Meeting the Moment: Conducting Meaningful, Community-Engaged Research with Sex Trafficking Survivors and Sex Workers Under Heightened Surveillance and Increased State Violence

Background and Purpose:

The current U.S. political administration has produced significant and compounding harms for people with lived experiences of sex trafficking and consensual sex work. People with lived experiences have been affected directly (through cuts to social services and the criminalization of people with active T-Visas) and indirectly (through broader policies such as ICE raids, anti-trans legislations, and the Dobbs decision). State violence has reshaped the landscape in which research is conducted, generating new risks and constraints for researchers, practitioners, and community members, particularly those occupying multiple roles. This roundtable examines how intensifying surveillance and political persecution are transforming community-engaged research and explores how to sustain ethical, meaningful inquiry that abides by trauma-informed and harm-reduction principles under increasingly oppressive conditions.

Content and Structure:

This session brings together researchers engaged in community engaged research projects with diverse funding mechanisms to reflect on the challenges and adaptations required in the current political landscape. Panelists will draw from ongoing work with criminalized and surveilled populations in the sex trades to share emerging strategies for sustaining research while prioritizing participant safety and community accountability.

Presenter 1 will draw on two-state funded community-led sex worker studies. Her contribution examines how harm reduction frameworks developed within undocumented, trans, HIV-positive, and street-connected movements can inform ethical data collection practices. She will highlight emergent approaches to privacy protection, data stewardship, and accountability in contexts of heightened surveillance and self-censorship, as well as the impacts of funding instability, anti-trans legislation, and increased immigration enforcement on both participants and research teams.

Presenter 2 will draw on multiple community partnerships with an anti-trafficking organization and a sex worker-led organization, detailing tensions with IRB compliance while ensuring equitable leadership and the sharing of community-owned data as fears heighten due to increased surveillance of sex workers, trans and undocumented individuals. Her contribution foregrounds concerns among community collaborators who distrust the university’s ability to ensure their protection amid broader conditions of statewide prosecution. She will also outline efforts to redistribute decision-making power in ways that align with university IRB requirements while respecting community co-researchers.

Presenter 3 will primarily draw from their federally funded grant, which partners with racialized, trans, and/or queer young adults who provide sexual acts for compensation under diverse circumstances to better understand their experiences of, and ultimately prevent, harm. She will describe the strengths and challenges of conducting federally funded research, and the related increased distrust among participants. Her contribution highlights their methodological adaptations designed to sustain participation among multiply-minoritized young people, resist overcompliance, and center participant safety in research design and implementation.

Discussion and Implications:

Taken together, these perspectives underscore how contemporary political conditions are central to the conduct of research with criminalized communities. This session will engage attendees in considering how to resist the expansion of surveillance and overcompliance within research practices. Presenters will offer strategies for sustaining harm-reduction oriented research that center the expertise of people with lived experience while maintaining commitments to care under increasingly constrained conditions.