Surveillance, Punishment, and Exclusion: The Policing of Sex Workers in Europe

• In Event: Experiencing othering: Rethinking police relations with vulnerable groups

Abstract

Law enforcement strategies significantly influence sex workers’ lived realities and their access to existing structures of care. Under criminalisation and other repressive laws, policing practices tend to prioritize surveillance and punishment over safeguarding sex workers’ rights and safety. This dynamic creates a power imbalance between law enforcement and sex workers, rendering the latter vulnerable to exploitation and harm. This presentation examines whether policing strategies alleviate or exacerbate systemic injustices encountered by sex workers during interactions with police and as victims of crime. Building on a feminist participatory action research project conducted by the European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance alongside 13 sex worker-rights organisations, our analysis is based on 199 in-depth interviews with sex workers across 11 European countries.
This presentation scrutinises sex workers’ everyday encounters with police and their experiences when seeking protection, under four distinct legal models: criminalisation, partial criminalisation, the Swedish model, and regulation. It investigates how these encounters are shaped by various factors, including working arrangements, migration status, sexuality, and gender identity. Our findings reveal that punitive policing across all legal settings produces significant barriers to justice for sex workers. It also often creates dangerous environments that compromise sex workers’ safety and inclusion into police protection. This is particularly pronounced for multiply marginalised sex workers, as their intersecting identities amplify their exposure to abuses, including from police themselves.
In light of these findings, we advocate for transformative justice approaches that emphasise decriminalisation and the repeal of harmful laws, while addressing the systemic issues of police violence and discrimination. Our community and policy-oriented research highlights the critical need to reallocate resources from punitive policing to services that promote social justice, emphasizing the vital role of community-led initiatives and the contributions of sex workers’ rights organisations in effecting meaningful policy reform.

Authors

• Agata Dziuban, Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, European Sex Work Research Network (ESWORN)

• Irena Ferčíková Konečná, European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance (ESWA)