During the course of my interviews, I did not instigate any discussion over sex workers. However, ten participants introduced the topic themselves. When sex workers were mentioned, it was often in the context that they are particularly at risk of being victimised while soliciting for business. Furthermore, concern was raised over how a victim’s credibility can be damaged by the fact they are a sex worker. The topic of sex workers as rape victims illuminates the covert and overt systemic prejudice centred on the credibility of victims in the most striking way (see section 5.3.1 on victim credibility and systemic prejudice), as the following quotes demonstrate:
I’ve never known a case where the offender’s place in society makes any difference, except where the female is a prostitute and is raped. Through one set of eyes, it’s a rape, through another it’s a failure to pay. Which is not fair as no one should be judged on what they do, but they are. I can hear the defence barrister saying my client is a respectable figure in the community (Male officer 13, inspector, Police Force 2). We had a rape of a prostitute in (Police Force 1). We recover the condom, I lied to our forensic people because if we admitted she was a prostitute we had nothing to go on. We portrayed it as a stranger rape, we missed the prostitute bit out because (Police Force 1) it costs them a lot for a 24 hour turn around on DNA, they wouldn’t authorise it for a prostitute. So we omitted it, I don’t care if she’s a prostitute, she’s been raped. I got a call at 3am saying we have a hit. We went and arrested him, he didn’t want a solicitor, we interview, hadn’t disclosed his DNA had come back on the condom. We built a profile on him, where he had been, we discovered his vehicle that she described. He said he hates prostitutes and thinks people who sleep with them are disgusting. Then we say how come your DNA is on the inside of this condom. He then gets a solicitor and then no comments, we rang CPS, they said bail him, so went to his solicitor and said we will bail him, the solicitor says ‘What?’ This man has just raped a woman at knife point, he thought the CPS were mad. We bail him and put the file to CPS, they wouldn’t run it (NFA). Yes, she was a heroin addict with a previous for shoplifting which was dishonesty (Male officer 20, detective sergeant, SOIT, Police Force 1).
There was evident exasperation from my participants who felt they could not progress sex worker cases any further although they were confident in the guilt
of the perpetrator. There is a level of frustration present at the barrier to progressing sex worker cases because of the perceived lack of credibility their account holds. It appears that sex worker cases starts at the assumption that they would not appear credible to a jury. The participant in the quote above was led to not being completely transparent in conducting the investigation. This was driven by a desire to try to secure justice for a sex worker and avoid attrition of the case. A unique issue relating to sex workers who are victimised occurs when sex happens on the basis a payment will be made to the sex worker; when payment is withheld, some sex workers will make a complaint of rape, as this participant recalled:
In (larger city where the participant use to work before transferring to Police Force 2) where I worked for 6 years, we policed a red light area, where we had prostitutes standing on street corners. We used to get an awful lot of rape allegations made where clients didn’t pay. So we were used to dealing with that stranger rape mentality. Whereas, here (Police Force 2) it’s very, very rare, it would cause a significant policing response (a major crime team to investigate with large amounts of resources available). The prostitute ones rarely ended in a prosecution, despite there always being supporting evidence as the place was riddled with CCTV. We knew who these individuals were (Male officer 12, Inspector, STO, Police Force 2).
Rape for non-payment was seen by officers as wrong, as this was more of a civil debt for an unpaid service. Rape against sex workers was portrayed as the most difficult case to achieve a prosecution and conviction for because of social stigma against sex workers and the assumptions made on the low credibility of sex workers. It was as though achieving a prosecution when a victim was a sex worker was something police officers felt was a rare achievement, such as:
We have successfully prosecuted cases where prostitutes have been raped by punters. They purposefully go out and have sex for money, but sometimes the punters have raped them and there have been successful prosecutions (Male officer 4, detective chief inspector, Police Force 1).
Although my participants did not display in the interview negative or prejudicial views on sex workers, the assumptions around and importance of the victim’s credibility pose a difficult challenge to gaining a conviction for such cases. The
police and CPS make legally rational decisions over a victim’s credibility and sex workers are not well rated in these criteria. This could be a very damaging assumption to make, as it leaves sex workers disproportionately at risk of case attrition and rape with serious implications for justice and the rapist re- offending. Here, police officers are reluctantly complicit in systemic prejudice centred on the victim’s credibility. They are not satisfied with judgments and actions they take, and the CPS go on to take, in regards to sex worker cases, but because of the adversarial nature of the criminal justice system there is little they can do. Research conducted in the south of England reviewed police rape case files over a twenty-one year period where sex workers and non-sex workers were the complainants (Lea et al., 2016). They describe the outcomes for cases involving a sex worker: A quarter was recorded as no further action by the police and a further quarter by the CPS. Interestingly, the cases that got to trial were largely successful. Therefore, juries will deliver guilty verdicts more times than not when a sex worker is a victim. This throws doubt on the working assumption and prejudice against sex workers the criminal justice system operates to. When the same study compared a sample of sex worker cases with similar case circumstances with non-sex workers, it was found that attrition was high for both, with the highest level of attrition at the police stage. Strikingly, it was found that the cases with a sex worker were more likely to end in a conviction (Lea et al., 2016). This is directly at odds with the assumption that the status of the victim will prevent the likelihood of a conviction. The decisions made by the police and CPS may, therefore, not be based on an accurate reading of juries’ deliberations. This means that perceived credibility of the victim is not always the most prominent factor to consider.
Numerous reasons were posited by Lea et al. (2016) to explain the fact that sex workers were more likely to secure justice. The sex worker cases were more likely to resemble a real rape scenario which is largely accepted to increase the chances of a conviction (a stranger rape, in a public place, with the use or threat of violence). The majority of sex workers had consumed drugs or alcohol prior to the offence compared to a minority of non-sex workers. This also seems at odds with previous research that documents how intoxication greatly reduces the victim’s credibility (see section 5.3.1). It would appear that rape myths prevail when influencing case outcomes above the credibility of the
victim. Alternatively, juries may not judge women in the way they are presumed to do, or maybe defendants are perceived as guilty on some occasions. Further research is needed into understanding the patterns identified here. Nonetheless, there are still low levels of reporting of rape by sex workers, so it could be that offences that mirror a real rape scenario are the ones sex workers feel more able to report. Lea et al. (2016) conclude that police officers should have further training to change their attitude to sex worker cases and implement measures to assist sex workers in making complaints. This study only reviewed cases from one police force area, therefore the findings are not generalisable to England and Wales as a whole.