8 Policing violence against sex workers
When women who work in the sex industry are the victims of violent crime, there is a long history of low conviction rates. Sex workers may fear a loss of anonymity for their clients if they report a crime, or act as a witness. A fear of being prosecuted can lead to a lack of trust between sex workers and the police. Historically, though, a further reason for low conviction rates has been assumptions by police officers about the morals or behaviours of women.
Figure 11: A constable discovers the body of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square in London [Description: Black and white newspaper illustration depicting a nighttime scene in Mitre Square. A dead woman is lying on her back in front of a building with shuttered windows. Her clothes are dishevelled. A uniformed police officer leans over her shining a torch towards her face. Below the illustration is the title: ‘Finding the mutilated body in Mitre Sqare [sic]’] Source: https://go-gale-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/ps/navigateToIssue?volume=&loadFormat=page&issueNumber=1286&userGroupName=tou&inPS=true&mCode=1ZTS&prodId=BNCN&issueDate=118881006
One of most notorious set of murders in British history, those committed by ‘Jack the Ripper’, amply demonstrate this. Because of their poverty and chaotic lifestyles, police and public alike concluded that the Ripper’s victims were sex workers.
… the police assumed that they were prostitutes and that they had been killed by a maniac who had lured them to these places for sex. There is and never was any proof of this either.
In the past, male-dominated police forces routinely made assumptions if women were out on the street on their own. In 1894, for example, a young dressmaker was simply walking along Oxford Street in London in the evening when she was arrested by Police Constable Endacott. She was:
… carried off to a police station, and having been charged with solicitation on the streets, was locked up for the night. Investigation proved the charge to be absolutely groundless, and that Miss Cass was not only innocent of the specified offence but was a girl of spotless reputation.
Police assumptions of the moral probity (or otherwise) of some women were slow to change. Between 1985 1975? and1980 the so-called ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murdered thirteen women and attempted to murder seven more. Officers categorised potential female victims as ‘innocent’ or ‘non-innocent’ based on factors like class and lifestyle. This categorisation led genuine victims of the murderer to be excluded from the investigation because they did not fit the assumed victim profile.
Some argue that the general policing of sex work remains ‘oppressive, brutal, corrupt’ (Brown et al., 2024). There have been considerable shifts in recent decades in police understanding of, and treatment of, sex workers who have been the victims of violent crime. The promotion of a duty to protect ‘vulnerable people’ has begun to deliver shifts in both policy and practice. As of 2024, though, the ongoing inquiry into the police handling of Emma Caldwell’s murder, which you learned of in Section 1, shows that longstanding attitudes in some areas of policing have yet to change as much as they need to.