ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses global and regional trends in research produced about sex work in an effort to shed light on the imbalances. Across global landscapes, activists and researchers have improved responses to Human Immuno-Deficiency Virus (HIV) prevention, bringing critical attention to the inherent harms of conflating sex work with sex trafficking. The HIV epidemic changed the course of sex work research and activism. UN agencies and sex worker rights networks collaborated on a series of guidelines and reports on sex work and HIV that culminated in the early 2010s in a series of reports that endorse a rights-based and community mobilisation approach to the epidemic. In the sex work literature, the majority of articles with authorship from Northern and Southern institutions is public health literature in which the first and last authors tend to be from a Northern based institution and the others local researchers.
