Prostitution is an old crime, but one professor thinks technology has changed the way it’s communicated and perceived.

The Institute for Women’s Studies kicks off its Friday Speaker Series today, with a discussion on cyberprostitution – which she said she hopes to define more during the event.

“For a long time now, the noisy ‘feminist debate on prostitution’ has dominated thinking and discussion about prostitution,” said Brooke Campbell, a Franklin Fellow in the Institute of Women Studies.

“But there is a fundamental disconnect between what feminists are saying about prostitution and what prostitutes are saying about prostitution.”

Campbell chose the topic to create a “conceptual space” to get rid of “old, tired ethics” and create new ones.

“I think that cyberprostitution requires feminists to radically reconsider conventional paradigms of prostitution,” she said.

Courts create cyberprostitution as opposed to preventing it, Campbell said.

“I [may] talk about some of the ways in which the sex worker rights movement has managed to harness the new technologies encapsulated in cyberprostitution to the interests of social necessity, rather than capital accumulation,” she said.

A schedule of the Friday Speaker Series is available at www.uga.edu/iws.