Melissa Farley (born 1942) is an American clinical psychologist, researcher[1][2][3] and radical feminist anti-pornography and anti-prostitution activist.
These groups include the United Nations, the California Medical Examining Board, the US State Department, the Center for World Indigenous Studies, the Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition, Refuge House, Breaking Free, Veronica's Voice and the Cambodian Women's Crisis Center.
Farley has been a faculty member of the Center for World Indigenous Studies and has taught seminars on research for social change at the CWIS in Yelapa, Mexico.
Farley's research on the trafficking and prostitution of Indian women[6] is the source of a character, Vera in the acclaimed historical novel The Night Watchman.
She has written many studies reporting high rates of violence and post-traumatic stress disorder among women employed in the sex trade.
[3][8] In a 2004 paper summarizing prostitution research in nine countries (Canada, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, the US and Zambia), Farley and others interviewed 854 people (782 cisgender women and girls, 44 transgender people and 28 cisgender men[9]) currently active in prostitution or having recently left.
[11] Based on interviews and questionnaires, the paper's authors reported high rates of violence and post-traumatic stress: 71% of the respondents had been physically assaulted while in prostitution,[12] 63% had been raped,[12] and 68% met the criteria for PTSD.
"[12] In a 1998 paper on San Francisco street sex workers (one of the populations included in the nine-country study), Farley and co-author Howard Barkan reported a notable history of violence in the lives of those surveyed.
[20] Farley has written or co-written several studies sponsored by Kaiser Foundation Research Institute on the long-term health effects of sexual abuse and trauma.
The Rampage was a campaign involving the public destruction of bookstore-owned copies of Penthouse and Hustler which were denounced as violent pornography.
[45] In March 2007 she testified in hearings on Kink.com's purchase of the San Francisco Armory, comparing the company's images to those of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.
[48] On April 29, 2009 Farley argued on the radio program Intelligence Squared U.S. in favor of the proposition, "It is wrong to pay for sex".
[49] On June 11, 2003, Labour MP for Wairarapa Georgina Beyer read portions of a letter from Farley's research assistant Colleen Winn in New Zealand's House of Representatives.
Among Winn's accusations was that Farley's alleged statement that she had evidence that women were entering prostitution at age nine was untrue; the studies she performed did not collect any data indicating this.
[citation needed] In 2008, Farley published a critique of the Report of New Zealand Prostitution Law Review Committee on her website, leading to Dr. Calum Bennachie, PhD, also filing a formal complaint with the American Psychological Association (APA) to remove her from its membership.
[51] In the course of her critique, Farley had revealed information indicating that she may have breached ethical guidelines of both the APA as well as the New Zealand Psychological Society (NZPsS), and Dr. Bennachie also pointed out several examples of "errors of fact that appear to be deliberately designed to mislead people.
men who use prostitutes develop elaborate cognitive schemes to justify purchase and use of women" make her opinions less persuasive.
Accordingly, for these reasons, I assign less weight to Dr. Farley's evidence.Since that case in 2011, Farley, with co-authors from the William Mitchell College of Law, reported on the project of Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition and Prostitution Research and Education, Garden of Truth: the Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota.