If My Mouth Could Talk:

A study to explore sex workers’ experiences of oral health in Liverpool & other UK cities

This study uses a participatory approach that centres lived experience and collaborative knowledge production. The Liverpool study involved semi-structured interviews with 21 people with lived experience of sex work, recruited through community support services in Liverpool. Woven Ink were then invited into a collaborative illustration process where we created draft murals based on the interviews and then received feedback from the the sex workers on these sketches before creating the final artworks.

On Thursday 4 June 2026 we held an exhibition on the oral health needs of sex workers in Liverpool, welcoming over 100 guests to the event space at the University of Liverpool's School of Law and Social Justice. This included the launch of the study’s research website and a hard copy of a zine displaying artwork from our murals and the participants.

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Artist Isolde Godfrey

The study is led by Chief Investigator Dr Janine Yazdi-Doughty (Dentistry), with Co-Investigator Dr Gemma Ahearne (Criminology).

This is the first research of its kind globally, bringing together the disciplines of Dentistry and Criminology under a Public Health Criminology lens. There is a serious gap in the existing literature that our study seeks to address.

Access to oral health care is vital for violence reduction partnerships and must be a key priority for the VAWG agenda and all sex work strategies and services. Oral health stigma intersects with stigma around sex work, poverty, addiction and vulnerability. We want to challenge stigma against sex workers in both our research and our teaching.

We want to serve sex workers, and our study is reaching three cities so far (Liverpool, Manchester and London).

Images from exhibition on the oral health needs of sex workers in Liverpool, at the University of Liverpool's School of Law and Social Justice.