Virtual Methods

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Researching the Online Sex Work Community
Teela Sanders
This chapter reflects on an ethnography of the sex industry that utilized the
Internet to help in understanding the social organization of prostitution in Britain.
The aims of this chapter are threefold. First, using this study as a case example, I
illustrate the opportunities that the Internet presents for researchers who seek to
understand secretive, illicit social activities and access groups who are hard to
locate and engage. Second, I outline some of the ethical and methodological challenges
posed by recruiting from the Internet and the complexities of creating
online and offline relationships with informants. Third, in the context of the sensitive
topic of sex work, I demonstrate how research questions dictate the usefulness
of the Internet as a site for understanding the deep meaning of social interactions.
Therefore a combination of online and offline methods may be appropriate to
achieve levels of acceptance and rapport with respondents and consequently the
data necessary to write about other people’s behaviour.
Fieldwork, Sex Work and Computer-mediated Communication
I conducted a ten month ethnography of the social organization of the sex industry
in Britain (Sanders, 2004b), in which I observed indoor sex markets (licensed
saunas, brothels, escort agencies, working premises and women who worked from
home) as well as street prostitution. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with
fifty-five sex workers and I spoke with over two hundred women involved in the
sex industry, some of whom were owners, managers and receptionists. In order to
move away from the issues of child sexual exploitation, trafficking and pimping,
the sample was selected on the following criteria: women had to be aged 18 years
and over, hold British citizenship and describe their involvement in prostitution as
‘voluntary’.
The aim of the study was to understand the activity of selling sex for money as a
form of work and prostitution as a type of occupation. The hypothesis was that sex
workers would experience several other types of occupational hazards in addition to
the violence and sexual health issues already documented in the literature. By
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