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.
