Police in England and Wales should be banned from issuing a “draconian” caution that exclusively targets sex workers, both politicians and campaigners have said.
A “prostitute’s caution”, unlike other police cautions, does not require a person to admit to an offence or agree to accept it. Police canissue them to anyone they have “reasonable cause” to believe has broken prostitution laws, meaning little evidence is required.
Police cautions, which are typically issued for minor crimes, are filtered out from someone’s record after six years and do not need to be disclosed to employers, but a prostitute’s caution will show up on a sex worker’s enhanced DBS check until they are 100 years old.
Sex workers and lawmakers have demanded that police forces are immediately stopped from issuing the cautions, which “trap people in the conditions that we stigmatise them and marginalise them for”.
Labour MP Nadia Whittome said: “It’s absolutely shocking. We’ve got an institutionally misogynistic police force that has been proven to have routinely failed and even endangered women, and those are the people tasked with issuing these cautions which can ruin the lives of the most vulnerable women. You wouldn’t believe that this was happening in the UK.”
Whittome added: “I think that all [prostitute’s] cautions – no matter somebody’s status as a sex worker, former or current – should be taken off their records. The government should be investing in anti-poverty measures so that fewer people feel that sex work is the best option in the circumstances that they’re in.”
In November, a London assembly motion was put forward asking mayor Sadiq Khan to stop the Metropolitan police issuing prostitute’s cautions, describing them as “an extraordinary legal one-off”.
Green party member Zöe Garbett’s motion was seconded by Conservative Andrew Boff, who said: “Whatever view you take of sex work, it does seem unfair that a young person, who may have been forced on to the streets in order to sell sex by a pimp, should have to bear the consequences of that caution for the rest of their lives. It doesn’t stand up to natural justice and therefore it should go.”
The English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) published a report in November, which argues that prostitute’s cautions and convictions keep sex workers stuck in sex work.
The research looked at “jobs that are more commonly done by women, as most sex workers are women. These jobs include carers, childminders, community centre workers, medical professionals, social workers and teachers.” All of these jobs require enhanced DBS checks for employment.
“There are jobs I’ve been offered and had to say no to,” one woman told the report. “Social services asked if I’d considered doing emergency respite. It’s excellent money and would have suited my life and skills. But I couldn’t even think about it as they would have done the checks and found out.”
Women told the ECP how having a prostitute’s caution on their record also deterred them from reporting rape, domestic violence and other crimes.
Campaigners argue that prostitute’s cautions can quickly lead to convictions. The Street Offences Act 1959 makes it an offence in England and Wales for a person to “persistently” loiter or solicit in the street. Human rights lawyer Alice Hardy, who has worked on multiple cases to get sex workers’ cautions revoked, said if a sex worker has two cautions, that could meet the definition of “persistently”, meaning they could essentially be convicted through cautions that they cannot contest.
Hardy also questioned some of the “reasonable causes” presented by police. “I remember one case where the officer said he’d seen her talking to a man,” said Hardy. “When [the police officer] approached, the man walked away. That was the evidence. It’s not the sort of thing that would stand up in court.”
Women told the ECP report that they had been issued with the cautions when they weren’t working, and in one case when the recipient wasn’t even a sex worker.
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“Having a prostitute’s caution and/or a criminal record for a prostitution offence brands sex workers as criminals, making us an easy target for the police and others in authority to discriminate and deny us our rights,” the report says.
Police forces do not record the number of prostitute’s cautions issued. Sam Hanks, criminology lecturer at Swansea University, said: “They’re able to give out these cautions that have a huge impact on people’s lives, but there’s no footprint for that. That enables this gaslighting situation where the police consistently say: ‘We don’t enforce these things, we don’t prosecute, we’re here to safeguard sex workers.’ And it’s really hard to counter that narrative unless you go to the sex workers who say they’re still being cautioned and prosecuted.
“We’re trapping people in the conditions that we stigmatise them and marginalise them for,” he added.
Laura Watson, a spokesperson for the ECP, said: “We have women in our group who have seen multiple injustices as a result of having these draconian cautions on their record. For example, not being able to leave prostitution, not being able to get or even apply for the jobs they want to. Accessing justice and accessing housing has also been problematic for women with prostitute’s cautions.
“We want prostitute’s cautions and convictions for prostitution offences expunged from women’s records and we also want decriminalisation, so that women don’t have to face these injustices just for working to refuse the poverty that’s imposed on them.”
The Home Office declined to comment.