Alone against the danger: a study of the routine precautions taken by voluntary sex workers to avoid victimisation

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the routine precautions taken by sex workers (SW) in Switzerland, a country in which sex work is a legal activity. It is based on approximately 1100 h of non-systematic participant observation spread over 18 months and 14 semi-structured interviews with indoor and outdoor SW. The findings show that SW use a series of routine precautions that overlap with the situational prevention techniques for increasing perpetrators’ efforts or their perception of the risk of offending, reducing the rewards of the crime, and decreasing the provocations and perpetrators’ excuses. Future tests of the efficacy of these routine precautions could help developing specific situational crime prevention techniques for deterring offences against SW.

Keywords

• Sew work
• Prostitution
• Victimisation
• Legalisation
• Routine precautions
• Situational crime prevention