Making Sex Workers Safer: Why Trust and Intelligence Sharing Are Pivotal

Sex work legislation is one of the most polarising areas of social policy, often shaped by moral beliefs. Across the world, governments take vastly different approaches, from full to partial criminalisation, with a whole range of variations in between.

What we know is that sex workers are safest when they can engage openly with support services, especially the police, without fear of prosecution or stigma.

Policing’s role in the UK is very clear; protect people who are routinely exposed to exploitation and violence. In the context of reducing vulnerability and harm, that is our first priority and always will be.

There are several different things we need to do well to achieve this goal:

• Build and maintain trust and confidence in the sex work community so that victims of exploitation and violence will report offences to the police.
• Know who the highest harm offenders are and track and investigate them until they are brought to justice.
• Work with our communities and local agencies to address the grass root drivers of vulnerability and abuse.

Police forces have developed several successful initiatives around all three of these pillars, often through the dedicated and tenacious work of Sex Work Liaison Officers. Up and down the country, liaison officers do an exemplary job of building relationships within the sex work community, ultimately to identify and tackle violence and abuse.

These relationships have helped to solve some of the most serious crimes devastating communities - murder, rapes and the exploitation of children. This is backed by research by the University of York, which found that Sex Work Liaison Officers play a vital role in ensuring more crimes committed against this group enter the criminal justice system.

Simply listening, showing up consistently and acting on what communities tell us goes a long way.

But, there is more for us to do. We must ensure that intelligence is being actively logged, used and shared across agencies to tackle abusers and exploiters. There are multiple agencies that collect information about suspects of sexual exploitation, but no consistent, singular way of joining it up and acting on the information we have.

That is why we are building a new national intelligence hub that can take intelligence from policing, support services and charities, and disseminate it to the right agency. The hub will help to join up the dots to strengthen investigations into sexual exploitation, which often cross national and international borders. The intelligence hub will help to make sure that this information does not slip through the net and is in the hands of the right people to take action. Even the smallest piece of intelligence can help us to take down organised crime groups behind sexual exploitation, as well as individual people who violently abuse sex workers.

I have no doubt that the changes we are making will make a fundamental difference to victims and survivors of sexual exploitation and violence. But in the midst of societal debate and noise, we have to look past moral judgement, confront exploitation directly, and ensure that our collective response serves a single goal - making sex workers safer.