| Summary: | A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
October 2017
Johannesburg === By adopting a legal ethnographic methodology, this dissertation examines the everyday policing of sex work in Johannesburg, South Africa. Sex work is difficult to regulate and is at the literal and figurative margins of proper society, where legality and illegality often blur into one another. The policing of sex work in Johannesburg, South Africa, straddles the line between formal and informal. On the streets, police often appear to be acting in an informal and ad hoc manner. However, high-level organisational directives intended to regulate the police’s obligations and duties toward sex workers also influence police action, and tilt the exercise of discretion to the formal. These obligations themselves reflect the tension between the law and human rights: police must respect the human rights of sex workers, but they also must enforce the laws of the country. Sex work is illegal, but it is also time-consuming to regulate and difficult to prove that a sex work transaction has occurred. Sex work involves activity that occurs in private transactions in spaces that are ordinarily private in nature. But the illegality of sex work make it a matter of public concern.
Meanwhile, discourses and attitudes about sex workers themselves inform how the law is interpreted and enforced, reflecting the fluidity between the formal and informal, and the legal and social. Popular discourses about sex workers’ hygiene, impact on public health, and proclivities to upset public order all inform how the police approach them. In this liminal space, this study considers how sex work is policed and how it should be policed. How do discourses about sexuality and gender informally police sex workers, and in turn inform how they are formally policed by the police organization? What is the current relationship between the police organization and sex workers in Johannesburg? These two ethnographic questions about the nature of sex work provide the foundation for determining how sex work should be policed. This study reveals that there is the possibility of negotiation between police and sex workers, which can provide provisional security for sex workers through police protection, and this relationship is often formulated in a human rights language, adopting legal language and terms. However, it is never a lasting security because it is unregulated, and police ‘greed,’ the structural effect of working for an institution that is perceived to be underfunded, can tilt things very quickly. Thus, the law is not the primary issue in the policing of sex workers; these other practices which remain despite changes in the law and are informed by popular discourses and competing rationales, constitute the everyday practices, norms, and understandings that influence the policing of sex workers. === MT 2018
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