The policing-citizenship nexus: sex work, criminalisation and the conditions of policed abandonment

Drawing on in-depth interviews with sex workers across 11 European countries, conducted within the European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance project, this article explores how sex worker citizenship – understood in terms of access to rights, recognition, and inclusion within existing structures of care – is constructed and negotiated through encounters with the police as victims of crime. Across four policy regimes – criminalisation, partial criminalisation, the Swedish model, and regulation – three recurring police responses were identified: misrecognition, responsibilisation, and punishment. This systemic denial of victimhood excludes sex workers from the police’s duty of care. Within a broader landscape of repressive or restrictive policies and enforcement-led policing that structure the everyday lives of sex workers, these practices contribute to conditions that are conceptualised here as policed abandonment: a mode of governance that amplifies the visibility of sex workers as subjects of control and punishment, while rendering them invisible as subjects of rights, protection, and care.