By Natasha Joseph
Police officers often threaten Cape Town's sex workers with violence or compel them to have sex with them to avoid arrest or secure their release from custody, a survey by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) has found.
Researchers Nicole Fick and Chandre Gould surveyed 35 street-based sex workers - those who work out of doors rather than in brothels or at escort agencies.
Of the 35 sex workers, 47 percent said they had been threatened with violence by police, 12 percent said they had been raped by policemen, and 28 percent said they had been asked for sex by policemen in exchange for release from custody.
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The survey findings are part of a report on "Selling sex in Cape Town: sex work and human trafficking in a South African city", produced in conjunction with the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT).
In their introduction to their study report, Fick and Gould said they "decided that the best way to get to any meaningful sense of trafficking was to research the sex industry as a whole".
In a chapter titled "Sex work and the police", some sex workers claimed that police had blackmailed their clients and asked for "protection money".
One sex worker interviewed for the report told of a policeman who made a client hand over money to avert arrest or a scandal.
The sex worker ended by saying: "(The police) have got the right to do all these things because they can get away with it, they do things just because they can. Because they are the law."
The institute's research found police "tend to tolerate brothels" and that sex workers based in brothels "seldom have any interaction with the police, except perhaps if the policemen are clients".
Despite this lack of interaction, 51 percent of the 83 brothel-based sex workers interviewed by Fick and Gould said they did not trust the police, and 19 percent said they did not know if they could trust the police.
Twenty percent of brothel-based sex workers said that they would "not go to the police if they were a victim of crime, even if the crime was unrelated to sex work", the report said.
Not all the sex workers surveyed had negative perceptions of the police, however.
"Some said they had had positive experiences, they felt safer and more protected, and were willing to assist the police with investigations."
Research suggested that "aggressive policing, particularly the arrest of sex workers, is not an effective deterrent" to sex work, said Gould and Fick.
"We are convinced that criminalisation of sex work creates conditions within which police corruption and abuse are not only possible, but almost inevitable.
"It also exacerbates the vulnerability of sex workers, particularly those (on the) street."
A spokesperson for provincial police Commissioner Mzwandile Petros did not respond to requests for comment.
natasha.joseph@inl.co.za
- This article was originally published on page 4 of Cape Times on June 30, 2008
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