“It Depends on Who You Are, What You Are”: ‘Community Safety’ and Sex Workers’ Experience with Surveillance

Abstract

Community safety has complex connotations for sex workers. This complexity is, in part, a function of the contradictory nature of ideas of community and the positioning of sex workers as both at-risk and risky, victims and criminals. ‘Community’ is simultaneously inclusive of everyone, including sex workers, and that which needs to be defended against the perceived dangers posed by sex work and sex workers. Denied in these contexts is any sense that harm may indeed flow from community to sex workers, not just the reverse. Drawing on data from a study with a diversity of sex working women in Toronto, Canada, this article argues that these contradictions are not the product of confusion, but in fact are constitutive of the ways in which communities are rhetorically and materially formed. They have structured legislative responses to sex work, reflect normative conceptions of community, bodies, and public space, and have actively produced unsafe and insecure conditions for sex workers. Indeed, sex workers themselves consistently identify the contradictory nature of ideas of community and the harm that flows from them. This is strongly evident in one of the key ways in which projects for ‘community safety’ are currently implemented, namely the installation of Closed Circuit Television Cameras (CCTV).