Officer in the Line of Duty, Client, Third Party. Female Sex Workers’ Interactions with the Police in Poland

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyse the experiences of sex workers in Poland in terms of their encounters with police officers. Much as the very provision of sexual services is not criminalised or penalised in Poland, binding ‎legal regulations (criminalising third parties who organise, coordinate, and ‎facilitate the provision of sexual services for financial gain) bring sex workers ‎within the purview of the operational activities of police officers. This factor ‎sets a specific backdrop for all interactions that occur between sex workers ‎and police officers.‎In this article, I discuss the three main roles in which police officers interact with sex workers: as a client, as a third party or as an officer in the line of ‎duty. I set out to demonstrate that the disparate modes of enacting these roles ‎by police officers reinforce sex workers’ distrust and reluctance to interact ‎with the police. ‎I discuss the aforementioned issues drawing on qualitative interviews con ducted with female sex workers providing a range of sex services in Poland.