“Officers Are Doing the Best They Can”: Concerns Around Law Enforcement and Social Service Collaboration in Service Provision to Sex Workers

Abstract

Frontline service providers are often tasked with providing services to criminalized populations, including individuals involved in the sex trade. These providers have been working to transform services to this population, proposing what they believe to be socially just responses in helping individuals in the sex trade transition from “criminals” to a “victims.” While frontline service providers have been advocating for trauma-informed and compassionate responses to working with individuals involved in the sex trade, they regularly temper this work with collaboration with law enforcement, propagating carceral (punishment-oriented) logics in order to “protect” vulnerable clients. This qualitative study, completed in a Midwestern U.S. state, used interviews with 30 frontline service providers who work with individuals in the sex trade to understand service providers' perceptions around their work with this population, and how this shapes collaborations with law enforcement. Findings reveal that as most frontline service providers assume that individual trauma and drug use are present in the sex trade, these individual characteristics have legitimated paternalistic service responses provided in collaboration with law enforcement. However, a minority of frontline service providers denounce these collaborations as harmful to their clients, revealing that responses to law enforcement are not homogenous across service providers. I conclude by discussing what these law enforcement–social service collaborations mean for the social work profession and provide a discussion of alternative methods to work with individuals in the sex trade.

An Epidemic of Virtue: A Review of Social Work's Complicity in “Prostitution” Interventions

“…Researchers have found that arrests “further perpetuate a cycle of power and control that police hold over sex workers,” even when the aim is to prosecute traffickers (Capous-Desyllas et al, 2021, p. 513). Despite this finding, Anasti (2020) found that 70% of service providers interviewed at one PDP believed that “law enforcement and carceral mechanisms can be a useful force” in dealing with sex workers (p. 62). Because service providers are responsible not only to participants but also to the criminal legal system, they contribute to the harm experienced by sex workers through criminalization (Roe-Sepowitz et al, 2014).…”

“…It also serves to transform the court into a “resource-heavy social welfare [institution],” using crime management to control sex workers under the guise of court reform while keeping social services financially lean (GHJP, 2018; Halley et al, 2018). Anasti (2020) describes this as the “detention to protection pipeline,” in which social services, such as victims’ advocates, disguise the punitive goals of the criminal legal apparatus (p. 50).…”

Introduction to Special Topic on Anticarceral Feminisms: Imagining a World Without Prisons

“…The rapid growth of PIC attention to sex trafficking and the expansion of a new frontier for carceral feminism have further fueled the dual subjectivities of women and girls engaged in sex work as both victims and criminals. Anasti (2020) interviews social workers and other advocates working broadly within this sector to examine their views on law enforcement. The close relationship between advocates in the field and law enforcement as well as the ties between arrest and service provision lead not surprisingly to widespread failure to discern a rigorous critique of the dominance of the PIC.…”

Using Anticarceral Feminism to Illustrate the Impact of Criminalization on the Lives of Individuals in the Sex Trades

“…Poignantly, one carceral feminist policy that often leads to the arrest or incarceration of people engaged in sex trade are raids and stings conducted by a collaboration of law enforcement and social service providers. Carceral feminism positions law enforcement as protectors and rescuers of those that have been victimized in the sex industry (Anasti, 2020;Musto, 2013). For instance, the federal government's funding of antisex trafficking initiatives, like FBI's Operation Innocence Lost and Found, is touted as an intervention to rescue child victims of commercial sexual exploitation.…”