When it’s convenient for police officers to do so, sometimes they take a break from criminalizing street sex workers to engage in another kind of abuse against them. They are exploited as an unpaid labour force of informants on their clients, many of whom are dangerous predators harming other marginalized groups in addition to sex workers ourselves. In particular, sex workers are often used to collect information about clients who may be sexually abusing children.
In this article by the Bristol Post, we can see how these kinds of operations are sold to the public as heart-warming tales of sex workers as unlikely protectors. In reality, initiatives like Bristol’s project Night Light put street sex workers in more danger. How this operation works is that liaison officers use an unmarked police car to pull up next to those soliciting on the street, or approach them on foot, and ask them questions about their experiences with clients. They make it clear that they’re looking for information about the abuse of under-18s, thereby guilting them into speaking with officers when they otherwise wouldn’t.
A sex worker mentioned in the article, given the pseudonym Anna, makes this explicit when she expresses that she kept seeing a client who sickened her specifically because she felt obligated to get this information to the police. Anna is not compensated for this work and is ultimately put at a much higher personal risk as a result. That’s without even mentioning the toll on her mental health.
On one occasion a man, who was paying her for sex, asked her to engage in role-play, where she had to pretend to be a primary school age girl.
“It was really unpleasant. Sickening to be honest,” she said. “I had to carry on for three months, but I couldn’t walk away until I knew what was happening.”
After reporting her concerns to the police, it turned out the man was abusing his eight-year-old daughter. ‘Anna’ gave evidence, and he was sent to prison.
“If you think there’s a chance you’re leaving a child in that position, you’ve got to stay. You’ve got to find out,” she said.
The justification for having vulnerable women like Anna do such work is that the children identified would have been impossible for police to identify through other means. Instead of considering that the ways police tackle child abuse currently may be the cause of victims not coming forward, they use this as a justification for pushing sex workers to keep seeing clients they would otherwise reject as a means to gather evidence.
The BBC documentary mentioned about Night Light and its mission to “keep kids safe” goes into further detail, showing many of the sex workers that these officers have spoken with. Within the documentary it is revealed that “16 children and young people have been safeguarded as a direct result of Night Light”. What we cannot know is how many additional rapes and other assaults of sex workers have taken place due to the pressures placed on those targeted to share information. It is also presumed by the documentary that these children were adequately protected once identified, however we have no reason to believe this. A noteworthy portion of the young people reported on were those trying to sell sex on the streets themselves, who often have complex histories of abuse and circumstances which have led them there. Police are notoriously bad at aiding children in these situations and they do not become any less likely to sell sex when they are dumped into the hands of social services and foster carers.
We see the lack of concern for the sex workers involved be exemplified by Night Light’s collaboration with Op Boss, another police operation which “targets the perpetrators within the night-time exploitation of street-workers and children”. Op Boss seeks to criminalize the clients of adult street sex workers in general. This approach leads to higher rates of abuse and murder of sex workers in the places it is implemented because it restricts the client pool and leaves workers with no choice but to accept the more dangerous of their clients or to keep seeing men who have assaulted them previously because they cannot find someone else to pay them.
Op Boss is not covering the income these sex workers lose when their clients are arrested, which only puts them in a worse situations because of their insistence on behaving paternalistically. If someone is selling sex under perilous conditions and we are not assuming they are foolish or incompetent, it stands to reason that they are doing so because their alternatives are worse. Taking away the best choice available to these sex workers, rather than providing them with better options, leaves many in a position where they cannot afford drugs and go into deadly withdrawal or starve or end up homeless.
Working with Op Boss also causes the officers within the Night Light program to make a tacit admission of guilt; if they agree with Op Boss’ mission of criminalizing clients because they view the purchase of sex as inherently abusive, Night Light are using a large network of street sex workers as sponges for this abuse by intentionally not arresting certain clients whilst people like Anna probe them for information about potential child victims. The offenders who are arrested are placed on a course intended to correct their behaviour, using money which could instead be spent supporting the sex workers whose income has been further limited by police intervention.
Despite the damage these projects do to street sex workers, it’s important not to diminish those who support the concept behind such programs. One officer in the BBC documentary claims that “time and time again we hear them say, ‘I wish this had been running when I was a kid, cos perhaps I wouldn’t be out here now.’ And I think they’re probably the most passionate advocates.” It’s noteworthy that while we do hear a few sex workers express that they eager to report it to the police if they see anyone underage working the streets or that they’re proud to be able to protect kids, we don’t hear anyone express this general sentiment about the program. However, if we assume these words to be true, it’s not hard to see why someone might feel that way.
For many sex workers who have experienced repeated abuse from our youth until adulthood, both in and out of prostitution, assaults are something we have come to accept as part of our lives. The idea of making sacrifices to be close to clients who harm us so that we can protect young people who have not yet been subject to it, or who have begun being assaulted but are in a position where they may be helped before it becomes a repeated and life-long issue, feels like a noble goal. I have felt this way myself when swallowing my urge to vomit so that I could act sweet towards a regular client who detailed to me the abuse he was enacting on various young girls, just to get the information of these girls and support them to escape from him when I was only a teenager myself. Unfortunately schemes like this don’t do what they promise, even for those of us who would be willing to make the trade.
We hear from one girl with the pseudonym Paige who was approached by the Night Light program at the age of 15 and ultimately placed into foster care, who was out on the streets due to her unsafe home environment and had been approached by men though she was not selling sex. Her reading from a script in what appears to be her own handwriting is the only specific example we’re given of a child who claims to have achieved a favourable outcome as a result of the program, and yet we can clearly see that in her case there would have been no need to use street sex workers as informants to find that she was at risk.
We must refuse to be manipulated by anecdotes employed by the police to justify using street sex workers as unpaid informants. Instead, we should talk about how we protect young people without displacing the danger onto another vulnerable group.
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Read more about surveillance of sex workers and the police using us as a tool in my upcoming book, Hooker Mentality, available for pre-order now.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 