Online & Indoor Sex Work

This page provides links to research, both national and international, regarding sexual services sold online, including commercial content creators & in premises. To share research on this page please fill in the form on the 'Contact Us' page or email g.trueman@neswf.co.uk

Non-consensual sharing of images: Commercial content creators, sexual content creation platforms and the lack of protection

Teela Sanders, Gaynor Trueman, Kate Worthington, Rachel Keighley (2023)

In this article, the experiences of commercial content creators who have their content (videos, photos, and images) misused are explored. It describes how content creators experience blackmail, threats of exposure and recording without knowledge, stalking, harassment, doxing, ‘deepfakes’ and impersonation. It concludes that the online sex work environment may not be as safe as previous research has demonstrated, and that commercial content creators are often ignored by governance and platforms following sex workers’ complaints regarding their content being misused.

Access the article here

Working From Home: Analysing the Autonomy of App-Based Adult Content Creators

Jenna DePasquale (2020)

Accessibility to social media applications (“apps”) has paved the way for a new addition under the umbrella of sex work: adult content creation. By selling self-produced photos and videos through mainstream social media apps, creators experience a specific set of conditions unlike the forms of sex work that have proceeded it. Through 13 semi-structured interviews, the following question is investigated: What aspects of app-based sex work heighten or threaten workers’ senses of autonomy?

Access the article here

Beyond the Gaze and Well Beyond Wolfenden: The Practices and Rationalities of Regulating and Policing Sex Work in the Digital Age

Jane Scoular, Jane Pitcher, Teela Sanders, Rosie Campbell, and Stewart Cunningham (2019)

Drawing on the largest study of the United Kingdom online market in sexual labour to date, this article examines the legal and regulatory consequences as aspects of sex work increasingly take place within an online environment.

Access the article here.

Risking safety and rights: online sex work, crimes and ‘blended safety repertoires’

Rosie Campbell, Teela Sanders, Jane Scoular, Jane Pitcher, Stewart Cunningham (2018)

This paper reports the most comprehensive findings on the internet‐based sex market in the UK demonstrating types of crimes experienced by internet‐based sex workers and the strategies of risk management that sex workers adopt.

Access the article here.

Behind the screen: Commercial Sex, digital spaces and working online

Stuart Cunningham, Teela Sanders, Jane Scoular, Rosie Campbell Jane Pitcher, Kathleen Hill, Matt Valentine-Chase, Camille Melissa, Yigit Aydin, Rebecca Hamer (2018)

Using the largest datasets created in the UK/Europe, this article explores how sex workers use the internet and digital technologies to facilitate the range of different services that they offer. Access the article here.

The Lives and Needs of Women Working within the Online Sex Industry Across Teesside

Gaynor Trueman in conjunction with A Way Out (2019)

This report was conducted to better understand the needs of women working within the online sex industry across Teesside and to truly appreciate the choices and reality of their lived existence and their unwavering aim to gain parity within society.

off street needs assessment fv (3).pdf

Download PDF • 873KB

On Our Own Terms: The Working Conditions of Internet-Based Sex Workers in the UK

Teela Sanders, Laura Connelly and Laura Jarvis-King (2016)

The sex industry is increasingly operated through online technologies, whether this is selling services online through webcam or advertising, marketing or organising sex work through the Internet and digital technologies. Using data from a survey of 240 internet-based sex workers (members of the National Ugly Mug reporting scheme in the UK), the working conditions of this type of work is discussed here.

Access the article here.