Sex Work Awareness (SWA) 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. Other research teams are from Brazil, Lebanon-Egypt, South Africa, and India.

We are investigating the use of content filters on public library computers with Internet access. The priority research areas are access to information about sexuality and sexual reproductive health. We need help with this work, and request that people all over the United States visit their local public library and do some simple searches. In places with filters, the items that are filtered are not standard across systems. Filtering today cannot be fine-tuned to exclude only pornographic or violent content rather than health information. For example, in a large east coast city, only the word “anal” seemed to be filtered, which prevented people from gaining access to information about anal cancer as well as any potential sexual content.

Please visit infoandthelibrary.org for more information and our survey.