Restricted Access to Online Sexuality Info: My First Funded Research Project

This year continues to be something of a banner year for me gaining legitimacy in the world. Remember when I went from being a sex worker, blogger, and porn director to being a professor and non-profit full time job haver? Yeah, that was pretty awesome.

The latest development in the Year of Legitimacy (it deserves to be capitalized) is this:

Sex Work Awareness has been named the United States country research partner for the Exploratory Research on Internet & Sexuality (EROTICS) research project, funded by the Association for Progressive Communications’ Women’s Networking Support Program (APC WNSP). Other research teams are from Brazil, Lebanon-Egypt, South Africa and India. SWA will evaluate the effects of content restriction on women’s ability to access information about sexuality using the Internet. We will use an online survey to give women the opportunity to tell us about their experiences using the Internet to get sex-related information.

The research team is being led by Melissa Ditmore, who among many many things was lead researcher on several reports for the Sex Workers Project and was the producer of the short film Taking the Pledge. She’s also a Sex Work Awareness board member, very awesome researcher, and editor of the annual journal Research for Sex Work. Kevicha Echols is the other researcher on the team – she’s working on her doctorate of education in the Widener program in human sexuality. I’m an advisor to the project and something of a community liaison, since this stuff is near and dear to my heart and communities. We’re all very invested in producing research that serves communities of people who use the internet for gaining access to sexuality information. So if there’s stuff out there that you think is being restricted and needs some light shed on it, please speak up and help us create a project that can improve the flow of online information.

At the moment we’re in a preliminary stage of researching, called “mapping” (in lay person’s terms: big fucking list with some descriptive notes). We’re working to identify what issues regarding women’s access to online sexuality information are most pressing in the United States right now. This will result in a 5-10 page paper that we need to produce and present to the other working groups – from there we will build out the research study design and decide on what exactly we’ll be focusing on.

Here is some of the stuff we’re considering:

• Craigslist, Julissa Brissman’s death and policy responses – and the wider context of adult/cruising/looking for paid and unpaid partners online
• Sexting scandals including effects on youth (literature, not interviews) and the concept of “child porn” and youth arrested for sexual activity becoming sex offenders who need to register and the ways this ruins their lives
• Access to sites about sexuality information in on public computer terminals – in libraries, universities, and public wifi spaces – this is particularly relevant to people who do not have their own computers and therefore use library or cafe computers and people who do this outside home (e.g. students, youth)
• Access to accurate information about birth control and abortion, and the possibility that Google bombing is being used to sway results of online searches for this information
• Information about health for transgender and transsexual people that goes beyond transitioning. (which is to say, yes: the study is trans-inclusive)
• Terms of Service agreements on social networking sites and their ill-defined restrictions on “adult” content, especially with regards to images of breast-feeding

So, community, what would you like to know more about, specifically in the United States? Have you heard rumors about access to sexual health information being restricted in some way and wished that someone would look into it? Please let me know here in comments of by email dacia [at] wakingvixen.com. We’ll add your suggestions to our list for the initial mapping exercise, and of course I’ll keep everyone updated on our process.