Abstract
This article examines challenges and barriers seemingly endemic to the research ethics review process. We argue that these challenges and barriers disempower community stakeholders in sex work research and that they put our studies and those who consent to participate in them at risk. To advance this position, we interrogate three of our own encounters with research ethics boards (REBs) in the context of current scholarship on meaningful collaborative research and REB roles and responsibilities in relation to sex work and other sensitive research. As these encounters illustrate, there is an urgent need for established REB processes to be opened up to allow for and respect non-academic expertise. We suggest that such policy and process revisions are particularly important given the growing requirement for meaningful stakeholder involvement in all aspects of studies that engage marginalized groups. In this new anti-oppressive collaborative framework, stakeholder community expertise thus informs study development and design, as well as the collection and analysis of data, and decisions regarding where and how study findings are to be shared. Research ethics review processes must be revised accordingly to acknowledge and give due consideration to community-based expertise. We conclude by proposing institutional and community-based strategies for resisting and revising current research ethics review structures and processes. Applying the lens of whore stigma to select REB encounters, this article contributes to existing research about ethical and anti-oppressive sex work research methods and methodologies, arguing that we must account for REB encounters in the growing body of theory that seeks to understand and articulate how best to conduct sex work research in partnership with sex workers.
Highlights
A growing body of research and associated policies advocates meaningful involvement of stakeholder communities in the design, development, and administration of the research that affects them
Drawing from three examples of encounters with different Research Ethics Boards (REBs) at Canadian research universities in the course of two multi-part, multi-year sex work research projects, we examine how REB failure to respect or account for community researcher knowledge and expertise—in these examples a failure refracted through whore stigma and myths about sex work/ers—threatened the stability and hard-won cohesiveness of our research teams, advocated more risky, less ethical protocols than the ones recommended by our community partners, and put our studies themselves at risk of failure
We argue that research review processes must be brought into alignment with both TCPS2 (2018) and established international anti-oppressive collaborative research methods and methodologies
Summary
A growing body of research and associated policies advocates meaningful involvement of stakeholder (and marginalized) communities in the design, development, and administration of the research that affects them. In our first response to this REB, we noted academic members of our research team had not been required to insert such direct and detailed language about duties to report into protocols or consent forms for studies we had done with non-sex working populations.
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