Compass Gender Spotlight: The Question of Trust in British Carceral Environments
Content Warning: sexual violence, police violence, domestic abuse.
After leaving a friend’s house in South London on March 3, Sarah Everard was abducted by police officer Wayne Couzens. Last month, he received a life sentence for using his Metropolitan Police (Met) issued warrant card and handcuffs to abduct, rape, and kill Everard behind the façade of an arrest. The responses of U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Met Deputy Commissioner Sir Stephen House beg the question of what (re)building a sense of trust with the police means. Many sex workers and undocumented immigrants never felt protected by the police in the first place, and Everard’s murder is bringing this conversation to the public eye.
The British community has exhibited increasing distrust of the Metropolitan Police following various scandals. (Wikimedia Commons)
After Couzens wielded his power as a police officer to commit violence, Johnson insisted to the public that the police are “overwhelmingly trustworthy.” Johnson asserted, “The police do, overwhelmingly, a wonderful job, and what I want is the public, and women in particular, girls and young women, women of all ages, to trust the police.”
In addition to Sarah Everard’s murder, Couzens has been linked to an indecent exposure incident in Swanley 72 hours before her death and another in Kent in 2015. Despite the 2015 incident on his record, he joined the police force in 2018, meaning that he was able to bypass screening of past abuse in the hiring process. For many, this has put into question the police vetting process.
Furthermore, Couzens was part of a WhatsApp group in which four current officers and one former officer shared misogynistic, racist, and homophobic messages. Two Met officers linked with the chat have remained on duty during an investigation of the WhatsApp group.
Discussing the questions called by Couzens’s presence in the police force, The Met Deputy Commissioner Sir Stephen House told London Assembly's police and crime committee, "We know we have to work to rebuild trust and confidence, and we will do all we can to achieve that."
Sexual assault, in general, is underreported because of a lack of trust in the legal process to adequately support survivors of sexual assault. Data reported by the U.K. Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that in England and Wales fewer than one in six women report sexual assault to the police. Police must address and reconcile with their history of not believing survivors and specifically targeting sex workers and undocumented migrants because of their criminalized identities.
Sex Workers: The Dangers of Criminalization
Labor Member of Parliament Diana Johnson has pushed for a bill that would criminalize paying for sex. Exchanging sexual services for money is legal, but soliciting in a public place, kerb crawling, retaining a brothel, and pimping and pandering are illegal under the Sexual Offenses Act of 2003. This bill follows a precedent of moves to criminalize sex work in Western countries, increasing police contact with sex workers.
For sex workers, exposure to repressive policing—recent arrest, prison, displacement from a workplace, extortion, or violence by officers—increase the chance of experiencing sexual or physical violence threefold, according to a systematic review by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Additionally, sex workers who have experienced repressive policing were twice as likely to have contracted HIV or other sexually transmitted infections than sex workers who have not. Sex workers who faced recent incarceration, arrest, or increased police presence were more likely to have poorer mental health outcomes.
After France introduced a law that criminalized the purchase of sexual acts and decriminalized soliciting on April 13, 2016, Médecins du Monde conducted a survey detailing sex workers’ experiences. 42 percent of survey respondents reported a rise in workplace violence, and 38 percent reported that negotiating condom usage became increasingly difficult after the law’s inception. Furthermore, the relationship between sex workers and police worsened for one in five sex workers.
More than 87 percent of sex workers surveyed opposed the criminalization of clients. Nevertheless, the trend of criminalization has continued.
In 2017, Ireland put the Sex Buyer Law in place by coopting the Nordic Model—the policy in which sex buyers are criminalized while sex workers are decriminalized. Under this law, soliciting has been decriminalized and brothel-keeping penalties have risen. However, Jade, a street-based sex worker from Dublin, told iNews opinion writer Frankie Miren that after the law became operative, police harassment became constant, repelling clients and forcing sex workers to take risks.
Jade described nights rife with police contact: “As the night goes on, you feel that squeeze. It starts to push your boundaries. I’ll go to a place I’m a bit less comfortable in [to avoid police]. I’ll take a client that’s a bit sketchy.”
Another sex worker talked about their experience after Canada’s passage of a Nordic Model law in 2014: “It’s like you have to hide out, you can’t talk to a guy, and there’s no discussion about what you’re willing to do and for how much. The negotiation has to take place afterwards, which is always so much scarier. It’s designed to set it up to be dangerous. I don’t think it was the original intention, but that’s what it does.”
When sex work is criminalized to any extent, sex workers have to worry about the arrest of themselves or their clients, causing them to do their work in more remote places or rush screening that would otherwise allow them to negotiate services. In the name of evading police contact, sex workers are exposed to more violence and theft.
When sex workers do report crimes committed against them by clients, police often fail to act. Alternatively, the police may blame or arrest the sex workers who come forward, creating a culture of impunity that empowers offenders and makes sex workers hesitant to go to the police after future encounters.
While research in Sweden and Canada show that the Nordic Model did not increase safety or access to services, after decriminalization in New Zealand, sex workers reported an improved ability to refuse clients and demand condom use. Nevertheless, undocumented immigrants have been excluded from New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA), which only extends to citizens and permanent residents, making undocumented sex workers especially vulnerable.
Undocumented Immigrants: The Risk in Calling for Help
In situations of violence, undocumented migrant women are put in precarious situations as they confront a mistrust in the police and a lack of a support system in the community. In a report published by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, victims of insecure immigration status were found to be afraid that if they report crimes, the police would share their information with the Home Office—the U.K.’s government ministerial department responsible for “immigration and passports, drugs policy, crime, fire, counter-terrorism, and police.” This fear prevents victims from speaking up or getting resources, and it lets abusers’ behavior go unquestioned.
Fempower Magazine gives an account of an undocumented Guinean woman’s experience with police and domestic violence. After her neighbors overheard a fight between her and her partner, they called the police. As it became apparent that the case was domestic violence, the police took a statement from the woman before detaining her to deport her. While the attempt to deport her failed, the police did not direct her to a women’s shelter, and she had to seek shelter through an informal circuit.
In 2018, the organizations Liberty and Southall Black Sisters (SBS) jointly created a “policing super-complaint,” which claimed that the police worked with the Home Office to use the Police National Computer (PNC) and monitor the immigration statuses of victims and witnesses from ethnic minority groups.
The Home Office said that if a police officer knows or suspects that someone is an “immigration offender,” they refer those details to the Home Office, even if the person is not under arrest. Some police forces were shown to refer undocumented suspects and victims in the U.K. to immigration authorities instead of investigating human trafficking or helping victims understand and gain access to appropriate services. Because of this, perpetrators often manipulate undocumented migrants’ fears of police to keep them in abusive environments.
When a Black African woman called the cops on her white British husband for smothering her with her pillow, he admitted that he did it but claimed self-defense, and the police believed his claim. They exhaustively interrogated her immigration status while leaving her husband’s behavior unchecked. After this visit, her husband tormented her by telling her she would be sent back to her country if she tried to call the police in the future. Her husband regularly abused her, but because she was on a spousal visa with no alternative support system, her immigration status depended on her marriage with him. Even though she called the police many more times with evidence of abuse, they continued to focus on her immigration status over the abuse.
Undocumented migrant and asylum-seeking women in Europe face many barriers to accessing protection and support in the countries in which they stay. Language barriers, mistrust, discrimination, racism, and xenophobia prevent many women from getting the support they need. Often, they do not know their rights to protection and support. In addition, abusive partners or employers instill fear of deportation in immigrants, and this fear is often confirmed by discriminatory treatment from police, immigration officials, and social workers.
Moving Past the Police
The prison population of England and Wales is projected to increase from almost 79,000 at the end of 2020 to 98,700 by September 2026. This is attributed to the recruitment of 20,000 more police officers who are anticipated to raise the number of criminal charges thereby raising the prison population. England and Wales currently already have the thirteenth-highest prison population per capita in the world.
Against the backdrop of the expansion of the British carceral state, the experiences of sex workers and undocumented immigrant women remind us that criminalization does not make the most vulnerable women safer, but it instead can often stop them from accessing essential services, reporting their perpetrators, and escaping unsafe situations. Despite punitive approaches to gender justice echoed by Johnson, survivors are not likely to report their experiences of sexual assault, and when they do, it often isn’t taken seriously.
Given these realities, feminists have started to reimagine state institutions. Sisters Uncut said, “It can be much easier to focus on individual violence than on state violence because it keeps intact the idea that our state institutions are fundamentally there to protect us.”
In response to the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill, Sisters Uncut asserted that opposing its passage is “an absolute priority.” The bill would give the police more power and increase violence, as it would lead to more survivors being arrested, allow officers to digitally strip search survivors who report gendered violence, impose stop and searches, and permit police to determine how citizens are allowed to protest institutional violence. The bill also takes steps to criminalize Romani and Traveller communities by introducing “residing on land without consent in or with a vehicle” as an offense resulting in a fine of up to £2,500 and/or confiscation or banning of their vehicle. This puts Romani and Traveller communities at risk of becoming homeless and/or getting expelled simply because they are nomadic. As of October 15, the Bill has passed through the House of Commons and is in the committee stage of the House of Lords.
In the face of systemic violence, Sisters Uncut argues that change can be made without empowering the police and that supporting work already being done is a great way to make this change: “Imagining radical change can be scary, especially for those who have stakes in maintaining the status quo. This is not the case for the many of us who have never been protected by the state. Only we can keep us safe.”