those pieces of research that paint sex workers in two-dimension terms, as either sex victims to be saved or completely empowered individuals, are often based on one-off interviews with a mass of subjects. I’m starting to believe that the lack of follow-up or ethnographic research is perhaps helping to reinforce these two-dimensional caricatures. The contours and complexity of the lives of sex workers seems to be completely missed by this type of approach.

I think it’s worthwhile remembering that, ultimately, as the researcher, we are the ones in the position of power, and not only because many sex workers are operating illegally and are therefore vulnerable to coercion. We have the power to judge their words, and to use their stories for our own purposes. I think we therefore have a responsibility to not misrepresent or cherry-pick their stories; to, where possible, let their own words speak for themselves; to respect what they say, even when we personally don’t agree; and to assume that what they speak is the ‘truth’ (or, at the very least, ‘their truth’) unless we have a darn good reason to believe otherwise (I guess this is where instinct comes in). To do otherwise is, I think, unethical.

Of late, I’m becoming increasingly concerned with the ethics (or lack thereof) of ‘researchers’ (and I’m using the term very loosely here) of the anti-prostitution variety – particularly those of the radical feminist persuasion. Whilst I’ve long disagreed with the work of this band of researchers (I won’t name them here, but their names often feature on this blog!), in the past my disagreement has been primarily philosophical or methodological; I found their logic to be nonsensical, and their ‘research’ to be simplistic or sloppy, or betraying their obvious personal biases. However, I’m now beginning to view their research as unethical, as I don’t believe they accurately reflect the views and opinions of their research subjects, and involve significant cherry-picking and distortion. It is unethical to treat an interview subject in such a way.

Reflecting on my interview subjects, I could easily construct a radical feminist narrative of victimisation, if I were to base my work completely around certain aspects of my interviews; but to do so would mean I focus on the 5% of the interview that addresses or emphasizes victimhood, and ignores everything else about their life, and the wider context of the world we/they live in. To frame my analysis in such a way, to emphasise victimhood over everything else, would be, I think, unethical, as it ignores ‘their truth’ in favour of a ‘radical feminist truth’.

Anyway, a great piece Laura. It’s given me a few ideas to chew on over the Christmas break!

As you say: ‘My interest is in facilitating dialogue, not requiring that everyone involved agree but instead accept each other’s differences in order to find common ground.’

My point was just that I don’t see that you need to commit yourself to a problematic relativism to pursue that interest. For that matter, I don’t really see why you need to accept relativism in order to avoid attempts at arriving at moral bottom lines. I can see that such attempts would be most unhelpful and not very interesting!

Cultural relativism is certainly a guiding principle of my work and much anthropology. My understanding does not come from reading philosophy but from seeing how attempts to arrive at moral bottom lines stop conversations about prostitution and sex work. My interest is in facilitating dialogue, not requiring that everyone involved agree but instead accept each other’s differences in order to find common ground.

Interesting post. I have a couple of queries though. One was the assertion that it is usually the case that that research respondents have ‘not usually been given any choice about participating’. Is that really true? If so, then the institutional ethics review processes are not doing their job– which is to make sure that participants do have that choice.

Secondly. Why do we have to reject any notion of a universal ethics in order to hold that respondents are morally justified in withholding sensitive information or lying to researchers? I mean, sure, Kant wouldn’t approve, but we can accept that ethical considerations apply to everybody without agreeing with him. I would think there would be a good case for holding that this sort of withholding was justified (and therefore ethical) within any reasonable view of ethics.

A couple of points are often missed about moral relativism. One is that we can hold that ethical claims apply to everyone without thereby denying that other people and cultures have a different view on these issues then we do– ethical universalism need not entail cultural imperialism.

The logic of moral relativism is such that it makes dialogue impossible. If we accept that some activity is ‘okay for them’ it means we are unable to engage with ‘them’ in a way which allows that they might have insights which should change how we act. It also means that there is no way to fix ethical disputes through dialogue (if what is right is only relative to a culture there is no way for there to be a dialectical connect between what they think is right or wrong and what we do).