From 13 November 2018 to 29 January 2019, I embarked on some fieldwork for my doctoral thesis. The thesis aimed at exploring male sex workers’ experiences, attitudes, and perceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and victimization in their interactions with sex tourists in Botswana. At the time, male sex work had been flourishing under the booming sex tourism industry, and over the past decade, the tourism industry had been one of the fastest growing and largest economic sectors in Africa. Studies in other contexts confirm a strong correlation between growth in the tourism industry and an increase in sex work. While there are theoretically sound and empirically informed studies on the many forms of sex work, especially in Asia and other parts of the world, as well as studies focused on female sex work in the tourism industry, male sex work is still under-researched, and especially its occurrence in the tourism industry in Africa. This case study explores the research methodology, which utilized in-depth face-to-face semi-structured interviews with male sex workers, support groups, and the police as important players given the existence of sex work in a semi-criminalized and fuzzy legal system in Botswana. It focuses in particular on the difficulties of obtaining ethical clearance, and the strategies used during the fieldwork to ensure full protection of participants, and the impact that this can have on research findings.

Keywords:attitudes, Botswana, ethical considerations, population, protection, rapport, security, sex, sex work, support groups

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