YES
Fiona Mactaggart
NO
Julia O'Connell Davidson
Dear Professor O'Connell Davidson
10th February 2008
I am one of a number of British MPs who have just dipped our toes into the hottest of issues—questioning the right of men to buy whatever kind of sex they want with any number of prostituted women.
A browse through any Waterstone's or WH Smith will show that there are dozens of titles promoting the image of the happy, liberated hooker. And tucked away in many of our staid regional or even national papers are advertisements for an endless supply of prostitutes—"fresh girls every week," as one paper put it.
In the House of Lords, peers bristle with indignation at any challenge to the "oldest profession," and point to the example of legalised prostitution in New Zealand. But according to Otago University, legalisation has led to no reduction in the number of child or street prostitutes in New Zealand. Legalised prostitution can also be found in Nevada. Last year, the Guardian reported on the plight of the prostituted women there. They were wholly under the domination of male gangmasters. Four out of five said they wanted to quit—not surprisingly, as a survey of (male) students at the University of Nevada showed a majority believed it was impossible to rape a prostitute. In Germany, during the 2006 World Cup, the authorities set up supervised brothels for soccer fans. They were flooded with an extra 40,000 foreign women who had been brought into the country and who operated outside of any control as their pimps made a fortune. Many liberal-minded people assume that full legalisation would be preferable to our current system, which criminalises brothel-keeping, pimping, kerb-crawling and soliciting but not selling or buying sex. But the idea that legalisation helps to establish a "clean" system, with less violence and trafficking, is wrong. In countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, which have gone for full legalisation, demand has increased sharply and the business is no cleaner. Prostituted women remain at the mercy of male controllers, whether under legalised or "tolerant" regimes.
In a perfect world, this would be only a supply-side problem and we could develop policies to tackle trafficking and crack down on pimps. But there have been only 30 successful prosecutions of pimps and traffickers in the past eight years. The few raids on brothels and massage parlours see the women arrested and treated as criminals to be deported while the men whose demand creates the trade escape all responsibility. The small number of successful prosecutions does not mean there is not a problem. There is, and it is now assuming alarming proportions. No one would claim that the incidence of rape was negligible because there are very few successful prosecutions of rapists.
So some of us feel the time has come to look at the demand side of the equation—that is, to make men rather than women criminally responsible. In 1999, Sweden turned the story upside down by passing a law decriminalising women in prostitution and by making it illegal to pay for sex. Swedish Conservatives opposed these measures when they were first proposed. So did the police. No longer. The Conservative-led government in Stockholm is happy with the law. And the Swedish police have found that the number of women trafficked into Sweden has dropped in comparison to the thousands still being trafficked into neighbouring Denmark.
The Swedish example is being examined in other countries. Norway and Denmark are looking at similar laws. The mayor of Amsterdam now says that legalising sex is only encouraging trafficking and child sex slavery. Using the euphemism "sex worker," as if a prostituted woman was just another employee in any old service industry, cannot hide the grim violence that lies at the heart of what men assume their money can buy.
Most men will oppose the idea that men rather than woman should be made criminally responsible for prostitution. But until the demand side is tackled, there will no end to the flow of trafficked women into Britain's sex industry.
Yours
Fiona Mactaggart
Dear Fiona Mactaggart
11th February 2008
If someone put it to you that paying for the services of a domestic worker should be made illegal on the grounds that a) domestic work is a sector in which women and children have been found living in slavery-like conditions; b) to act as another person's personal servant is demeaning in the 21st century; and c) most domestic workers would quit the "profession" if offered a better paid alternative, I wonder if you would agree? Somehow, I doubt it.
There is a world of difference between those who employ someone as a cleaner each week for three or four hours, pay them above the minimum wage and treat them with respect, and those who imprison a woman or child in their home, then beat, rape, threaten and starve her into total submission to their will. Yet you would, I hope, accept that there is a long continuum between these two examples, and that it is extremely difficult to specify the precise point on this continuum at which very poor working conditions slip over into forced labour or "modern slavery." Perhaps you would further acknowledge that legislation criminalising the act of employing the services of a domestic worker would be very hard to enforce, and would do nothing to protect the rights of those who currently rely on domestic work as a means of subsistence. What makes prostitution different?
Your answer seems to be that prostitution is uniquely oppressive because it always involves men's use of brute force to dominate helpless, hapless, choiceless female victims. This makes me wonder if you have been spending too much time reading salacious pulp fiction and rather too little time reading academic research on the realities of prostitution. If you studied the latter, you would find that images of female prostitutes as "sex slaves" offer a very thin and superficial? description of the experience of those who trade sex in Britain today.
Leaving aside the fact that not all those who sell sex are female, and that not all third parties who organise and control prostitution are male, research shows that the power relations surrounding prostitution vary. Yes, some people in the British sex sector are subject to serious forms of abuse and exploitation (as are sectors such as domestic work, construction, hospitality, and agriculture). But there are also adult women and men who enjoy a high level of control over their encounters with clients and make a great deal of money from prostitution. If an adult wants to pay a dominatrix to give him a spanking, or to pay an independent escort to spend every third weekend acting as his "girlfriend" or "boyfriend," and s/he agrees to do so, on what grounds would you justify state intervention to prevent it?
You give the impression that the overwhelming majority of female prostitutes in Britain are directly forced into prostitution by a pimp or trafficker. Despite acknowledging that there are no reliable statistics on trafficking, you confidently assert that the problem "is now assuming alarming proportions." But you confuse trafficking with migration (just because four out of five sex workers in London are foreign nationals, it does not mean that four out of five are "trafficked"), and you uncritically present figures extrapolated from guesstimates as though they were fact. If there are 25,000 trafficked women in Britain's massage parlours, why is it that when police raided 515 establishments during the course of Operation Pentameter in 2006 they found only 84 women and girls that they identified as "victims of trafficking"? How is it that the (presumably huge number of) men who provide the "rising demand" for child sex slaves and trafficked women can find these brutalised victims so easily, while the police struggle to locate them?
Raids on brothels by police and immigration officers yield many, many more "immigration offenders" to be deported than they do "victims of trafficking" to be assisted. I would venture to guess that there are more migrant women in prostitution who live in fear of being deported than who live in fear of being beaten by their pimps. And for those who are subject to violence from third parties, fear of deportation operates as a powerful disincentive to report such abuse.
Interestingly, however, men who buy sex do sometimes report to the police cases in which women or girls are being imprisoned and forced into prostitution. They are unlikely to continue to do so if the act of paying for sex is criminalised.
Measures to suppress prostitution—whether focused on sex workers or their clients—are consistently condemned by women who actually work in prostitution, and who argue that the further underground the sex trade is driven, the more vulnerable they are to abuse.
A law against buying sex might allow those who introduced it to bask in a warm glow of self-righteousness, but it will do nothing to improve the situation of those who work in the most exploitative forms of prostitution.?
Yours
Julia O'Connell Davidson
Dear Julia
12th February 2008
You suggest that prostitution, like other low-paid forms of employment, is capable of being regulated in a way which ends the oppression inherent in it. Yet where it is regulated, rape and violence towards women have increased, because legalising leads to more prostitution and no less violence. Nevada, where most prostitution is legal, has the highest murder rate of women of any US state.
Even if some prostituted women find it a congenial way to earn their living, the reality for most is that frequent daily unwanted sex is not just tiring, as is most low-paid work, but dangerous and alienating. Women who are penetrated by strangers 20 or 30 times a day experience themselves as disposable. If some can feel in control of this experience, I congratulate them—but too often prostitutes lapse into addiction and self-harm to survive the abuse they have experienced.
No one knows how many women are trafficked to Britain, but I am not surprised police victim figures are low. Moreover, none of the 84 victims of trafficking you mention were found as a result of a report by a client—so our present laws clearly do not, as you imply, encourage men to?report women who have been trafficked.
The conviction rates for rape or, for that matter, honour killings, don't reflect the real extent of these problems, but that is not an excuse for inaction. Doing nothing about trafficking for prostitution is equally intolerable. Police intercept evidence of telephone calls reveals people traffickers warning each other to avoid Sweden because profits went down when the purchase of sex was criminalised. The Swedish way works.
Yours ever
Fiona Mactaggart
Dear Fiona
13th February 2008
In Britain and America, a coalition of radical feminist and religious groups are involved in a moral crusade against prostitution. Their emotive campaign literature is awash with "statistics" that are flatly contradicted by empirical evidence (such as your claim that 40,000 foreign prostitutes were brought into Germany during the 2006 World Cup, a prediction that turned out to be a wild exaggeration) not to mention your claim that "Nevada, where most prostitution is legal, has the highest murder rate of women of any US state." Is there a link between the two things? If I were to observe that the US, where prostitution is illegal in most states, is one of the most rape-prone societies in the world, would this convince you of the need to decriminalise prostitution?
The idea that prostitutes are penetrated by 20 or 30 strangers every day is another of the "facts" that features in the abolitionist literature. As with claims about the numbers trafficked, campaigners treat worst-case examples as though they are the tip of an immeasurably vast iceberg. More balanced research evidence suggests that it is highly atypical for prostitutes in Britain, even in the harshest forms of prostitution, to have penetrative sex with 20 or 30 strangers in a day. But the image of a woman giving what is known as hand relief to five or six men in a day would not send quite the same delightful quiver of horror down the spines of "respectable" citizens, even if it is a more accurate representation of many sex workers' jobs.
There is huge variation between the regulatory regimes that operate in countries where prostitution is legal, and this makes it hard to generalise about the effects of legalisation. The impact of any policy approach to prostitution depends on the context. China, for example, criminalised the purchase of sex long before Sweden did, sending men caught paying for sex for long periods of "reform" in labour camps. This policy worked for many years in the sense of keeping the market small and underground. But with rapid economic growth in China, the market for prostitution has grown rapidly. It has not been legalised—sex workers and clients are still subject to brutal repression. But the alternatives to prostitution for many women, especially internal migrants, are so bleak that they take the risk. If you can't guarantee that there are better alternatives available for those who work in prostitution in Britain, what makes you think that a policy of suppression is the answer?
Yours
Julia
Dear Julia
14th February 2008
By "moral crusade" I think you imply puritanism. I am no puritan. In the teeth of tabloid outrage I proposed that indoor prostitutes working in pairs should not be prosecuted for brothel-keeping, because they are safer working together. Yet in all this correspondence you have offered no suggestions to stop or slow down the increase in sex trafficking.
Most women in prostitution have little choice or control over their work. But the men who pay them do have choice, and the campaign to tackle demand is a campaign to make men take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
Every reputable study shows that prostitution is dangerous. The murder rate for prostitutes is 18 times higher than in the general population. Studies of the estimated 400,000 prostitutes in Germany (half from eastern Europe) show more than half reported violence as they serviced men. I recall a Bulgarian prostitute saying she preferred to work illegally in Bulgaria rather than in Germany, where men would not wear condoms. This is not a moral crusade but a campaign for women's safety. Sweden has shown that criminalising the purchase of sex can make a difference. We should follow its lead.
Yours ever
Fiona Mactaggart
Dear Fiona
16th February 2008
I wonder what women who have decided to work together in indoor prostitution will make of the fact you are simultaneously defending their right to do so but calling for the criminalisation of the men upon whom their business depends. The idea of criminalising demand is sold on the basis that it offers a way of suppressing the market for sex that won't have a negative impact on women in prostitution. But a campaign against buying sex does nothing to reduce the stigma attached to prostitution. (If it is shameful and criminal to pay for sex, it is surely also a sign of deviance to sell it?) Since groups that are socially devalued are at the greatest risk of violence, anything that reinforces such stigma is dangerous.
Next, although there are some people who make a positive choice to sell sex and some who are directly forced to do so by a third party, there are many more who choose prostitution as the least worst option. A law against buying sex would not stop people from making the decision to work in street prostitution, but would rather encourage them to work from better hidden locations, and increase their dependence on third parties for protection (as has been the case in Sweden).
The law you propose also disregards the diversity of demand. While some clients are violent, others are themselves young or vulnerable in some way. Others still could be described as prostitution's equivalent of "ethical consumers." And then there are many who are none of these things. As there are lots of good reasons to avoid letting the state intervene in sexual arrangements between consenting adults, wouldn't your energies be better spent in inventing more creative, less punitive strategies for change?
Decriminalisation offers a better starting point for promoting the safety of those in prostitution. It would make it easier to identify cases of forced labour and investigate other crimes against those who trade sex, and allow people to work more openly and so more safely. I agree it will not solve all the problems, not least because a policy of decriminalisation (like a policy of suppression) does not address the background conditions that turn prostitution into the least-worst option for many people.
In Britain, it is our welfare and immigration regimes that limit the choices open to many poor women, while inadequately funded support services for drug users, the homeless and victims of domestic violence restrict the real options open to those who are affected by such problems. It is government, not some generic category of "men," which needs to take responsibility for this.
Yours
Julia
