Governing sex workers through trust: Evaluating policing practices for sex workers’ safety through a procedural justice lens

ABSTRACT

Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with differen key actors in Geneva, Switzerland, I apply procedural justice theory to the governance of prostitution. My findings show that the vice squad is ill-equipped to protect sex workers from violence and exploitation because their everyday practices during interactions with sex workers, aimed at creating trust, rely on affect alone. Conversely, the community RLD unit utilizes both fair treatment and a transparent decision-making process which successfully creates trust relationships with sex workers, increasing their willingness to report incidents of violence and exploitation. This has important implications for prostitution policy aimed at improving sex workers’ safety.

KEYWORDS:

• Governance
• trust
• policing
• prostitution
• sex work
• procedural justice

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Isabel Crowhurst, Birgit Sauer, and Eilís Ward for inviting me to be part of this special edition and for all their helpful suggestions throughout the publication process. Many thanks also to the anynomous reviewers whose comments helped to improve this article significantly. Additionally, I want to thank Elisabeth Prügl, David Sylvan, and the Berkeley CER writing group for discussing earlier drafts of this article and Hannah Brown for editing these.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. I use ‘prostitution’ or ‘sex work’ when talking about the transaction of sexual services in exchange for money. I assume that these transactions are mutually agreed upon. When talking about people selling sexual services, I use ‘sex workers’, the preferred term by the people I talked to, also largely agreed upon in the literature to attribute agency and avoid victimization (Kingston and Sanders 2010).

2. This shift in research focus might be explained (at least partially) by various prostitution policy changes from the turn of the century onward in Europe and Canada and the related normative debates on which policy benefits people in prostitution best (Kilvington et al. 2001, Weitzer 2010, Harrington 2012).

3. With ‘short-term migrants’ I refer to those migrant sex workers with EU passports who can legally work in Switzerland for 90 days/year without having to apply for a work permit.

4. Wagenaar (2017) provides a comprehensive comparison of why prostitution policies based on control largely fail.

5. I adhered to the guidelines specified in the Code of Ethics by the American Sociological Association (ASA 2018).

6. My translation from the French original, my interpretation in italics.

7. All quotations from my interviews are translated transcripts of the original French recordings.

8. Sex workers who register to work in Geneva and then leave the city afterwards do not usually request de-registration.

9. To respect sex workers’ privacy, I could not record the registrations, but took notes during and afterwards.

10. Connelly et al. (2018) also highlight the importance of frequent interactions between police officers and sex workers for increased willingness to report crimes for the UK context.

11. As other quotes show, the head of the RLD unit switches back and forth between using ‘sex workers’ and ‘girls’. While this use of terminology is still not ideal, it is an improvement compared to the vice squad where police officers almost exclusively used ‘girls’ to talk about sex workers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mira Fey

Mira Fey is a PhD Candidate of Political Science/International Relations at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland and PhD Affiliate to the Gender Center, Graduate Institute, Geneva. She was lecturer and visiting doctoral student, Faculty of Applied Social Sciences, University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, in 2019.