openDemocracy: Sex workers need the police to do better, not more

Policing often harms sex workers. That’s not up for debate – copious academic research and sex worker-led advocacy and research demonstrate that. But we’re not actually sure why law enforcement behaves the way it does. Few researchers have seriously studied the motivations and justifications for police action when it comes to sex work, or asked what lies behind the police’s continued reliance on methods that hurt the people they claim to help.

How do police officers see their role in this area? What do they believe does or doesn’t work? For whom? How? Why? And how do officers’ self-perceptions stack up against the views of those who receive or witness such policing? These were among the key questions guiding our latest research project, the results of which we publish today.

Taking London as our area of interest, we interviewed 24 serving police officers and 18 key non-police stakeholders (including six from sex worker organisations). The topic was policing in relation to sex work and trafficking for sexual exploitation.

Our findings are bleak: the current system isn’t working for either the police or the policed, and the former and the latter certainly don’t agree with each other on what to do about it.

Central to the issues are the inherent contradictions in the different goals the police pursue. For example, the police could better protect sex workers against violent criminals if sex workers trusted them. But when they increase enforcement against sex workers in response to demands from ‘the community’, they erode sex workers’ trust. They can’t have it both ways.

To give another example, the police regularly visit brothels (defined in law by as little as two people working together for safety). Ostensibly they do this to check on the welfare of those selling sex, but they also gather intelligence while they’re at it. The ways this information is then used often renders workers less safe, not more. Again: it must be one or the other. Without extraordinary care it can hardly be both.

The fundamental incompatibility of policing goals in this domain means that the more the police pursue one aim, the less likely they are to succeed in others. Many external stakeholders and some police officers understood this. They highlighted the negative backfire effects of various police actions in their interviews. But while most officers we spoke to somewhat acknowledged contradictory outcomes, they did not seem to really appreciate the tensions they cause.

These officers seemed to have never considered how they might be undermining their own work with their actions. Few even seemed aware that in practice they were preferencing some goals or groups over others. As a result, they hadn’t contemplated the benefits that might come with changing tack, or even weighed up the different constellations of trade-offs on offer. For them, all their actions were defensible in isolation. They didn’t generally spend time wondering how they added up as a whole.

Being over-stretched, operating in silos, and constantly juggling competing demands might help explain why they tended to focus on individual actions and didn’t look at their responses from a broader systems perspective. In contrast, the team at the Metropolitan Police Service who commissioned this research had the foresight to try and pull together these disparate strands to enable a more holistic understanding of policing responses in this domain.

In this article, we focus on three particular problems. If police leadership – and those they answer to and take direction from – want to improve access to justice and reduce harms to people in the sex industry, they need to address these tensions head on.

Moving towards a more nuanced understanding of violence

Police participants evidently struggled to conceive of sex work as a legitimate choice, despite buying and selling sex being legal in England and Wales (though many of the associated activities are not). Paternalistic attitudes were common. Generally, they positioned themselves as there to catch the ‘baddies’ and/or save the ‘victims’, which roughly aligns with their role in law and the self-image within the police more generally.

Like external stakeholders, they were very concerned about violence from clients. It was notable, however, how preoccupied many police officers were with the idea of ‘controller’ figures hidden in the shadows – i.e. pimps or traffickers. But they rarely presented any particular evidence to support their belief that these characters were ubiquitous.

What we might be seeing here is the influence of well-documented moral panics around the supposed extent of extreme exploitation in the sex industry. The police would be far from the only ones to fall for these, but their responses need to be evidence-based and held to a higher standard. Another contributing factor could be the impact of occupational exposure to the some of the most extreme interpersonal harms around, leading officers simply to expect the worst.

The police had a blind spot around the harms that policing in the name of safeguarding can cause

Although police participants came across as genuinely worried about violence towards sex workers from vicious clients and ‘controllers’, they seemed oblivious to the fact that policing itself could be another major source of violence. There was a conspicuous absence of attention in their interviews to structural violence towards sex workers from policing as an institution, or to interpersonal violence from corrupt and abusive individual officers.

While deliberately covering up for colleagues behind the “blue wall of silence” is of course a possibility, we did not get the impression that was what was happening. The dynamics here could instead be explained in terms of limited direct exposure to other officers’ abuses and not taking seriously the ways in which policing business as usual harms those in the industry. Perhaps doing so would threaten their own self-image. Or perhaps this simply reflects a lack of introspection or interest.

On the one hand then, police participants had a narrow conceptualisation of violence as interpersonal rather than structural. On the other hand, they were generally quite positive – largely due to gains in resourcing – about treating sex work as a ‘Violence Against Women and Girls’ (VAWG) issue. For example, the Mayor’s Office on Police and Crime emphasised the need for a “consistent policing response to women involved in prostitution… for the whole of London” in their 2022-25 VAWG strategy document. Yet, this framing appeared also to enable police to approach sex work as fundamentally violent, something several external stakeholders strongly opposed as reductive, homogenising, and stripping workers of agency.

Reconciling tensions in police-led ‘safeguarding’

The people we spoke to fundamentally disagreed about what comprises safety and ‘safeguarding’.

Many police participants expressed a desire to help, and thus often saw police efforts around safeguarding as an inherently good thing. But they had a blind spot around the harms that policing in the name of safeguarding can cause. When we juxtapose police and external stakeholders’ accounts, it’s clear that many routine interventions ostensibly there to protect people selling sex are experienced and understood as making them less safe.

Ironically, one of the few common grounds between various police and non-police stakeholders was questioning how much the police should be involved in this sort of business-as-usual safeguarding (as opposed to intervention into very high-risk, high-harm situations, where few disputed a need for policing).

‘Welfare checks’ at sex working premises are a good example of the difficult dynamics around safeguarding. Police officers framed these as safeguarding (and also a good source of intelligence), but those from sex worker organisations and many from healthcare saw them as actively making people selling sex more vulnerable. Deliberately or not, such checks were seen to cause trauma, ‘out’ sex workers to their neighbours (making them even easier targets), disrupt support and safety mechanisms, further impoverish them, and provoke displacement to riskier working conditions.

The perceptual disconnect can be enormously wide. On the one hand, we had sex worker organisations telling us that the very idea of tasking the police with ‘welfare’ was “a bit of an oxymoron really”, so little did they trust law enforcement to keep them safe. On the other hand, we had a police officer tell us that stopping such checks would be “almost as if we don’t care”. Another said they saw “no downsides…I don’t see why we shouldn’t do it”.

Whether NGOs should accompany police on such checks was a related, and equally contentious, question. Police saw it as making ‘welfare checks’ more palatable for sex workers. But several external stakeholders saw these collaborations as a way of sugarcoating the intervention. Many said they would categorically not accompany the police as it would jeopardise the trust their organisations had spent so long to build.

Views also diverged when the conversations turned to migrant sex workers. Many police officers were convinced that some element of coercion and exploitation is present wherever migrant sex workers are involved, regardless of their own choices and expectations. Therefore, they saw police intervention in the name of anti-trafficking, even if it later led to immigration proceedings, as legitimate and as an example of good safeguarding for this population.

There also appear to be organisational pressures here, with a growing focus on trafficking and ‘modern slavery’ reportedly incentivising speculative interventions on the off-chance of uncovering serious organised crime. In contrast, many of those we spoke to from outside policing emphasised that migrants in the sex industry are among the most precarious, not least because of restrictions on access to other labour markets. They stressed that police intervention can be among the worst things that can happen for migrant workers, even if conditions are poor to start with.

We encountered much distrust around police “propaganda” about anti-trafficking operations, which was based in the disconnect between perceived spin and communities’ lived experiences of these interventions. People from sex worker organisations critiqued the way a focus on combatting trafficking was, in their eyes, cynically deployed to legitimise “a more violent and aggressive policing strategy”, in which migrant workers bore the brunt of harms.

These points echo longstanding concerns in the broader literature about the tensions and overlaps between anti-trafficking and migration control. But our interviews with police suggest the realities behind counterproductive action on the frontline level can be surprisingly mundane. National policing guidelines call for a “clear separation between immigration law enforcement and sex work law enforcement”. But many police we interviewed were not familiar with this guidance. Even if they did know it, as one officer explained it leaves much “open to interpretation … including Immigration”.

Police accounts varied, depending upon how nuanced their understanding was, as to whether and why they had, would, or wouldn’t conduct joint checks or raids with immigration enforcement or pass migrant workers’ details onto them. Many seemed to lack confidence and clarity on this issue. Yet, officers rarely explicitly recognised how involving immigration officers could harm people selling sex, deter reporting, and enable crimes against them.

Part of the problem here is that police are expected to enforce laws. Police-led safeguarding is a difficult and often conflicted task at the best of times, but particularly fraught where migrant sex workers are concerned: risks of criminalisation based on irregular or precarious migration status alone clearly pose formidable barriers to engagement.

Resolving this tension requires a reform of existing, migration-related offences or, at a minimum, a clear and explicit firewall to enable secure reporting for victims or witnesses of crime who hold an irregular migration status. Without that, any police activity is likely to pose a threat to migrants in the sex industry – including those who meet (vague) legal thresholds to be considered trafficked.

Indeed, non-police participants were in near unanimous agreement that migrant sex workers were terrified of police and so are particularly unlikely to engage with them. As one healthcare worker said:

Based on accounts we heard from both inside and outside policing, fears of detention and deportation are rational. In a sense it appears less important how often such things actually happen – participants’ views differ on this and there appears to be no reliable data – than that they could happen.

Recognising how the laws themselves are creating problems

One area on which there was broad agreement was around the lack of consistency in policing in relation to sex work. Both police and non-police participants emphasised stark discrepancies across individuals, teams and areas of London. Inconsistency and the associated unpredictability were seen by many outside policing as powerful deterrents of reporting victimisation.

Despite acknowledging inconsistencies in many aspects of policing, police participants generally suggested the level of service they gave to sex workers reporting crimes was good. In some respects that might be a function of self-selection biases; perhaps officers who chose to take part in this study were more sympathetically inclined to sex workers. Regardless, this perception was in sharp contrast to the more mixed and negative experiences raised by those outside policing.

Those from sex worker organisations tended to have an especially bleak view, which likely reflects an exposure to some of the worst excesses of policing, longstanding frustrations at having their experiences and needs sidelined, and operating in a context where criminalisation is an ever-present risk. They have a strong interest in challenging a harmful status quo. In any case, their accounts were consistent with prior research in London that highlights harms sex workers experience at the hands of police.

Police participants often pointed to a lack of clear strategy and ‘ownership’ of sex work within policing structures. And although some officers decried existing laws as being problematic and contradictory, the police by and large took the laws as given (the same went for laws around migration). After all, their job is to enforce existing laws – not just the ones they personally approve of.

Non-policing participants are bound by no such obligation. They were often heavily critical of the laws around sex work and intersecting areas (e.g. migration) as well as the police’s implementation of them. They routinely implicated expansive, outdated legal frameworks in fuelling fear, mistrust and harmful policing practices, and stressed the need for a whole different framework around sex work if we are to see substantial improvement.

The main focus of advocacy here, unsurprisingly, was for full decriminalisation (in keeping with the strong international evidence base). When asked about what would help improve policing, many non-policing participants were very explicit about the limits to reform within current systems, as highlighted by someone from a sex worker organisation below.

Looking to the future

Grappling with the tensions highlighted here isn’t easy, but it is important. Such problems also cannot be resolved by the police alone: broader systemic and legislative reforms are crucial.

Acknowledging this complexity doesn’t let the police off the hook. While legislative reform is not within their gift, they do have considerable discretion around enforcing existing laws. They could affect change now, under the existing paradigm, if they chose to do so. Much greater clarity, transparency, and accountability are needed from police management and those they answer to about what the police’s priorities actually are and, more importantly, what they should be and why. Confronting police violence and misconduct against sex workers is also vital.

Resolving the contradictions uncovered by our research would require honest accounting within a heavily sensationalised and politicised space, and drawing out a sensible roadmap for change. For example, if the top priority for sex work-related policing was enabling sex workers to report serious violence, then police activities that breed further fear and mistrust must stop or be severely restricted. Worryingly, the current direction of travel under the new Labour administration seems to be going further down the violence against women and girls route, towards conflating all sex work with ‘sexual exploitation’. This development is likely to exacerbate the harms policing already causes to people in the sex industry.

The fact that the Metropolitan Police Service commissioned our research was encouraging. It indicated a willingness to identify and confront problems. Unfortunately, the team driving that effort for internal change has been disbanded – and there appears to be little internal interest in resolving these problems. But burying heads in the sand will not make them go away.

Acknowledgments and disclaimer: We are very grateful to the Operation Evergreen team at the Metropolitan Police Service for commissioning and securing funding for this research, and all our interview participants and advisory group members for their time and input. The full report can be found here. All quotes used here are in line with the ethical approval for the study. The views presented here are those of the people quoted or the authors, not the Metropolitan Police Service at large. We would also like to thank Cameron Thibos at openDemocracy for his stellar edits.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/sex-workers-need-the-police-to-do-better-not-more/