Regional Implications of Local Policy Change: Attempts to Govern Liminal Space

• In Event: When Other Governments Matter: Policymaking in Federal Systems

Abstract

This paper explores regional implications of local policy changes that try to create normative change, looking at the instance of prostitution policy. Specifically, the focus is on attempts made by police and other street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 2010) to govern the resulting liminal spaces between legal changes and normative perceptions in the affected area, and lived realities in the unaffected bordering areas. Based on findings from ethnographic research on the policing of prostitution in two different contexts,I argue that instead of changing attitudes of those most affected by normative policy changes, they largely displace the issue to unaffected bordering areas through changes in policing. When France adopted the normative abolitionist prostitution policy, criminalizing buyers only to “eradicate sexual exploitation of women” in spring 2016 which effectively increased the policing of prostitution, an influx of French sex workers (and potential clients) from the surrounding French areas (and beyond) into the canton of Geneva in Switzerland could be observed, as prostitution remained legal and therefore lucratice there. In San Francisco, where prostitution is illegal as in most of the US, a bill normatively promising safety for sex workers was adopted in late 2017, promising sex workers amnesty from arrest if they report violence to the police. However, simultaneously, policing of the red-light district was increased, leading to an exodus of street workers to Oakland in the East Bay where no amnesty bill exists. In both cases, policing strategies affected not only the geographical area they target, but also neighboring areas unaffected by the alleged normative change. While legal changes are restricted to a specific geographical space, people in such larger metropolitan areas are in flux which contradicts linking normative change to local policy change.

Author

• Mira Fey, University of California, Berkeley