CAPÍTULO III DE LOS SOCIOS
EXTINCIÓN DE LA COOPERATIVA SECCIÓN PRIMERA
Drawing on social science and public health literature largely from Global North settings, Sanders (2016) argues that sex workers’ safety is contingent upon the interrelated influences of space, governance, and stigma. She highlights the well-documented differences between street and indoor sex work, attributing risks of violence in the former partly to seclusion, criminalisation, and intersections with drug markets―relative to the protection, greater control, and increased possibilities of working with others in indoor spaces (Sanders, 2016: 100). Yet other research also demonstrates the importance of attending to the varied on and off-street locations in which street-based sex workers experience violence14 (Prior et al., 2013),
and the visibility of outdoor spaces―to police, residents, and passer-by―that can pose threats of physical and verbal attacks (see e.g. Lewis et al., 2005). Sanders (2016) highlight that these actors may be sources of violence, in addition to clients, vigilantes, other sex workers, partners, and those involved in controlling sex workers’ activities.
Sanders (2016) stresses the relative safety of licensed premises and managed zones15
compared with more isolated work environments, rushed screening and negotiations, and difficulties reporting violence in criminalised systems (citing Crago, 2009; Pitcher and Wijers, 2014). She points out that licensing laws in the Netherlands exclude migrant workers (see Chapter 2, Sex workers’ citizenship) but, given the regional focus of the review, does not discuss other exclusionary and coercive elements of state regulation described in other settings (see
14Analysis in Australia, for example, demonstrated that counter to frequent assertions, the majority of assaults
experienced by street-based sex workers occurred in private, off-street locations (Prior et al., 2013).
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below, and Research in Latin America). She juxtaposes the “anti-sex worker” (Sanders, 2016: 107) environment in Sweden―where the purchase of sex has been criminalised and harm reduction programmes have been cancelled in favour of conditional exiting programmes (Levy and Jakobsson, 2014)―with improved safety in New Zealand, where decriminalisation has allowed sex workers to challenge contractual breeches and exploitation (Abel, 2014). She observes how widespread “discourses of disposability” (Lowman, 2000) and “rhetoric of abhorrence” (Kinnell, 2006), reproducing notions that sex workers do not matter and should be “erased”, are frequently apparent in media coverage, public debate, sex work governance, and police responses to sex workers’ reports of violence (Sanders, 2016). However, Sanders (2016) also offers an encouraging case study of how this is changing in one setting: in Liverpool, U.K, since police stopped arresting sex workers and began treating violence against them as hate crime, reporting and conviction rates have improved dramatically.
In a later, mixed-method international review on the effects of criminalisation and policing on sex workers’ safety and health, colleagues and I including Sanders (Platt et al., Forthcoming) found that, on average, sex workers who had directly experienced repressive policing practices (e.g. fines, arrest, detention, extortion, or violence) were three times more likely to experience violence by a client or partner. Qualitative studies across diverse geo- political and economic settings demonstrated how criminalisation and policing consistently disrupted sex workers’ workspaces and protective strategies. This was apparent in how sex workers responded to threats of enforcement―by rushing or forgoing their screening and/or negotiation processes in policed street-based areas (O'Doherty, 2011), or working alone to avoid being suspected of managing sex work where this was prohibited (Pitcher and Wijers, 2014). It was also reflected in the ways in which police and anti-trafficking raids displaced sex
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workers into unknown, isolated locations far from safety networks (Maher et al., 2015; Maher et al., 2011; O'Doherty, 2011; Ratinthorn et al., 2009; Okal et al., 2011; Simic and Rhodes, 2009).
Evidence from Sweden, and Vancouver, Canada, indicated that these effects were not diminished when the purchase of sex was criminalised and its sale purportedly decriminalised16, and that service providers and police in these contexts had adopted fatalistic
attitudes towards violence against sex workers (Levy and Jakobsson, 2014; Krüsi et al., 2014). In Tijuana, Mexico―where sex work is regulated and HIV/STI testing was at the time mandatory―licensed venues and tolerance zones offered greater protection against violence. Yet they largely excluded trans and male sex workers, undocumented migrants, minors, and people living with HIV (Katsulis et al., 2010). Sex workers’ relationships with police were precarious, dependent upon their continued engagement in routine HIV/STI screening to maintain their registration status―loss of which risked fines, arrest, or detention. In New Zealand, sex workers reported improved relationships with police and access to justice since sex work has been decriminalised (Armstrong, 2014; Abel, 2014). However, as subsequent work highlights, they remain legally obliged to use condoms in all commercial sexual exchanges and migrants cannot secure work visas for sex work (Armstrong, 2017).
Studies across settings demonstrated how policing practices institutionalised violence, either through direct police assaults and demands for money or sex to avoid arrest, or by denying sex workers access to justice (Ratinthorn et al., 2009; Okal et al., 2011; Simic and Rhodes, 2009; Rhodes et al., 2008; Scorgie et al., 2013b; Sherman et al., 2015). Sex workers frequently described being criminalised, ignored, blamed, or discredited when reporting
16I say ‘purportedly’ because evidence from Sweden indicates that sex workers are still pursued and/or restricted
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violence, leaving them reluctant to do so (Nichols, 2010; Scorgie et al., 2013b; Sherman et al., 2015; O'Doherty, 2011; Dewey and St. Germain, 2014; Okal et al., 2011). Studies also documented police targeting street-based, migrant, and trans sex workers of colour (Ratinthorn et al., 2009; Rhodes et al., 2008; Simic and Rhodes, 2009; Scorgie et al., 2013b; Nichols, 2010; Levy, 2015), dismissing drug-using sex workers as “junkies” (Sherman et al., 2015) and treating trans and male sex workers with “contempt”, humiliation and denigration (Rhodes et al., 2008; Nichols, 2010; Okal et al., 2011). Raids restricted sex workers’ movement during and outside of work hours (Nichols, 2010; Dewey and St. Germain, 2014) and disrupted access to outreach and central health services, as well as hindering their self- organisation (Scorgie et al., 2013b; Maher et al., 2015). Thus, criminalisation and policing exacerbated existing social, economic, gendered, racial, and health inequalities.
Evidence from Rajahmundry, India, meanwhile, demonstrated how sex workers have successfully reformed policing practices in the context of a sex-worker led, NGO-supported HIV prevention programme (Biradavolu et al., 2009). Establishing a multi-party crisis intervention team17 to monitor, pursue and penalise police bribery and violence achieved
marked improvements in sex workers’ safety and police treatment. However, the system placed a heavy workload on peer educators, while financial worries and the lengthy criminal justice process deterred some from pursuing their cases. Nevertheless, as the authors argue, this offers a pertinent example of how sex workers have “re-calibrate[d] an overwhelmingly unequal power relation with the police” through a combination of “community empowerment, collective action, and network-based governance” (Biradavolu et al., 2009:
17The team comprised sex worker ‘peer educators’ and community organisers trained as frontline responders, as
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1546). This illustrates the importance of examining and addressing policing in action, rather than focusing solely on laws (Scoular, 2010; Draus et al., 2015). Our mixed-method review, by contrast, identified common themes across diverse settings and so provided limited insights into context-specific processes, power relations, and effects (Platt et al., Forthcoming).
A review of the international epidemiological literature identified additional structural factors that increase sex workers’ risk of violence, including economic and housing insecurity, stigma, having been forced or coerced into sex work, lower levels of education and/or “sexual relationship power” (e.g. possibilities to negotiate condom use), and not belonging to a sex worker collective or having access to peer-led health services (Deering et al., 2014). However, most included studies did not measure all of these social and structural factors, some did not clearly define force and coercion, and just one measured the effects of a proxy for stigma.18 Their typically cross-sectional design left them unable to establish
‘causation’, and the wider limitations of epidemiological studies―which conceptualise relationships between ‘risk-’ or ‘protective’ factors and ‘outcomes’ as linear rather than iterative and contingent (Rhodes, 2009)―limit what they reveal about “the complex interrelationships between factors that produce violence” (Deering et al., 2014: 51).
These reviews provide important insights into some of the legal, political, social, and economic influences on sex workers’ safety and work environments. However, with the exception of Biradavolu et al. (2009)’s study, they provide little detail on how sex workers navigate, resist, and organise against violence, in ways that may generate safer work environments within hostile legislative and social landscapes, and/or push back against them.
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Furthermore, few included studies relate to Latin America, to which I now turn. Below and in Chapter 2, I discuss in more detail how sex workers are organising to challenge violence and stigma, and claim space, recognition, and rights (see Sex worker rights movements & alliances, and Chapter 2: Geographies of sex work and Sex workers’ citizenship).