Dr Melissa Farley

Luba Fein from FiLiA in conversation with Melissa Farley

Luba: Hello, I'm Luba Fein from FiLiA. Today, I have with me Dr Melissa Farley, a clinical psychologist and the most famous prostitution researcher globally. I have followed her work for nearly 30 years and know that her contribution to the body of knowledge in the sex trade is tremendous. 

Good afternoon, Dr Farley, thank you for joining us.

Melissa: Hi. I'm happy to be here. Thank you for your kind words. And please call me Melissa. 

Luba: Thank you very much. I will. I have so much to ask you actually. So let's start with an introduction to your life's work. When did you decide to dedicate your life to prostitution research? 

Melissa:  Well, I would say that many, many years ago, it became obvious to me as a psychologist that so many of women's mental health problems were a result of men's violence against them and all these different forms of abuse, incest, rape, battering. And in those days, long ago, I was not thinking about prostitution.  Like many people of my era, there was very little out there on prostitution and crucially, we didn't hear from survivors back in those days. 

And then one day after I was in the community where I lived, I was known as the psychologist who worked with women who had experienced violence and abuse at the hands of men, someone called me up on the phone and said - You know, there's this woman who is being kicked off the San Francisco task force on prostitution. And we're trying to get people to write a letter to support her and keep her from being ejected from this task force. 

And I remember saying at the time. Well, that doesn't sound right, but I have to tell you, I don't know much about prostitution. I don't know anything at all about it really. And the woman said, that's okay, just sign the letter.

So I signed the letter and Norma Hotaling, who was a survivor of prostitution, was getting her Master's in Public Health at the time. And she was fighting the trend in San Francisco, back in the early 1990s, she was fighting the trend all the way back in those days, which has existed for years and years and years in California, the trend to mainstream the sex trade, decriminalise it.

And she knew first-hand how bad it was. And. And she told me why she was being kicked off. This was a very heavily politicised group of politicians, sex work advocates from Coyote, and some of the politicians were known sex buyers to Norma and her friends, but Norma got on there and she was telling the truth about prostitution, including the extreme violence she'd suffered. I remember she talked about how her pimp at one point kicked her in the head with steel toed boots, which fractured her skull. 

They didn't want to hear things like that. They wanted to hear the same thing that the sex work groups talk about today. It's a nice job for women who aren't earning enough money. It can be all nice. If it's above ground and legal and et cetera, et cetera, all of those lies that are still told about prostitution decades later. 

So that's how I got into it. I jumped into it. Norma still got kicked off the task force. None of us made any difference because they had their political path charted.

She and I became friends and we got mad and we decided we'd do our own research. And she taught me a lot. I guess what I would point out that significant to me and my awareness of prostitution is that from the very, very beginning, I was working very closely with a survivor who was willing to share everything she knew about prostitution with me.

So from the very start I have collaborated with survivors and all of the work I've done and I could never have done it without that kind of a partnership.

Luba: So what year it was when you signed the letter? 

Melissa: Oh, I think it was about 1992. Around 1992 or three, because in about 1994, both Norma and I started our own organisations. She started a group called Sage, which was a survivor run exit program in San Francisco. And I started Prostitution Research and Education.

Luba:  So you have been researching prostitution for almost 30 years in a row that’s three decades. What is your motivation behind staying in this field for such a long time? 

Melissa: I guess mostly there's a lot of work left to be done. Cause you know, as well as I do, we have a lot of work to be done. We've made a few steps forward, but at the same time we're pushed back constantly. So we have a lot of work to do. And I think those of us who last in this very challenging field, we're kind of stubborn feminists and we keep our eye on the goal, which is very simply. I guess I would have to say I was inspired very early on by Andrea Dworkin who described the work of feminists as pulling one man at a time off of the back of yet another woman.

I think it's important for all of us to see that every little victory we have in making one woman's life a little safer, a little more secure, so she doesn't have to worry about next month housing or bill paying. That's a victory. And in the long run, of course what all of us at FiLiA and Prostitution Research and Education and many other groups are after is the abolition of the sex trade.

Luba: Did you have certain beliefs, perceptions, assumptions that they changed throughout this period?

Melissa: Well, yes, I got into work against pornography in the 1980s, and I did not see until later, I did not understand that pornography was pictures of prostitution. I, like so many people, well, let me just speak about myself. I didn't understand the woman in the porn as a victim of violence of the sex trade.

I didn't understand that until I started listening to testimony of women at the Minneapolis hearings on the Dworkin MacKinnon ordinance against pornography. And I started hearing from women who, very clearly, were saying they were in prostitution, it was filmed. It harmed them. And way back in those days, I just saw the harm to the society at large. I didn't look at the harm to the woman in the porn. 

Luba: This is amazing. I'm really surprised. So I feel more forgiven about myself. 

Melissa: I think we all have to forgive ourselves because, aren't we all just swamped with lies from the pornographers and the pimps and the sex trade advocates. They lie all the time about the nature of the sex trade. And when we first get into this work, it's really hard to find out what is the truth of women's experiences in all elements of the sex trade. 

Luba: Yeah. Now. Okay. Now I feel free to say that too, I didn't realise the importance of the sex purchase ban, and I know many activists including me, who have taken the time to start supporting the Nordic Model.

For our listeners, the Nordic Model is the ban on pimping and purchase of sex while supporting sex trade survivors. So in the nineties, many of the current abolitionists included me called the Nordic Model an extremist act. We changed our minds. Only by learning more and more about the sex trade and the sex buyers and the what about you?

I am aware of your attitude now, but what was your opinion about the sex purchase ban in the beginning of your research career? 

Melissa: Well, when I first heard about the 1999 Swedish law, where men would be held accountable for buying women for sexual use. That was the main thing I heard about it. Wow. Sweden is arresting sex buyers. Isn't that wonderful? 

Yes. I was very thrilled. I mean every Swedish person I knew was a hero in my mind and many still are I have to say.

 I'm working with some wonderful people in Stockholm right now at Toleda one of the exiting agencies in Sweden. So I think it's great that men are arrested for buying sex, but in the US where, by the way, Luba you're, you're located in Israel, is that correct or not?

I mean, in Israel. It is my impression. You have a better safety net for people, women who are in desperate economic circumstances, they have health care. For example, your whole country has vaccinated everyone for COVID. That doesn't happen in the US. Not at all. We don't have good healthcare. We don't take care of people who are homeless, we don't care take care of children who need breakfast in the morning when they come to school because their family or their single mom, isn't able to provide them with enough food. We don't have enough of a safety net.

 And when you don't have a safety net and you're taking away the urgent need for cash that let's say a woman has to pay her rent, or she has to buy enough food for her family. When you take away that 50 or a hundred dollars that she's getting from doing a blow job or an erotic massage prostitution, when you remove that from her, she doesn't have other options. And in some countries, Sweden, Israel, France, there's more of a safety net to protect women.

So I just think we have to look at the context in which the Nordic Model laws are implemented. Does that make sense? 

Luba: Absolutely. And this leads me to the disagreement that you and I have had several times. You agree that like now that the sex purchase ban should not be applied before offering massive support to victims of prostitution.

And I believe that we should promote the rehabilitation and exit services regardless of the ban, but also prohibit the purchase of sex regardless of rehabilitation. So I just like wanted to ask you, how do you explain this point of view? Because we both know that sex buyers are violent people, and then you publish the study that proved it from 2015.

So why cannot we call the sex buyers criminals until we have a wide range of aid organisations? How is it different from domestic violence? Even in domestic violence, women depend on violent men, but we do criminalise them?

Melissa: I'm caught in the middle. I have survivors, like Autumn Burris, in the United States, arguing with me that we absolutely can't arrest sex buyers unless we simultaneously provide services, I guess, that would be where I stand right now. I don't agree with you still that we should just arrest sex buyers, which by the way, most advocacy groups want to do that in the US.

They're pushing very hard to do that. I'm in a minority of sex trade abolitionists. I'm in a minority when I say no, we can't arrest them until your city comes up with enough services to keep her off the street if she doesn't have enough money to pay the rent.  you know, most people agree with you. They want to just go ahead and arrest sex buyers. 

But when I listened to survivors like Autumn or colleagues like Meg Baldwin, who just retired from running an agency in Florida for survivors seeking to exit.  They both say the same thing. We must provide services at least at the same time.

So I don't know. I mean, we just have to respectfully do it and you bring up a very good point. Luba. These are violent men. Yes. And they need to be held accountable and their behaviour needs to be stopped. I don't know the answer; I guess that's what I'm going to have to say. 

Luba:  Yes, I absolutely understand your point of view.

And you know that in Israel 10, 15 years ago, we had no chance to pass the sex purchase ban. So we invested in rehabilitation and in 2018 when the sex purchase ban bill has passed, we already had accelerated rehabilitation. So maybe my point of view is different. But when I think about the sex buyers, you know, the average sex buyer, he is not going to the brothel and asking them: who is the, the woman in need here? I want to support her - No they solicit young 16, 17, 18 years old, new girls. They want new girls that they're not necessarily needy but that's what the sex buyers want. I understand your point of view. 

Melissa: What I also hasten to say is that many people don't realise the incredible cruelty of the United States policies on social safety nets today.

This has been happening since Ronald Reagan, let homeowners remove all escalating taxes for their property in California, where I live and the school system went bad. The social safety nets and services for people in economic need went bad. And you know, what's happened in the last year about 25 people in the United States have made billions of dollars during the pandemic while workers on the front lines are struggling for their lives. 

The economic cruelty, the economic inequality with built in. Constant racism and sexism, it's, it's hard to believe, but it's so cruel that I think that's where some of us are coming from. 

Luba:  This leads me to my next question. The sex bars, violence and racism and sexism. So we cannot just ignore the recent mass murder in the prostitution era. I wanted to ask you what a social legal and cultural climate could facilitate such a horrible crime?

Melissa:  Well above all right now in the United States, there is a massive increase month by month of anti-Asian violence. And Asian women are especially targeted. Elderly Asian women are especially targeted. It's very horrible to look at.

 I just looked at a Twitter video yesterday of a woman in downtown San Francisco. She appeared to me to be a Chinese woman who had a huge bruise on her face. And someone had come up to her and punched her in the face. I would guess she was over 60 years old.

This is the kind of violence that's happening against Asian people and in particular Asian women. And as my colleagues at Vancouver rape relief and at the Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution, my colleagues, Alice Lee, and Suzanne J. 

Luba:  I know Alice, she visited me in Israel.

Melissa: It's a small family of feminists. Isn't it? It's and it's wonderful but yes, these women and some and many others have taught me a lot. And, and Alice and Suzanne and I are writing something as we speak an op ed that we're going to submit to some of the east coast newspapers about the fact that the Atlanta massage brothel murders are being framed as, and rightly so, as an Asian hate crime.

 But what we're trying to point out is that prostitution is a sexualised hate crime period. Prostitution is a sexualised hate crime and we need to call it that, define it as that. And in massage parlours, which is what they're called in the US and Mexico and Canada and in all of our neighbours that sandwich, the United States in all of these places, massage prostitution is where some of the Asian gangs in Atlanta and in every place else, Asian gangs from Korea, Vietnam, and China, they traffic women into massage parlours and they're called Asian massage parlours.

It's a fetishized, sexualised, stereotyped view of Asian women in and out of prostitution with all the most toxic racist stereotypes about Asian women you've ever heard, that are applied to all Asian women at this point in history. trying to The US press as we speak has not yet covered the racism in massage prostitution. They're not even talking about it. 

They're acting as if this is a hate crime against Asian women who are low wage workers in the city of Atlanta. And they're ignoring the fact that all three spas, that's what they're called. Health spas. Have you ever noticed pimps always come up with these camouflage names for the sex trade, everything from dating to sugar daddy, prostitution to massage parlours to strip clubs, you name it, they come up with.

Luba: I knew it, but I have heard you at the last conference. You helped me to make order in my head that various prostitution related phenomena disguised as this something normative. You're told that sugar daddy is dating and mail order brides are dating agencies and independent modelling. So, you know what? I asked myself, how can we fight this phenomenon under the Nordic Model?  Will the Nordic Model be enough for all those issues? 

Melissa: That's a really good question. I'm not a lawyer and certainly that's a question for the lawyers, but also, I mean, there's some hope, I think, because both in France and the United States, women who have been harmed by the production of pornography have started suing groups like pimps. I think they're pimps and pornographers, but there have been these lawsuits against pimps as traffickers, kidnappers, rapists, people who are committing very, very serious crimes in any country, including countries that have the Nordic Model like France, Israel, and Sweden. 

I just think we have to offer support to survivors. So they are able to go through the very stressful experience of suing organised criminals, which is what pornographers are.

Luba: Yes. So we should start expanding our legal protection. 

So I want to go back to you as a researcher. It is easy to understand that you are an abolitionist and you know why. You know that the sex buyer is abusive, the pimp is a criminal and the woman in prostitution is a victim.

So my question is as a researcher with such a solid stand.

 What happens to you if your findings contradict your beliefs? 

Melissa: Well, sometimes that happens and we try and understand it. For example, I could give you two examples where I thought we were going to find a certain thing and we didn't.

For example, I thought that when we interviewed a large sample of women and men and trans women, that is men who self-identify as women, and who look like women. I thought when we interviewed 854 people in prostitution who included those three groups, in nine countries, in very different cultures, I thought we'd find that the women were the most harmed.

That the women would have the highest rates of violence, the highest rate of emotional stress, like post-traumatic stress disorder. And in short that the women would be the worst hurt. And then the trans women, that is men who self-identify as women, they would be the next most hurt. And that men are protected, relatively speaking from violence, even in prostitution because they are men, not women. And we did not find that. 

What we found is that women and trans women, that is men who self-identify as women, had the same level of violence perpetrated against. And they had the same level of emotional stress and that those levels were very, very high and there wasn't a difference.

And I was confused about that and I remember calling up Andrea Dworkin because she was alive and very, very helpful in her consultations to me as a person learning everything they could about the sex trade and trying to do research that would help our movement. I said to her, what do you think of this? I don't get it. I didn't predict that. And I remember that what she said to me was this: well, I guess you could look at it this way. She said, if a man looks like a woman, acts like a woman dresses, like a woman, I guess he's going to get beaten up like a woman.

Way back in those days, this was early 90s or 95 or something like that. I've got the date written down someplace, but it was before we published the Nine Countries study because I was trying to write it up at the time.

 Back in those days, I thought, oh my goodness, that makes all the sense in the world. They're acting like women so they get treated like women. She didn't say they turned into women, which is what you hear today. But she had respect for the harm perpetrated against a group of human beings, which is men who self-identify as women in prostitution. So that was one example. 

And another example is we found in our early interviews, we found that women were not reporting to us that high rate of childhood sexual abuse. I didn't understand that either. We got a lower rate than many people do, other researchers. 

As a researcher, you just struggled to understand what are the factors that cause the results you're looking at. It's a matter of question and answer, question and answers. You know, that's all research really is, is figuring out the questions to ask, getting the answers. If the answers don't make sense, you ask more questions to try and understand it. And what I came to understand about why we got low rates and by low, it's still very high, but we got a rate of, I think it was around 60% of all of our interviewees told us they'd been sexually abused as kids, many other studies and many agencies offering services, report rates of 80 or 90% of everybody in the sex trade has been sexually abused before the age of 18. 

Luba:  Maybe they were focused on a population that were initially identified as a child sexual exploitation victims. 

Melissa: Yes. That's one way other people got different results. And also we were interviewing women who were in the middle of prostitution. We were interviewing them. And they were going to go back and turn a trick two hours later. I I've always wondered about this. They probably didn't want to revisit all of their childhood trauma when they're in the middle of a war zone, which is one way of looking at the sex trade. It's kind of a war zone.

I always thought that makes sense too. They just didn't want to deal with it until they were safe, which makes all the sense in the world.

Luba: Yes. I understand that. By the way, speaking on biases in your attitude, your opponents, you probably know it, I hope I'm sensitive enough, but you probably know that your opponents usually accuse you of lack of objectivity. Your former research assistant, Colleen Wynn from New Zealand said that you misrepresent your data, that your reports don't match the actual data collected and that you ignore the findings that don't match your opinion.

This is opposite of what you say now. So why did she say this? 

Melissa: Why did Colleen Wynn say that?

I went to New Zealand in 2003 and did a number of interviews of women in the sex trade in New Zealand. Many of them were in massage brothels, just like the Atlanta brothels. Many of them I interviewed on the street with several people helping out. It was mostly massage and straight prostitution in New Zealand and Colleen, someone who I don't know, which was my first mistake. Someone I don't know well said when I was looking for a research assistant said: Oh, you should talk to this person, Colleen Wynn and she'll help you out. So I hired her to help me out with interviews in one city in New Zealand and Colleen helped in one of the cities, Edmonton, that I did interviews in, I also did half of the interviews in Auckland with another research assistant.

I don't think Colleen realised that, but the most, and some of the quotes that were in the New Zealand press came from the Auckland interviews, not the interviews she helped out with an Edmonton. 

So unbeknownst to me, Colleen was an exited survivor, I thought, but during the course of my acquaintance with her, the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, a very powerful organisation that was pushing extremely hard for the pimp’s law to pass in New Zealand. They were aware that I was in the country. They were aware I was doing research. One of the things I did not know is that Colleen was also working for the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective. 

Luba: Sort of spy. 

Melissa: It was a spy. It was sabotage because to be fair to her, she couldn't decide what she was going to do. And, and I understand that. What am I to her? I'm going to leave and go back to the US in a week or two. And she has to deal with a very intimidating force of people. But one of the things that the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective did, was to call up as many of their members and say, don't talk to this researcher from the US, she's trouble don't talk to her.

And then she made these claims that I lied about data, which I'll tell you if there's one thing I don't lie about, it's the numbers and the data. Researchers, most of us, don't do that and I certainly don't do that. 

My whole credibility rests on the fact that what I report is honest data and it definitely was in New Zealand, but Colleen had a motivation to support the sex trade and she was under tremendous pressure and she did some very unethical things that required me to go to the New Zealand Parliament and rebut her claims on the parliamentary record, because she gave her report on me to Georgina Buyer a trans woman. That is to say, Georgina is a man who self-identifies as a woman. Colleen gave her report to Georgina Buyer who then used it as a way to try and debunk what we found in New Zealand, which is what we find in prostitution, every place in the world. 

It's very, very harmful. Women are hurt badly in it, their body and their psyche, and they want to get out and they don't know what the alternatives are. The New Zealand Prostitutes Collective did not want that data coming in. So they did everything they could to fight it. 

The New Zealand Prostitutes Collective male member even published a petition against me online that he got signed by a bunch of academic. This is what pimps do, they try to marginalise research, they try to marginalise analysis from sex trade survivors. They try and call us names like crank or marginalised or controversial, so that people question what we say. 

I would have to say part of the reason I've gone through the arduous process of publishing stuff in peer reviewed journals is because they can't attack it there because that's a very high standard of research credibility.

I'll tell you one story. One of my proudest moments is when some pro sex trade person called me up many years ago, she's a well-known pro sex trade women's studies type that everyone would know her name, but I'm not going to say it here, she called me up and said, what's your data on HIV among women in prostitution? And I said why are you calling me up? And she said to me, because everybody I work with lies about their data. 

Anyway, when you get in between pimps and their money, they're not very nice people. We're trying to take their money.

Luba: I wanted to ask something else about New Zealand. 

This country has finally passed the prostitution reform act in 2003.

 For our listeners, the prostitution reform act allowed opening licensed brothels under very loose supervision. And do you opposed the law but eventually the bill narrowly passed. 

Have your concerns about this law come true in a 2021?

Melissa: Yes. I mean, everything we hear from survivors like Sabrina Valisce who's been in the sex trade in New Zealand and writers like Renee Gerlach. Abolitionists writers are constantly giving us accounts of the fact that it did not change the harms of prostitution. Probably the biggest reason the New Zealand law was pushed and past was that the myth was promoted that legalised or decriminalised prostitution will be an improvement in safety and public health for everybody in the sex trade. Not at all true. 

The safety of the women in the indoor prostitution locations, like the massage brothels, which is the biggest organised part of the sex trade in New Zealand, other than the big multi building brothels that went up after the law was passed. 

There's not an increase in safety. The government's own report tells us that there's just as much coercion and violence on the part of pimps before and after the law was passed. It's made it more normalised. The pimps in New Zealand proudly say that it's a good job for women who don't have economic alternatives and they can easily get into prostitution. So I don't see it as really changing. 

Luba: And then what's about the Nordic Model countries like Sweden, Norway, Canada, France. Do they have any critic of this sex purchase ban implementation there as well? 

Melissa: Well, the sex trade advocates are constantly attacking The Nordic Model, especially in Sweden, because Sweden has been held up as the main and it, and rightly so Sweden deserves credit for being the first to implement that law.

But, you know, they can't contradict some of these major research studies that don't come from people like me, they come from economists like chill and Dreyer who did a 150 countries study of prostitution and found out any place prostitution is legalised or decriminalised, trafficking goes up, but guess what happens in Sweden? When you arrest sex buyers, as the Swedes have done trafficking decreases. So that Sweden now has one of, if not the, one of the lowest rates of trafficking in Europe. If everybody wants to stop trafficking, but they forget the trafficking is a hundred percent connected to all other forms of prostitution.

So if you want to stop trafficking, you have to stop sex purchase. The Swedes have been able to document the change in trafficking since that law was implemented. Is there room for improvement?  Of course. Is it challenging to switch a whole legal system from one approach to prostitution, to a totally new approach? Yes. It takes time and it takes political will and it takes the vigilance of feminists to make sure the implementation of the law happens. 

I'm sure you're aware in Israel passing a law is great and now you have to do the hard work of implementing it. And most of all in Sweden and every place else, I think we need more funding for services. That's what I hear from every place. They're not sufficient funds.

Luba: Yeah. This is the answer I was looking for. We always need more services because sometimes the harm is so horrible that you need the millions and millions and millions. 

I have another question for you as a researcher and activist.

We know that today there is a public struggle between supporters of two legal models. One is the Nordic Model and the other one is decriminalisation. Decriminalisation name means the decriminalisation of all parties involved in the sex trade, including pimps and sex buyers, and also licensing of brothels. Obviously we oppose it.

If we can find people from all nations backgrounds, professional and demographic groups on each side, and there is only one group, which is overwhelmingly supports decriminalisation, and that is transgender people. It is crucial to note that a transgender group has been negatively affected by the sex trade by the sex trade overwhelming, mainly negatively affected by the sex trade, the legal sex trade.

 In my country, which is Israel it is assumed that due to social and economic marginalisation, trans people are too dependent on the sex trade for survival. But that does not explain everything because we know that we can find the highly marginalised survivor groups who promote the Nordic Model.

We have sex trade survivors in South Africa, indigenous women in Canada, Maori women in New Zealand survivors in India, marginalized people. And they all support the Nordic Model. So why do we not have any group of trans survivors for the Nordic Model?

Melissa: Well, there are a couple, to be fair of individuals.  

I don't know any group of trans individuals that is men who self-identify as women, organised groups that oppose the sex trade. You probably know more about this than I do. I don't understand it.

I truly don't understand it. I guess the only way I can struggle to understand why an extremely marginalised group who in my opinion would completely benefit from a feminist understanding of the sex trade, which is whether it's men, trans women, women, or anyone else, the sex trade is where gender role visions of femininity and femaleness are viciously. brutally subordinated. Women are subordinated and anybody who appears like a woman is subordinated and treated horribly. 

Why wouldn't you want to get out of that situation? Trans women in prostitution, and I'm not talking about the models or the actors that are famous, I'm talking about most of the people I've known who define themselves as trans women, that is men who self-identify as women, most of those people see absolutely no place else in the world for themselves, except in the sex trade and what they, and when they reach out to the gay men's community, the gay men's community, I think is almost pushing a very sexist, imprisoning attitude on trans people, that is men who self-identify as women, in prostitution.

There's no reaching out to them to help them get out or to ask them, as I've asked them, what do you want and what do you need? their vision just like everybody else in prostitution, when you really sit down and say, what do you want for yourself? They don't want to be a ‘sex worker.’ I'm putting that in quotes. They don't want to be at a ‘sex worker’ for the next 20 years. They want what everybody else wants a secure home, a job where they're respected, a job where they're paid enough to live on and a loving, friendly relationship with somebody. That's what everybody wants. So we have more to learn about that don't we, I don't get. 

Luba: I can say, my political stand, that I think that no one deserves to be prostituted, but, we cannot speak for other communities. So I really hope that, trans leaders for equality will lead the abolitionist fight so maybe someday we can cooperate. It should be our common goal, I think.

Do you have some message to finish this interview?

Melissa:  Let me see. What's my message? I think we need a lot of feminist abolitionists in this struggle and we need more people in it. We need more research. We need more housing activists. We need more anti-racist activists. We need more lawyers. And of course from my position, we need more researchers. So I hope people decide to go into research in this field because it helps all of us. So thank you, Luba. Thank you so much for these great questions. I really appreciate it.