Policing Sex Work in Switzerland: Enforcing (Il)legality on the Ground

While full-service sex work1 is legalized at the national level in Switzerland, numerous regulations and restrictions are implemented at the cantonal and municipal level, varying substantially throughout the country. These regulations particularly affect migrant sex workers, constituting an overwhelming majority of sex workers in Switzerland (ProCoRe, 2022). The cantonal and municipal police, sometimes with specialized subdivisions, regularly control work and residency permits in red-light districts, brothels and areas known for sex work. While the “Swiss approach” to sex work has been described as pragmatic or even progressive (Van Liempt and Chimienti, 2017), to date there is no research on how this coexists with punitive and protective measures on the ground, and whether and how policing structures and subdivides the sex trade along intersecting2 axes such as gender, race and nationality. Using a comparative ethnographic approach in Zurich and Basel, this project aims to investigate the main question of how law enforcement operates in the context of sex work in Switzerland along the sub-questions: 1) What are the on-the-ground practices of policing sex work in Switzerland? 2) What differences exist along intersecting axes such as nationality, race and type of prostitution? 3) What narratives and professional norms shape police practices? 4) How do specialized police subdivisions affect policing? While Basel and Zurich both have a prominent urban sex trade, there are substantial differences, such as the regulation of street-based sex work, the provision of EU work permits, as well as the existence of a specialized police subdivision in Zurich. Building on the approach “state from below” (Mainsant, 2010; Fassin, 2015), the data will include a total of 60 semi-structured interviews, 30 with police officers and 30 with sex workers and counselors, participant observation during police patrols and document analysis. A local (municipal and cantonal) approach looking at street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 2010; Achermann, 2021) will be used, as the regulatory and executive power on sex work in Switzerland lies at the urban and municipal level. This project is the first academic study on policing sex work in Switzerland, and one of few such ethnographic studies internationally. It thus fills the research gap in understanding the punitive and protective realities on the ground within the framework of a regulatory approach to sex work, contributing to the theoretical intersections of sex work research, police studies and criminology, migration studies, critical race theory, as well as feminist state theory.