Introduction

Like many women from Ukraine, Elena regularly migrates to Poland to earn a living in a managed brothel in Warsaw. Her reasons for initially entering sex work included the prospect of a considerably higher income than was available in Ukraine at the time—in 2002, so during an economic crisis. A visa-free travel arrangement between Poland and Ukraine made the commute easy. Her situation changed significantly the following year, when Poland entered the Schengen Area and the common European border regime. Now positioned as a ‘third country’ citizen, Elena became subjected to much stricter migration controls. Although unable to legalize her stay under European Union (EU) visa policies, which typically bind regularization to employment status, Elena continued engaging in cross-border sex work by securing expensive tourist visas that allowed her to stay in Poland for up to 90 days in any 180-day period.

Elena’s circumstances shifted again in 2007, when Poland adopted simplified procedures for citizens of several Eastern European countries to secure temporary work-related visas. As the market for fake employment invitations flourished, Elena turned to one of the newly emerging “recruitment agencies” for a temporary work visa as a strawberry picker. With the help of various intermediaries, Elena managed to regularize her visits to Poland over several years. However, when migration officials prosecuted one of the agencies that supplied her visa, Elena lost the legal grounds to stay in Poland and returned to Ukraine in order to avoid deportation.

When I met Elena in 2016, she was in the process of securing an employment contract as a housekeeper, offered to her and some of her colleagues by the owner of their workplace. While grateful, Elena was aware this increased her dependence on the brothel owner and thus made her more vulnerable to exploitative workplace practices. When her boss was arrested a couple of years later under pimping charges, Elena not only lost her job and temporary home at the brothel, but also the legal grounds for staying in Poland. Having found work at another brothel, Elena returned to travelling back and forth between Poland and Ukraine as a “tourist,” based on her newly received biometric passport.

Having been granted protected status after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Elena took her children with her to Poland. While she no longer fears deportation and has access to public healthcare and child benefits, these provisions are temporary, and, due to the economic crisis and having to take care of her children, Elena’s income has significantly declined. She is now considering migrating to a Western European country to earn her living by providing sexual services.

Elena’s story typifies the situations and migration patterns of the many Ukrainian women who travel to Poland for sex work. While their individual trajectories and experiences vary, the vast majority of Ukrainian sex workers function in an ongoing state of uncertainty and precarity resulting from the complex and volatile social and legal environments they must navigate. As Elena’s story illustrates, the uncertainty and precarity enshrined in many Ukrainian sex worker’s migratory projects, everyday lives, and working arrangements are produced by migration regulations and border controls impacting sex worker’s ability to regularize. Uncertainty results from damaging sex work policies and labor regulations that force sex workers into the informal economy, and precarious working environments. These conditions are closely linked with surveillance, bordering and policing strategies that target sex workers and their venues. Rather than working in isolation, these policy measures intersect to shape the living conditions of Ukrainian sex workers in Poland.

In this article, I focus on this intersection to explore how intertwining laws, policy measures, and law enforcement strategies define the lived realities of Ukrainian sex workers. My approach builds on scholarship calling for “a wide and multi-scalar examination of laws, policies, administrative sanctions, and their application in practice […] to gain a comprehensive understanding of the intended and unintended effects of prostitution governance” (Crowhurst 2019: 166; Scoular and Sanders 2010; Skilbrei 2019). This requires analysis of the strategies of sex work governance in all their plurality and complexity. Contributing to this body of scholarship, I move beyond a narrow focus on regulations explicitly directed at sex work, to examine the entanglements of sex work policies with border controls and migration regulations, as well as other laws governing sex workers in Poland. With a focus on the experiences of Ukrainian sex workers, this analysis demonstrates the importance of immigration policies on structuring the living and working conditions of migrants who sell sex. Drawing on sex work and crimmigration research, I argue that restrictive immigration laws and policing strategies targeting migrant sex workers are key tools governing their mobility and positionality vis-à-vis the Polish state and its institutions (Fabini 2017; Melossi 2003; Vuolajärvi 2019). Rather than solely serving as instruments of punishment, deterrence or exclusion (Aas and Bosworth 2013), they operate together with sex work policies and other regulations to produce migrant sex workers as precarious, vulnerabilized and subordinated subjects with restricted access to rights and protections.

Building on the theoretical framework developed within the CrimScapes: Navigating Citizenship through European Landscapes of Criminalisation research project, I approach this complex policy entanglement as a sex work crimscape.Footnote 1 As elaborated below, by emphasizing the plural and relational character of contemporary sex work criminalization landscapes, composed of a myriad of actors, policies, legal regulations, cultural norms, state and non-governmental institutions, and navigational practices, this analytical concept facilitates a wide and multi-scalar approach to the living and working conditions of sex workers. The crimscape concept engages with sex work as a complex and dynamic site of interaction between various practices, policy logics, and modes of sex work governance that shape everyday practices, labor arrangements, and the life prospects of those performing sexual labor in Poland. To address how a sex work crimscape shapes the biographical and migrational trajectories, work-related vulnerabilities, and access to rights, recognition, protections, and safety of migrant sex workers, I draw upon my participatory research with the sex worker rights collective, Sex Work Polska (SWP), and my fieldwork and interviews conducted with Ukrainian sex workers in Poland as part of the CrimScapes project. By analyzing material gathered for this study, I show how the Polish sex work crimscape, as a complex mode of governance, produces conditions for migrant women selling sex in Poland that I conceptualize below as imposed mobility, legal ambiguity, and institutionalized abandonment.

Firstly, I provide a theoretical background for the crimscape concept and identify the key policy instruments, norms, and logics that constitute the sex work criminalization landscape in Poland. Emphasis here is on those policies that shape the working and living conditions of migrants selling sex in Poland. After briefly describing the fieldwork conducted for this study, I explore how the existing assemblage of sex work, migration, fiscal, labor and anti-trafficking policies, and related policy enforcement strategies, work together to shape mobility, positionality vis-à-vis the law and law enforcement agencies, and access to state protections and rights for Ukrainian sex workers.

Exploring the Landscape of Sex Work Governance

As noted by Wagenaar (2018: 2), “prostitution, in all its manifestations, is deeply entangled with the state.” Since the nineteenth century, almost all national governments across Europe and beyond have adopted policy measures intended to subject sex workers and their work settings to surveillance and control (Jahnsen and Wagenaar 2018; Sanders and Laing 2019; Skilbrei and Spanger 2020). The expansion, increasing visibility, and internal diversification of sexual commerce over the last few decades has prompted a further “flurry of regulatory controls” (Scoular and Sanders 2010: 3) over the sex industry. Reflecting the wider “culture of control” witnessed in contemporary democracies (Garland 2001), states are increasingly mobilizing a vast array of legal measures in sex work governance, including criminal law and administrative controls such as inspections and licensing. Often infused with the dominant moral framings of sexuality, gender relations, vulnerability, victimhood, agency, and respectable citizenry, these punitive and coercive policies, and their implementation strategies, structure and maintain the conditions of sex work and the lived realities of those who sell sex (Östergren 2017; Scoular 2015; Skilbrei 2019).

Sex work management, however, expands beyond the existence and enforcement of prostitution-specific laws. With the recent expansion of crimmigration controls (Aas and Bosworth 2013; Stumpf 2014), landscapes of sex work governance are increasingly shaped by migration policies and border controls that target migrant sex workers. Focusing primarily on the impact of anti-trafficking policies on the sex industry (Andrijasevic 2010; Milivojevic and Pickering 2013), an increasing number of researchers have highlighted the role of migration regimes and one’s immigration status in shaping the living and working conditions of migrant sex workers (Agustin 2007; Chin 2013; Jahnsen and Skilbrei 2017; Mai 2018; Parreñas 2011; Plambech 2016). Others have examined how internal bordering practices and routine policing can come to structure the sex industry and create various vulnerabilities for migrant sex workers (Diatlova and Näre 2018; Fabini 2017). Some have also analyzed how visa regimes and residence permit systems contribute to internal differentiations within the field of commercial sex (Ham 2017; Oso, 2016; Skilbrei 2020; Vuolajärvi 2019). Existing research points to the productive role of crimmigration laws and diffused mechanisms of border controls in shaping the sex industry and the socio, legal and economic statuses of migrants providing sexual labor. The logics of contemporary (European) border and migration regimes go beyond the dichotomies of internal/external, inclusion/exclusion, and legal/illegal, to render migrant sex workers as subordinated subjects whose inclusion into society, the (in/formal) labor market and state support structures is diversified, conditional and constantly renegotiated via bordering practices (Fabini 2017; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Menjívar and Kanstroom 2010; Vuolajärvi 2019).

Also, as documented in the scholarship, regulatory controls that target sex work emerge as an entanglement of diverse laws, policy measures, and enforcement strategies that are often tied to various regulatory frameworks, some of which do not directly address the sex industry directly (Munro and Della Giusta 2008; Jahnsen and Wagenaar 2018; Östergren 2017; Scoular and Sanders 2010; West 2000). As Crowhurst (2019: 166) has stated, “employment, immigration, health and security measures, and criminal justice sanctions can have such profound impacts on the governance of commercial sex ‘on the ground’ that they may alter, sometimes almost completely, the ways in which this is meant to be regulated ‘in the books’ by national prostitution laws.” These complex landscapes of regulatory controls are further shaped by the multiple contexts in which they operate, creating outcomes for sex workers that differ depending on their legal status and location of work (Skilbrei 2019).

Inspired by the concept of scapes proposed by Appadurai (1996), I adopt the notion of a crimscape to analyze the local articulations of sex work governance that constitute the politico-legal and socio-economic realities of sex work criminalization in contemporary Poland (Faust et al., forthcoming; Geeaert et al. 2024). Understood as a multilayered and relational assemblage (Collier et al. 2007), the concept of crimscape brings together the seemingly disparate policies and regulatory measures that interrelate in the processes of sex work governance. An emergent product of distinctive social forces and policy logics, a sex work crimscape is a historically-situated and context-specific array of policies that produce particular material conditions and structures of possibility under which criminalized populations, i.e. sex workers, are compelled to exist. Hence, rather than merely focusing on how sex work is legally regulated “on the books,” the notion of crimscape directs our attention to the “manifold social lives that are produced in and with policies” (Faust et al., forthcoming; Geeaert et al. 2024; Shore et al. 2011), with particular focus on the diverse policy measures and interconnected law enforcement strategies that shape the experiences of sex workers.

I will now explore the key policy instruments relating to sex work, migration, trafficking, fiscality, and labor that constitute the Polish sex work crimscape, then analyze the ways in which the existing policy assemblage contributes to shaping the lived realities of migrant sex workers.

The Polish Sex Work Crimscape

The contemporary Polish sex work crimscape is grounded in the 1949 United Nations (UN) Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons, ratified by the state-socialist government in 1952. Constructing prostitution as “incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person” (UN 1949), the Convention called for its abolition via repressive policies (Dolinsek 2022; Östergren 2017). Its main principles are reflected in the section “Offences against sexual freedom and decency” of the 1997 Polish Penal Code (PC), introduced after the socio-political transformation of 1989. Within this framing, the PC imposes criminal sanctions for coercing an individual into prostitution and thus restricting their sexual freedom (art. 203). Article 204 of the PC criminalizes all third parties facilitating and organizing sex work, procuring for “prostitution,” and ‘profiting from sex workers’ earnings. The latter are considered crimes against “public decency” rather than against the sexual freedom of sex workers (Dziuban 2024; Krajewski 2022; Ratecka, 2023), and are prosecuted regardless of sex workers’ consent. Thus, all consensual and non-coercive labor relations and third-party activities, including owning or managing sex work venues, hiring a sex worker, and providing sex workers with any services, are criminal offences. These measures may also criminalize any mutual support and cooperative work arrangements between sex workers.

Despite explicitly constructing consensual prostitution as a nuisance that violates moral order and “social decency,” the PC does not impose criminal sanctions for the provision of sexual services: in accordance with the UN Convention, sex workers are understood to be “victims of prostitution” (Dolinsek 2022; Dziuban 2024). However, exclusionary fiscal policies ensure they are denied recognition and rights as workers. Focusing on Italy, Crowhurst has argued that taxation arrangements penalize sex workers by “excluding them from the status of full taxpayer citizenship,” thereby reinforcing the “social and political liminality of sex workers as lesser citizens” (2019: 166). Tax policies loom large in regulating sex work in Poland too, where the Tax Code dictates that income generated via “prostitution” is not to be taxed like income from other forms of waged or unwaged labour. According to the Polish Personal Income Tax Act (1991), “prostitution” is exempt from taxation on moral grounds: as an activity that violates the “rules of social coexistence” (Olczyk 2017: 58), it cannot be the subject of a legal contract. Due to this exemption, sex work is not legally recognised as legitimate income-generating activity or as legal ground for (self) employment. Thus, although not criminalized per se for the provision of sexual services, sex workers are deprived of “economic citizenship” and related state protections (Crowhurst 2019; Dziuban 2024; Ratecka 2023).

As in other European countries, anti-trafficking legislation is central to the sex work crimscape in Poland. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and opening of borders across many Eastern European countries, a sharp rise in cross-border movement sparked concerns about the scale and uncontrollability of transnational migration flows, the permeability of European borders, and the assumed vulnerability of migrant women to sex trafficking (Andrijasevic 2010; Darley 2023; Milivojevic and Pickering 2013; Suchland 2015). With many Poles migrating to Western Europe and Poland becoming a transit or destination country for migrants from the East, anti-trafficking measures have predominantly been mobilized to “protect” Polish and Eastern European women from sexual exploitation (Ratecka 2022). Drawing on the UN Palermo Protocol (UN 2000), provisions to criminalize sex trafficking were introduced to the Polish Criminal Code in 2010, and sex work venues, as presumed trafficking focal points, were subjected to law enforcement interventions by police and border guards. Despite victims of forced labor trafficking far exceeding those trafficked for sexual exploitation, with numbers of the latter having remained relatively low over the past 10 years,Footnote 2 Polish trafficking policy has primarily focused on sexual labor and been deployed to police the sex industry and migrant sex workers.Footnote 3

Additionally, as Elena’s story illustrates, opportunities for movement and regularization among Ukrainian migrant sex workers, and their exposure to policing and deportability, are to a great extent determined by the shifting migration regime in Poland. Having previously provided visa-free entry for Eastern Block citizens, Poland transformed its migration policy upon accession to the EU in 2004. Visas for migrants from the former Soviet Union had been introduced in 2003, and the Schengen migration regime was fully initiated in 2007, further limiting access to residence permits and visas for third-country citizens (Follis 2012; Kindler and Szulecka 2013). In order to attract a cheap and flexible labor force, the Polish government has simultaneously introduced various arrangements that facilitate short-term migration for Eastern European citizens, including a simplified employment procedure in 2007, and visa-free entry for Ukrainians with biometric passports in 2017.

Additionally, Ukrainian migrants’ positionality vis-à-vis the Polish migration regime has shifted significantly in the wake of Russian aggressions. Provided they do not reenter Ukraine for over 30 days at a time, Ukrainian citizens that have fled the country are afforded temporary protection, a status recently extended until March 2025.Footnote 4 While enabling Ukrainians to legally remain in Poland, these measures are conditional and temporary: as I discuss below, only some Ukrainian migrants are provided with access to protections, leaving others outside of the state’s duty to care.

In the following sections I outline the fieldwork conducted for this study, then explore how the sex work crimscape in Poland shapes the lived realities of migrant sex workers.

Methodological Note

Interested in the impact of policy measures and governance strategies on the everyday realities of migrant sex workers in Poland, I build here on ethnographic research within sex worker communities (Denzin and Lincoln 2018; Dewey and Zheng 2013). I draw on my long-term engagement and participatory research with SWP and fieldwork conducted with sex workers in Poland as part of the CrimScapes project between November 2022 and March 2024.Footnote 5 Embedded in the everyday activities of the SWP collective since 2014, I have delivered outreach and support services to sex workers in sex work venues across Warsaw since 2016. This ongoing engagement has informed my understanding of the real-life outcomes of policies and law enforcement strategies targeting migrant sex workers. Additionally, my work with SWP and collaborations with sex worker communities allowed for an alternative to existing “top-down” studies “on” sex workers (Sanders and Hardy 2014: 4; Dewey and Zheng 2013; van der Meulen 2011), reflected in my research objectives, data collection process and analysis.

As well as participant observation, informal field interviews, and conversations with sex workers as part of my outreach activities, I conducted 35 in-depth interviews with indoor and outdoor sex workers based in Warsaw, who I met through my association with SWP, including 15 from Ukraine. As the Ukrainian sex workers I interviewed had been working in Poland between 7 and 23 years and all spoke fluent Polish, the interviews were conducted in Polish. When necessary, we also communicated in Russian. On average, interviews lasted for two hours. Research participation was voluntary and based on informed consent, which could be revoked at any time. To ensure anonymity, identifying data were not collected; interviewees were invited to provide pseudonyms for use in publications. All sex worker informants received an honorarium. Following transcription of the interviews, audio recordings were deleted for safety. The transcripts were subjected to thematic and theoretical coding (Braun and Clarke 2021).

All the Ukrainian sex workers I interviewed worked in the indoor sector, including managed or cooperatively-run brothels. Aged between 37 and 66, all had completed secondary or higher education and had previously worked in the service sector, public administration, health care, agriculture, or factories in Ukraine and in Poland. None reported being coerced into sex work in Poland by a third party or trafficker, and all had learned about this employment possibility from Ukrainian friends already engaged in sex work. Challenging economic situations and low and/or unreliable wages were some of the key factors behind their decision to seek work abroad. Many were single mothers and/or the only “breadwinners” of multigenerational families, migrating to secure an income and improve living conditions back home. Other motives included fulfilling economic and emancipatory aspirations, paying off debts, gaining financial independence, investing in their children’s education, and the need to accumulate savings due to a lack of pension benefits.

The Polish policy assemblage that relates to sex work, migration, and labor ensures the lives of migrant Ukrainian sex workers are marked by uncertainty, insecurity, and precarity. In the following sections I focus on three intertwined modes of sex worker governance within the Polish sex work crimscape—imposed mobility, legal ambiguity, and institutionalized abandonment—and explore the impact of these on Ukrainian sex workers in Poland.

“Always on the Move”: A Regime of Imposed Mobility

A leitmotiv of ongoing and repetitive mobility ran through all my fieldwork conversations with Ukrainian sex workers. This was exemplified by Masha, who had worked in various managed brothels in Warsaw for over 10 years and described herself as being “always on the move: a couple of months here, a couple of months at home. Coming and going, coming and going.” The lived realities and migratory projects of these women were marked by traveling back and forth between Poland and Ukraine in intervals ranging from a week to three months. Some appreciated that this enabled regular family visits, the opportunity to address household demands, and to rest after intense work in the night-time economy. Others, tired of their “nomadic lifestyle,” yearned for more stable living and working arrangements in Poland. However, as the Polish sex work crimscape effectively forced them to keep moving, this appeared to be impossible.

As Górny and Kindler (2016: 92) have noted, the “temporariness of Ukrainian migration” to Poland is greatly determined by regulations on entry and stay. Located beyond the securitized borders of the EU, for many years Ukrainians were subjected to stringent visa requirements that only permitted them to enter and stay in Poland for short periods of time. As described earlier, facilitated employment procedures and visa-free movement introduced what came to be known as a “time corridor,” obligating migrants to remain in Ukraine for at least 90 days in any 180-day period (Follis, 2012; Górny and Kindler 2016). These policies constrained permanent migration and imposed regimes of circular mobility that require repeated short-term cross-border movement over an extended period. None of these options provided migrants with access to the formal labor market, public healthcare, or welfare benefits.

Options for more permanent migration, such as long-term or permanent residence permits, or EU residency, are available to some migrants from Ukraine. However, these are predominantly only available through marriage or employment within the formal labor market. Criminalization and a lack of recognition of sex work as work make it impossible for Ukrainian sex workers to rely on their labor as grounds for regularization. Even when providing services in managed venues under contract-like arrangements, the labor relations of sex workers are unrecognized and subjected to criminal sanctions. Constructed as non-workers in criminalized workplaces, sex workers are relegated to the underground economy. This inhibits their inclusion into society and forces them to function in “permanent temporariness,” defined by Bailey and colleagues (2002: 139) as a relatively “static experience of being temporary.”

While two of the women I interviewed had managed to secure residence permits via marriage to Polish citizens, a situation described by Vuolajärvi (2019) as “precarious intimacies,” the others existed in a state of fluid circular mobility, employing strategies based on the migration regulations of a given moment: visa-free movement prior to 2003, and after 2017, 90-days tourist and visitor visas, or national work visas based on a simplified employment procedure. The latter required an employer’s written declaration of intent to hire. Once registered at the local employment office, this declaration enabled the applicant to secure a temporary work visa, typically valid for a year, which allowed them to remain in Poland for up to 90 consecutive days (Górny et al. 2018; Fedyuk et al. 2016). As the declaration served as a statement of intent rather than a formal contract, and therefore had no legal repercussions if the work did not materialize, it was relatively easy to buy from numerous intermediaries. Like Elena, many of my interviewees chose this strategy and were issued with visas based on a specific type of employment:

So you buy an invitation, open a visa and you go. And what is written on those papers? What kind of work will you do? It varies, usually cleaning, repairs, seasonal work or housekeeping.

–Nikita

While this procedure involved claiming bogus work–“I was a plasterer, cleaner, domestic help, strawberry picker, you name it!” Diana told me–it became a common regularization strategy until 2018, when the procedure was restricted by imposing a legal obligation to inform the employment office whether or not the visa-holder had actually taken up the indicated work (Górny et al. 2018). This costly and legally dubious strategy increased the dependence of sex workers on the intermediaries that organized their documents, and thus exposed them to such exploitative practices as inflated prices. Sex workers with declarations provided by their workplaces were particularly vulnerable, as this dynamic granted employers an additional means of control that could be leveraged for any reason. Nevertheless, several of my interviewees relied on their employers as the most accessible declaration providers while also recognizing that it made them more dependent on the employers’ goodwill, and restricted their ability to quit work.

This form of circular mobility not only affected the ability of sex workers to travel and legally enter Poland, but also the conditions of their stay, their work routines, and their living arrangements. To make up for the time spent outside Poland, they often worked intense and grueling schedules, often close to 24 h, seven days a week. As the temporariness of migration prevented them from seeking costly out-of-workplace accommodation, most of the migrant sex workers that I met were living at their workplaces and usually sharing bedrooms with several colleagues. This situation not only inhibited privacy and adequate rest, it also obstructed their inclusion in wider society by hindering a sense of being embedded in social relations and networks outside of work. Entangled sex work, tax and migratory regimes hence rendered them particularly exploitable, and generated conditions of insecurity and not being embedded in extra-work social and political lives.

Paradoxically, the outbreak of war enabled Ukrainian sex workers to make more permanent living arrangements in Poland, regardless of their migration status. Eight of my interviewees secured temporary protection status and have been granted the right to work—in legal employment—as well as access to public healthcare and child support. Others, while not classified as war refugees, may reside in Poland but have limited access to rights and public services. These war-related regulations establish conditions that scholars have termed “differential inclusion” (Andrijasevic 2009; Könönen 2017; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013), stratifying migrant populations by “creating different legal statuses with different sets of rights” (Vuolajärvi 2019: 9) for Ukrainian migrants based on the terms and logics through which they are categorized. Longer-term regularization prospects have not improved for any Ukrainian sex workers, as their occupation is still not recognized as work. The possibility of staying in Poland and gaining access to certain rights is perceived by many of my interviewees as an interim and conditional stage that policymakers could end at any time. This leaves my informants in a state of uncertainty and anxiety.

“Like Walking on Quicksand”: Manufactured Legal Ambiguity

The feelings of uncertainty and insecurity many Ukrainian sex workers share are not restricted to wartime: they are embedded in their everyday existence and relations with various state institutions. As described by one of my interviewees, working in a Polish brothel is “like walking on quicksand,” with circumstances shifting from one day to the next. This shared sense of uncertainty and insecurity particularly emerges during encounters with law enforcement agencies, such as the police and border guards, which can have an immediate impact on the working arrangements, safety, and lives of Ukrainian sex workers. Navigating the Polish sex work crimscape is certainly like walking on quicksand: the assemblage of policy regulations relating to migration, labor, and sex work shifts unpredictably and is often arbitrarily implemented, leaving migrant sex workers in a constantly ambiguous position vis-à-vis the state, its representatives, and the law.

This ambiguous positionality stems from the overlapping layers of regulation to which Ukrainian sex workers are subjected due to their migrant and occupational status. Engaging in labor that, while not criminalized, is neither legalized nor recognized as work, sex workers tactically engage with existing legal possibilities to remain in the country, such as tourist visas and employer declarations, even when not the “plasterer, cleaner, domestic help, strawberry picker” or tourist, as their visas would indicate. Their workplaces are criminalized, yet often tolerated. While third-party bosses, receptionists, and drivers are explicitly criminalized, they themselves—working and, at times, living in criminalized settings—are not legally considered victims or accomplices of these third parties. Although they work consensually, they are often discursively constructed as victims of trafficking by the media, law enforcement agencies, and policymakers, but their vulnerability to labor exploitation and mistreatment goes unrecognized. Unsurprisingly, Ukrainian sex workers are often unsure where they stand in relation to Polish law.

The ambiguity inscribed in the relationship between migrant sex workers and policy and law enforcement strategies hence indexes the complex and differentiated statuses they occupy within the Polish sex work crimscape. It also blurs the paradigmatic binary divisions between “legality” and “illegality,” exposing the reified character of such bureaucratic classifications in relation to the positionalities, practices, and real-life experiences of migrant sex workers (Ham 2017; Scoular and Sanders 2010). Most importantly, this situation underlines the role of the state and its institutions in “perpetuating the legally ambiguous modes of incorporation” (Kubal 2013: 582) that produce the conditional and precarious legal conditions in which migrant sex workers exist (Anderson 2010; De Genova 2002; Fabini 2017; Könönen 2017). Building on these insights, in the next section I demonstrate how the nexus of sex work and migration policies inscribes “legal ambiguity” into the lives of migrant sex workers, shapes their encounters with law enforcement agents and manufactures their vulnerability to policing and deportability.

The arm of law enforcement with which sex workers most frequently come into contact is the police, charged by the state with implementing the laws that criminalize sex work. While, as previously mentioned, sex workers are not personally criminalized, their legal and discursive construction as presumed victims of trafficking, pimping, violence, and sexual exploitation, as well as the criminalization of their workplaces, expose them to intense surveillance and policing. Most of the Polish brothels undergo several unannounced police raids a year, during which checks of identity cards and, at times, migration certification are conducted. The sex workers I spoke to were unsure about the purpose of these inspections:

They look at our documents, note down our data. Maybe they check whether any of us are wanted, being held, or missing? For the hundredth time.

–Olga

They check our documents, call somewhere. If you are clean, they give your documents back. They don’t tell us why they come, they don’t have to.

–Nikita

Many sex workers described feeling uneasy about these checks and concerned their personal data might be officially registered.Footnote 6 Some were anxious the nature of their work would be made known to family members and their social networks, or used against them in some undefined way by the police. While knowing in theory that, as Olga stated, the police “can’t put me in jail for the work I do,” fear that their engagement in sex work may involve administrative or criminal charges, as well as other, unpredictable legal consequences, remained. Two of the sex workers I spoke to described being handcuffed and escorted with their colleagues from their workplaces to police stations. Having been subjected to intimidating interrogations, they were released without being provided with any information about the legal grounds for their detention. Fearing exposure, ridicule, or further surveillance, both felt unable to file an official complaint or otherwise demand accountability from the police.

For many of my interviewees, concern about encounters with the police and other law enforcement agents was primarily related to their migrant status and regularization strategies. In their situation, the routine policing of sex work venues translated into crude and threatening enactments of the Polish border regime. Indeed, as Diatlova and Näre (2018: 156) have argued, policing strategies deployed in sex workspaces, especially when accompanied by administrative migration checks, can be understood as “practices of everyday bordering,” diffuse controls beyond the physical border that are enforced by state and non-state institutions (Anderson 2013; Balibar 1998; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Exposure to such bordering practices not only transforms sex work venues into spaces of heightened scrutiny, but also forces migrant sex workers to constantly navigate their assumed deportability (Diatlova and Näre 2018: 156; De Genova 2002; Fabini 2017). Regardless of their actual migration status, the majority of women I spoke with expressed fear that information collected during police check-ups might be passed to migration officials, thereby jeopardizing their current stay in Poland, as well as the possibility of securing a visa and entering the country in the future. They were also concerned their regularization strategies could be revealed and deemed to be dubious or illegal by law enforcement agents. Hence, during police raids many sex workers attempted to avoid their details being collected by running away or hiding under beds, on balconies, in bathrooms or closets, evidencing sex workers’ distrust towards law enforcement agents and their uncertainty about their own legal status.

Their concerns were not entirely unjustified: following raids on their venues, two of my interviewees, Nata and Nadia, were deported and banned from re-entering Poland for several years. Nata, deported in 2003, was detained at a police station for 24 h before being transported directly to the border. She was not permitted to take any personal belongings, including the money she had earned during her stay in Poland. Although the provision of sexual services is not legal grounds for deportation from Poland, Nata believes the nature of her work was the main reason for her expulsion:

I told them how I work, maybe I shouldn’t have, I don’t know. They sent me back. It was very unpleasant; when they brought me to the border, they said, “This one is a whore.”

Nata

Nadia was deported in 2013 following an anti-trafficking raid carried out by border guards. The only migrant worker present in a brothel at the time of the raid, she was taken into police custody, held for 48 h, and then handed a copy of the expulsion decision:

I had arrived in Poland just a month earlier. I had documents, they didn’t even check those. They didn’t care. […] I don’t know why they took me. They didn’t give me any papers, they noted down something on their computers, and didn’t explain anything. They let me go and said, “You are to leave for Ukraine in a few days.”

Nadia

Nata and Nadia were never told of the exact grounds for their deportations. Neither had claimed to be trafficking victims and both were in possession of valid visas.

Lastly, as third parties within the sex industry are criminalized, raids are often conducted with the aim of arresting brothel owners, who, as I learned through my fieldwork, are hardly ever on the premises. Many migrant sex workers fear these kinds of raids, as they can lead to brothel closures, leaving them without a source of income and, for many, a home. Described as highly disturbing and stressful, such raids are generally carried out early in the morning when workers are still asleep. Police units will storm the venue, search for weapons and drugs, interrogate sex workers, and secure evidence, including the nightly revenue and business phones. At times, the personal phones and earnings of sex workers are also confiscated, leaving them with little to no means of communication or survival. Evicted and jobless, sex workers—as non-workers and non-victims—are not entitled to any state support and are left to fend for themselves. Six of my interviewees experienced such raids.

“I Feel Like I’m Buried Underground”: Institutionalized Abandonment

Being left to fend for oneself without any support from state institutions is a defining feature of life as a migrant sex worker in Poland. Governed by the harmful and entangled assemblage of policies relating to sex work, migration, and labor, migrant sex workers are denied recognition as workers and forced outside the formal economy, and hence, beyond legal protection. The Polish sex work crimscape constructs migrant sex workers as policeable and deportable subjects, not as a community to be afforded rights and access to institutional care. Nikita compared these conditions to being “buried underground,” pushed into non-existence and invisibilized. Informed by the expanding scholarship on neoliberal, carceral, and necropolitical governance (Agamben 1998; Biehl 2005; Gilmore 2015; Leshem 2017; Mbembe 2003; Povinelli 2011), I perceive the state’s failure to provide sex workers with recognition, rights, and care as a form of institutionalized abandonment (Dziuban et al. 2021). Drawing on Leshem (2017: 630), I conceptualize institutionalized abandonment as a state’s “systemic withdrawal of care and renunciation of obligations toward a population under its governance.” Rather than exceptional and crisis-laden, institutionalized abandonment is, I argue, an ordinary, continuous, and chronic mode of sex work governance (Dziuban and Sekuler 2021).

As one of the organizing principles of the Polish sex work crimscape, institutionalized abandonment manifests in various aspects of the lives of migrant sex workers. The implementation of this principle is most evident in their misrecognition as non-workers and the criminalization of all their labor relations. Working in an informal labor market and criminalized settings deprives sex workers of the protections associated with legally recognized employment, including any benefits provided within the Polish Labor Code (Dziuban 2024). With no access to health and social insurance, sick pay, accident compensation, and parental and holiday leave, these migrant sex workers have to bear the resulting consequences and costs, such as being left without an income when ill, and either paying for expensive private healthcare or only seeking medical help when returning to Ukraine. Some sex workers, including many who have been in the industry for over 20 years, have no prospect of receiving a pension and must rely on any savings they can accumulate.

Lacking access to labor and welfare protections, sex workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitative and unfair workplace practices. Their dependence on the third parties who manage and benefit from their labor can translate into “highly precarious, unstable and intermittent labor arrangements, uncertainty with respect to the expected workload, continuity of employment, stability of income and overall job security” (Dziuban and Stevenson 2018: 408). Indeed, several of my interviewees described being subjected to instant dismissal, wage manipulations, and fines for being late, going shopping, and refusing to provide services to clients that made them feel uncomfortable, even scared. None of the workers I met had been provided by their bosses with sexual health material, such as condoms and lubricants, and I was informed about workplaces that lacked basic safety procedures, such as security personnel, door cameras, or alert systems. While my interviewees had varying experiences with third parties, some exploitative and coercive, others fair and reliable, a general lack of access to Labor Code protections significantly weakens their negotiating positions and deprives them of any legal means of challenging exploitative workplace practices. They are unable to access labor courts, go on strike, or even bargain collectively. As a result, migrant sex workers in Poland constitute a particularly vulnerable and precarious workforce, facing likely and largely unavoidable exploitation, abuse, and job instability (Anderson 2010).

The politics of institutionalized abandonment were particularly blatant during the COVID-19 pandemic. With sex work venues closed and policed, sex workers, regardless of their migrant status, were out of work and often lacked the money to meet their basic needs. Nonetheless, the state-relief programs created at this time to assist vulnerable populations did not recognize sex workers as such, and they were excluded from available governmental support schemes targeting legally recognized workers impoverished by the pandemic (Dziuban 2022; Dziuban et al. 2021). The neglect and invisibilization of migrant sex workers from protective state policies included exclusion from access to pandemic-related healthcare: as non-Polish citizens lacking medical insurance, Ukrainian sex workers could not seek help in public hospitals when suffering from SARS-CoV-2 and were not eligible for vaccination. Once the strict lockdown was lifted and borders opened, they were subjected to long periods of quarantine, for which they were required to rent designated and expensive apartments. Many migrant sex workers had to increase their workload to pay off the debts incurred in this way.

The institutionalized withholding of care from sex workers also manifests in their limited access to justice and protection when faced with abuse and violence. As the experiences presented in this article demonstrate, migrant sex work governance in Poland is guided by the logics of carcerality (Bernstein 2012; Gilmore 2015; Musto 2016; Wang 2018). Third-party criminalization and strict surveillance by the police and anti-trafficking agencies are the only measures the Polish state has mobilized in its stated intention to protect sex workers from victimization. While creating and reinforcing hierarchies of victimhood and granting sex trafficking victims with some form of institutional and legal support, these measures subject non-trafficked sex workers to policing, deportability, and hazardous working conditions. Pushed into the underground economy, sex workers beyond the figure of the trafficked victim are particularly vulnerable to client violence and left with little means of protecting themselves. Venue security schemes are seen as helpful, but pose risks to sex workers if they prove insufficient or fail, as this often leads to the police being summoned. In cases of emergency, many sex workers are reluctant to call the police, as it might adversely affect them, their colleagues, and their workplaces.

We don’t call the police to the premises if there’s a problem. For what? You’d have to admit that you work here, you see. […] They know that I work here, of course, but I’d have to say it myself, and then you are exposed. […] And who will be held responsible? The bosses, they’d go to jail. […] And they’d shut down the whole workplace. Everyone is afraid of that. What would I do then? Where am I supposed to go? Into some unfamiliar venue, a place I don’t know.

Diana

Due to these understandable fears, sex workers rarely ask the police for help. Hence, violent clients hardly ever face legal consequences for their actions, creating a sense of impunity for perpetrators and constructing sex workers as “easy targets” of abuse (Ślęzak 2017, 2019). In addition, sex workers that have attempted to report abuse have experienced stigmatization and re-victimization within the criminal justice system. These factors severely limit their access to justice when hurt (Dziuban 2024; Dziuban et al. 2021; Ratecka 2022, 2023).

Conclusions

The results of this research demonstrate how policies governing migrant sex workers in Poland interact with and add to sex work-specific laws: the Polish sex work crimscape emerges as a complex assemblage of policies and enforcement strategies relating to sex work, migration and border controls, trafficking, fiscality, and labor. Rather than working in isolation, these different forms of regulation and their implementation strategies intertwine to shape the working arrangements and lived realities of Ukrainian women providing sexual services in Poland.

This article also shows that this policy assemblage translates into three interconnected modes of governance of migrant sex workers captured by me as regimes of imposed mobility, legal ambiguity, and institutionalized abandonment. Firstly, these entanglements introduce conditions of imposed mobility, forcing migrant sex workers to keep on the move and denying them the possibility of creating more permanent living and working arrangements in Poland. As third-country nationals and non-workers operating within the informal economy, Ukrainian sex workers are unable to regularize their stay and function in a state of permanent temporariness, an ongoing circular mobility of enforced “time corridors”. Secondly, the Polish sex work crimscape inscribes Ukrainian sex workers in a state of legal ambiguity. As workers, employees, and migrants they are particularly vulnerable to policing, bordering practices and deportation, and provided with few tools to protect themselves against the discretionary power of law enforcement agents. Thirdly, intersecting policies and law enforcement strategies subject migrant sex workers to institutionalized abandonment, marked by misrecognition, omission, and the persistent withholding of rights and access to state support. As a result, Ukrainian sex workers are constituted as unworthy subjects of protection, existing beyond the state’s duty of care. They are made to operate in a labor market marked by precarity and a lack of rights, including protection from unjust work practices, such as exploitation, violence and job insecurity.

This analysis of the Polish crimscape has demonstrated how these three modes of sex work governance produce migrants selling sex as subordinated subjects and workers whose inclusion into society is ambiguous, provisional and conditionalized, but not entirely restricted or banned. To paraphrase Fabini (2017: 57), they are simultaneously subjected to different forms of policing and control, allowed to enter and stay (but only temporarily), and tolerated (even welcomed) in the informal, criminalized labor market. They are not granted recognition and access to state protections and certain rights, but, as an exploitable work force in a highly gendered and sexualized shadow economy, they are not excluded or rendered illegal either. As a result, insecurity, uncertainty and precarity are inscribed into the migratory projects, everyday lives, and working conditions of Ukrainian sex workers in Poland. Embedded in the sex work crimscape, they are made to navigate unfavorable, if not explicitly hostile, social and legal environments that rarely provide them with support from state institutions or law enforcement agencies.

However, the Ukrainian sex workers I have met are agential, resourceful, and resilient subjects. Unwilling to passively submit to the circumstances imposed on them by the Polish authorities, they adopt strategies to safeguard their survival, secure an income, and improve their living and working conditions. Hence, rather than reflecting a static and predetermined configuration of power, the Polish sex work crimscape can be understood as a dynamic site of interaction, within which policies, regulations, and law enforcement strategies are actively acted upon, negotiated, appropriated, undermined, and even circumvented by the migrant sex workers themselves. As an internally contested site of practice and mode of governance, this sex work crimscape also contains a potential for change that would allow the emergence of more livable futures for Ukrainian sex workers in Poland.