LSSI Placement Fellowship 2013-14
Violence against sex workers: A secondary analysis of National Ugly Mugs data
Laura Connelly - PhD Student, School of Sociology & Social Policy
Outline of the project (including aims and objectives)
The aim of this project was to collaborate with National Ugly Mugs (NUM) – a voluntary
organisation providing a mechanism for reporting violence against sex workers in the UK –
to conduct a secondary quantitative analysis of their existing data. Due to funding constraints,
NUM is unable to conduct their own detailed analysis of this data. Using monitoring data
collected when members join up to the scheme, analyses were undertaken to explore the
nature and extent of the serious crimes sex workers experience and its relationship with other
variables, including: gender, sector of the sex industry, geographical region, and number of
perpetrators. The findings of this project are intended to be used by National Ugly Mugs as
they see fit and may be potentially used to inform their practice. It has been agreed that after
the placement has been completed, the researcher and Alex Feis-Bryce (Director of Services
at NUM), will co-author an academic paper based on the research findings. In addition, the
findings of this research project have been used to, in part, inform a Wellcome Trust-funded
project which the author is involved in alongside: Dr Teela Sanders, Laura Jarvis-King, Rosie
Campbell OBE and Alex-Feis Bryce.
Context
Research into the prevalence of violence against street-sex workers indicates that between 50100% will experience some form of violence in the commission of their work. Although
some sections of the feminist community argue that this evidences the inherently violent
nature of prostitution, others argue that it is the criminalising policies implemented at a state
level and poor working conditions for sex workers which exacerbate violence. This later
group of feminists/activists – variously termed ‘liberal feminists’, ‘sex-radicals’ and ‘sex
workers rights advocates’ – have been instrumental in campaigning for sex workers to be
according the same basic human, legal, political and workers’ rights as other members of
society. A major step towards improving the safety of sex workers came in April 2012, when
the National Ugly Mugs (NUM) pilot scheme was founded as a mechanism for reporting
crimes committed against sex workers. Indeed, individual sex workers and front-line
organisations can join the scheme, report into the mechanism and receive alerts about other
incidents of violence occurring nationally. NUM may also feed information to police forces
across the UK. It is the monitoring data routinely collected by NUM that this research project
seeks to analyse.
Methodology
Monitoring data collected by NUM when members join up to the scheme was transferred
from a Microsoft Access Database into SPSS and missing data was inputted. The author then
conducted a detailed secondary quantitative analyses of this data, using univariate and
bivariate analyses. In total, the author analysed 961 cases of reported crimes against sex
workers in the UK.
Summary of the findings
At present, the findings outlined below remain relatively descriptive. In the co-authored
academic output, theory will be integrated more comprehensively to develop a nuanced and
empirically-founded exploration of crime experienced by sex workers in the UK sex industry.
Furthermore, due to the sensitive nature of this subject matter not all findings are outlined
below; the full findings report remains confidential.

The majority of reports submitted to NUM were by sex worker support projects,
comprising 74% of all submissions. Only 17% of reports came from individual sex
workers themselves and even fewer reports were submitted by the police 6%) and sex
establishments (2%). This indicates that there is scope for NUM to advertise the
mechanism through different avenues, in order to encourage more engagement from sex
workers, sex establishments and the police.

The vast majority of reports were submitted by female sex workers (93%), indicating that
male and transgender sex workers are not fully engaging with the mechanism.

In keeping with existing academic literature, it is clear that sex workers operating on the
street are more likely to experience forms of crime, with 60% of reports submitted to
NUM coming from street-based sex workers. That said, a significant amount of reports
were also submitted by independent sex workers (24%), with more research required in
this sector of the sex industry.

The most common form of serious crime report to NUM was violence, with 44% of all
reports submitted including some form of violence. Robbery and attempted robbery were
the second most prevalent, with 20% of reports including this crime type. Fraud was the
least prevalent form of serious crime with less than 6% of NUM reports including this
crime.

The region in the UK with the highest number of incidents of rape was the Midlands (n =
41). Attempted rape was most prevalent in the North West (n = 12) and the Midlands (n =
12). The greatest number of reports of robbery or attempted robbery were reported in
London (n = 48) and the North West (n = 35). Furthermore, levels of reported violence
were greatest in the North West (n = 100, the Midlands (n = 95) and London (n = 80).

Unsurprisingly, the most common form of reported hate crime was ‘sex worker hate
crime’, with 18% of all NUM reports including perceived hostility or prejudice towards
sex workers. Only three reports submitted to NUM included reported ‘homophobic hate
crime’, three included ‘racial hate crime’ and only one reported incident of ‘transphobic
hate crime’.

Of the 157 incidents of reported sex worker hate crime, the vast majority were perpetrated
by one offender, thereby comprising 71% of all sex worker hate crime. Of the remaining
45 incidents of sex worker hate crime, 11% were perpetrated by two offenders, 4.5% by
three offenders, and a further 4.5% of incidents were committed by four perpetrators.
Challenges faced
Due to the excellent support provided by NUM throughout the placement, few challenges
were experienced by the author. Although the author anticipated that the ethical review
process may be problematic due to the sensitive nature of the topic, the secondary nature of
the data analysis meant that this was in fact relatively straightforward. Perhaps the biggest
problem faced was the volume of data available and, in some ways, the richness of the data.
There remains great scope to analyse this data further and the author and Alex Feis-Bryce
hope to do this at some point in the near future. In addition, this was the first comprehensive
piece of quantitative analysis conducted by the author, meaning that it was a steep – albeit,
worthwhile – learning curve. Following on from this placement, the author is now involved in
a Wellcome Trust-funded project, which will require her to use some of the quantitative data
analysis skills gained through this research.