“Living in fear”

This chapter presents a case study of public and private policing of vulnerable and marginalised minorities in the Nordic context. It addresses the following question: how does the criminalisation of migration function through public and private policing of street workers from Romania and Bulgaria, in the context of Nordic societies? The chapter discusses research on the migration of Roma and other precarious groups from Southeast Europe. It shows that project’s data, and nine semi-structured group interviews with precarious street workers from Romania and Bulgaria living rough in Helsinki. Besides humiliation, feelings of fear and stress were commonly expressed by street workers when describing their interactions with the police or security guards; humiliating encounters also produced these after-effects. Police interviews confirmed that the police consider street workers as their “property” and indicated that the police were responsible for controlling begging in response to fears and prejudice that the general public had towards foreign street workers and begging practices.