“It Depends on Who You Are, What You Are”: ‘Community Safety’ and Sex Workers’ Experience with Surveillance

Abstract

Community safety has complex connotations for sex workers. This complexity is, in part, a function of the contradictory nature of ideas of community and the positioning of sex workers as both at-risk and risky, victims and criminals. ‘Community’ is simultaneously inclusive of everyone, including sex workers, and that which needs to be defended against the perceived dangers posed by sex work and sex workers. Denied in these contexts is any sense that harm may indeed flow from community to sex workers, not just the reverse. Drawing on data from a study with a diversity of sex working women in Toronto, Canada, this article argues that these contradictions are not the product of confusion, but in fact are constitutive of the ways in which communities are rhetorically and materially formed. They have structured legislative responses to sex work, reflect normative conceptions of community, bodies, and public space, and have actively produced unsafe and insecure conditions for sex workers. Indeed, sex workers themselves consistently identify the contradictory nature of ideas of community and the harm that flows from them. This is strongly evident in one of the key ways in which projects for ‘community safety’ are currently implemented, namely the installation of Closed Circuit Television Cameras (CCTV).

Attitudes toward Surveillance: Personality, Belief and Value Correlates

“…There are a number of papers in this area with specialist journals but few are empirical or examine the correlates of attitudes to, surveillance and monitoring (Goold, 2003;Harper, 2008;Monaghan, 2014;Powell & Edwards, 2005;Wright, Heynen, & van der Meulen, 2015). Some have looked at surveillance in specific industries like call centres (Ball & Margulis, 2011;Ellway, 2013), while others have considered the legal and ethical issues involved in surveillance (Halpern, Reville, & Grunewald, 2008;Martin & Freeman, 2003;West & Bowman, 2014).…”

Getting at Equality: Research Methods Informed by the Lessons of Intersectionality

“…These methods are effective for examining conceptual spaces that are complex and admit multiple characterizations or are understood from a variety of lived perspectives. Thus, for example, van der Meulen and colleagues (van der Meulen & Glasbeek, 2013;Wright, Glasbeek, & van der Meulen, 2015;Wright, Heynen, & van der Meulen, 2015) used concept mapping techniques to explore conceptualization of closed-circuit camera surveillance in order to compare how the various aspects of/reactions to this surveillance identified through the concept mapping exercise (e.g., "invasive and intrusive," "assistive and supportive") were rated across different groups of women (e.g., sex workers, racialized, and older women; club-goers and low-income women). Q-sorting has been used to examine privacy perspectives among younger (Morton & Sasse, 2014) and older (Morton, 2014) adults, identifying a variety of different positions on informational privacy issues.…”

A Sex Work Research Symposium: Examining Positionality in Documenting Sex Work and Sex Workers’ Rights

“…However, researchers have yet to fully grasp how the sex industry has diversified along technological lines (Bernstein 2007). Roundtable discussants and participants represented innovative research on the implications that new technologies have had for sex workers' experiences of gender relations in Kenya (Lowthers 2015), global labour markets (Zen 2016), and in both spatial practices and subjectivity (Orchard et al 2016) and surveillance and community safety (Wright et al 2015) within Canada.…”