Policing and public health interventions into sex workers’ lives: necropolitical assemblages and alternative visions of social justice

While extensive literature documents how criminalisation harms sex workers’ health and rights, limited research has critically examined interactions between criminal-justice, health, other systems shape support justice for by people who sell sex. We attend to this question drawing on participatory, qualitative with a diverse group of workers stakeholders in East London, UK. In addition directly structurally-violent enforcement practices, we identified wider, necropolitical assemblages practices – across police, local immigration authorities, social services that disciplined lives, responsibilised them their defunded specialist grounded lived realities, amid tensions over sex-work governance. These effects notions community vulnerability often privileged residents’ concerns threats safety impacted marginalised minoritised cis trans women the most. Those worked street used drugs, were migrants, and/or colour particularly targeted enforcement, discounted when reporting violence service cuts. Yet participants’ appeals redirection funds from towards respectful, peer-led reflected claims own terms. recommend (re)commissioning respond them, alongside concerted efforts end policies criminalise, punish, blame. This would help alleviate document, inclusive participation broader goals.