Kathleen Barry

Kathleen Barry (born January 22, 1941) is an American sociologist and feminist. After researching and publishing books on international human sex trafficking, she cofounded the United Nations NGO, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). In 1985 she received the Wonder Woman Foundation Award for her strides towards the empowerment of women. She has taught at Brandeis University and Penn State University.

Barry's first book, Female Sexual Slavery (1979), prompted international awareness of human sex traffickingand has been translated into six languages. Her follow-up to Female Sexual Slavery, The Prostitution of Sexuality (1995) makes an important contribution to political philosophy and feminist theory by discussing the idea of "consent" in liberal modern American discourse and concluding that "every form of oppression is sustained" through apparent consent by the oppressed group or class to their exploitation. She further concludes that the normalization and acceptance of prostitution based on arguments of prostitutes' consent ignores the human-rights principle that violation cannot be consented to. She states that women, as members of an oppressed class under patriarchy, are compelled to "consent" to their own sexual exploitation by society, much in the way a Marxist would say workers are compelled to cooperate with their oppressors, the capitalists.

Barry has two Ph.Ds from the University of California, Berkeley, one in sociology and one in education.