Lack of Confidence in Police Creates a “Blue Ceiling” for Sex Workers' Safety

Abstract

Confidence in the police is fundamental to citizens' willingness to report unlawful behaviour, share intelligence about crime, seek help when victimized, and generally comply with the law. Marginalized groups overwhelmingly report a lack of confidence that police will apply the law fairly. Although sex work research reports a wide range of negative experiences with the police, it is not known how common these experiences are because most research focuses solely on street-based sex workers and does not include quantitative measures. We report on confidence in the police through the analysis of relevant data gathered from in-person interviews with sex workers from six census metropolitan areas of Canada. Under the pre-2014 legal regime, our non-random sample of sex workers had lower confidence in police than estimated for other Canadians by the General Social Survey and were particularly unlikely to see police as treating sex workers fairly. Thematic analysis suggests this is primarily driven by stigma and discrimination. We also found a significant minority who reported the police to be a source of aid, suggesting that appropriate policy and program regimes could be developed to improve sex worker–police relations.

“Well, It Should Be Changed for One, Because It’s Our Bodies”: Sex Workers’ Views on Canada’s Punitive Approach towards Sex Work

“…As reported in our previous analyses (Benoit et al 2016a;Benoit et al 2016b), sex workers in this sample reported higher unmet health care needs (40.4% vs. 14.9% with unmet needs) and have significantly lower levels of confidence in the police (63% vs. 15% report 'not very much' or 'no confidence at all' in the police) compared to other Canadians. This prior research noted that stigma, discrimination and criminalization all likely factored in to these poor outcomes for sex workers.…”

“…Nearly half of our participants had a well-thought-out view on prostitution legal reform and the vast majority favored change in the direction of decriminalization and regulation by utilizing Canada's existing occupational health and safety laws that regulate other service jobs. As hinted at above and discussed in detail elsewhere (Benoit et al 2016b), sex workers in our multi-city study had significantly lower confidence in police than other Canadians, and said that the police especially do a poor job treating sex workers fairly and being approachable and easy to for them to talk to. Decriminalization and regulation may not completely eliminate such prejudicial attitudes and unjust treatment of sex workers by police, but at least some of our participants suggested legal reform may reduce hesitancy by sex workers to involve the police if they witness or experience a crime (Abel et al 2009;Stoltz et al 2007;O'Doherty 2011;Abel et al 2010).…”

Associations between sex work laws and sex workers’ health: A systematic review and meta-analysis of quantitative and qualitative studies

“…In India, some brothel owners paid police to avoid raids, or allowed pre-selected sex workers to be arrested [99]. Police harassment, raids [35,110,120], undercover operations, entrapment, and pressure to act as informants [97,128] generated fear, anxiety, and stress, with media sometimes publicising sex workers’ faces during raids [120].…”

“…Studies showed that policing practices in contexts of criminalisation and regulation institutionalised violence against sex workers, both directly through police inflicting physical or sexual violence or demanding fines in lieu of arrest, and indirectly by restricting access to justice and thus creating an environment of impunity for perpetrators of violence [97,102,122,125,127–130].…”

“…Violence and abuses of power by police were reported across all genders and diverse political and economic contexts, including Cambodia, Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Serbia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uganda, the US, and Zimbabwe [49,97,99,104,106,111,112,118,119,122,125,127,128]. This took the form of arbitrary arrest and detention, verbal harassment, intimidation, humiliating and derogatory treatment, extortion, forcible displacement, physical violence, gang rape, and other forms of sexual violence during raids and in police custody [49,97,99,103,104,106,111,112,118,122,127,128].…”