ABSTRACT
The continued exposure of sex workers to preventable violence is government policy. The Co-ordinated Strategy on Prostitution (Home Office 2006) had one positive proposal, to permit ‘mini-brothels’, recognising that indoor sex work is demonstrably safer than street work. This proposal has now been abandoned. The Strategy makes clear that warnings about anti-street prostitution enforcement exacerbating sex workers’ vulnerability had been heard but not heeded. Instead, intensified enforcement was demanded, with great emphasis on using CCTV to catch kerb-crawlers. The results of this were seen in Ipswich and indirectly acknowledged at Wright's trial. While in many places street workers have clung to areas covered by CCTV because the cameras deter violence, in Ipswich they did not. Commenting on the Ipswich murders in December 2006, Deborah Orr criticised the government's ‘abolitionist strategy, that concerns itself least with the welfare of the uncooperative people,’ adding:
Maybe it deters some, and of course that's not a bad thing. But for those who continue with this work, it is a perilous policy. It propels women into the darkest and least policed places, where there are no CCTV cameras to record them or their clients, and it propels them to make no report to the police when they are assaulted or when they have reason to believe that one of their clients might be a dangerous character. 1
