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BBC NEWS | Politics | UK should outlaw paying for sex

After endless amounts of backwards and forwards discussion, Harriet Harman is considering “banning” prostitution. Her reasons are something I applaud - to reduce the sex market, thereby decreasing the profits of sex-trafficking, and moving towards eliminating the modern slave-trade.

Actually, though, ‘banning’ is something that patently does not work as far as what is generally referred to as ‘vice’ is concerned. The American experiment with Prohibition of Alcohol is invariably cited as the case in point. On the other hand, the solution recommended by the English Collective of Prostitutes - to legalise building-based prostitution, as has been done in New Zealand - has also been proven not to work. In Amsterdam and across Belgium, building-based prostitution has been shown as the best of all worlds for people-traffickers. Their victims are out of sight, easy to control.

This sounds like the counsel of despair. If banning doesn’t work, and if legalisation doesn’t work, we are almost at the point of saying that we are living in the best of all possible worlds - and what a terrible world that is.

Some solutions, have yet to be tried. It has been hinted at in radio interviews, but the best solution is to target the clients. Any kind of restrictions on sex-workers invariably results in more pressure by pimps and traffickers on illegal immigrants. The threat of law is used against the victims. What’s more, those involved in semi-consensual sex, which is most prostitutes, can only pay the fines that are currently dished out to them in magistrates’ courts by engaging in more prostitution. Targeting the clients, on the other hand, goes (as the Inland Revenue say) ‘where the money is’. There are at least three kinds of prostitutes: trafficked women, semi-consensual prostitutes, and (most often heard on the radio) prostitutes who choose to do what they do. There is only one kind of client: men who want sex, and are prepared to pay for it. The experience of research in Belgium is that men are unwilling to distinguish between the three kinds. Target the clients, and the market reduces.

However, this approach can only be pursued if routes are created out of prostitution for those who want to exit the trade. This is not only for trafficked women. There are plenty of semi-consensual prostitutes, working to pay for drug-habits, or because their economic situation is one for which they cannot find another solution. We don’t (as yet) have sufficiently integrated paths out of drug-use. Any way out needs to be carefully constructed at a local level to provide drug rehabilitation, dental treatment (almost always essential for drug users), training for employment, social housing, and more. This can only happen if we commit to it as a society: far too often initiatives of this kind are held back because ‘ordinary’ people (or their local political representatives) say that they don’t want public money to go on helping people out of their own bad choices to this extent. It’s the same argument that says that teenage girls get pregnant in order to get housing benefit. True, or not? Hard to say. But irrelevant. In a civilised society, we need to invest in people’s lives to bring them back into mainstream society, no matter how they fell out of it. If we are not willing to pay the price, then we must accept that we will never approach an answer to human trafficking.

Which makes all of us guilty.

Today is Freedom Sunday, 25 March 2007, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, and the focus of a new generation of campaigners against the modern slave trade. It coincides with the release of the film Amazing Grace recounting the life of William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was a politician who became an evangelical Christian and then dedicated his life to a programme of social reforms, the most famous of which — and at the time the most unpopular and controversial — was the abolition of slavery.

Wilberforce stands as a powerful example to both Christians and to politicians. But it was not the example of Wilberforce, but direct contact with human trafficking, which brought me into politics.
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See: Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Police chiefs say no to red light ‘toleration zones’.

Red light toleration zones seem such a good idea. After all, they have them in Amsterdam, and everyone knows that the Dutch lead the way in a happy, liberal society with low teenage pregnancy and freedom for all. What’s more, any discussion about sexual politics always ends up with someone pointing out that things get worse if you drive them underground.

But myself, I couldn’t agree less. You see, I’ve lived in Holland, and I’ve worked with victims of people trafficking and the sex industry.

There is simply no way of organising the sex trade that makes it anything other than sordid. Although it’s always possible to find individual sex workers who boldly proclaim that they chose their career themselves and wouldn’t have it any other way, the broader facts speak all too clearly.

Statistically, you are far more likely to find your way into prostitution if you have been in care as a teenager, or if you have suffered child abuse. Among other studies, background to this is available in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation / NSPCC study Choice and Opportunity Project: Young women and sexual exploitation. In that study of 55 13-18 year old women, 39 had been in care or looked after by the local authority.

A very high proportion of people who are trafficked in Europe (read ’sold as slaves’) end up in the sex trade. Street prostitution is dangerous and humiliating for those who practice it, but building based prostitution is the real power base of sex traffickers - it is simply so much easier to coerce, intimidate and imprison in those circumstances. Legalised brothels in Amsterdam, and tolerated establishments in Belgium, have merely given the traffickers a safer and more defined market. A particularly disturbing report into the trafficking of children into the UK can be found here: Children - what the professionals know

But tolerance zones for street prostitution don’t help either. The control mechanisms that pimps use don’t depend on the legality of what sex workers do. The Home Office estimates that 95% of people working on the streets are using heroin or crack. The introduction of tolerance zones will not benefit these workers.

But what are the alternatives?

The Association of Chief Police Officers vice strategy, published today, is especially to be welcomed because it favours setting up safe houses and exit schemes. This is perhaps surprising coming from police chiefs, since in local situations it is often the police who favour Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and other penalty based approaches to tackling prostitution. From a police point of view, legalising brothels and tolerance zones would get the problem off their books. Exit schemes are a much harder — but better — approach to take.

Their new strategy perhaps reflects the realisation that the current practice of fining girls for soliciting only puts them back on the streets with a need to earn more cash fast.

But there is one legislative approach which has met with some success where it has been tried. Instead of fining the girls, fine the customers. One of the subtle and insidious degradations of the UK sex trade is that while sex workers are seen as dirty, cheap, and reprehensible, their clients are often able to continue respectable lives as business men, politicians, even senior policemen. Who has the most to lose by the threat of the courts? The clients. Who do financial penalties most put off repeat offending? The clients. Who is most threatened by their names and pictures appearing in local papers after a successful conviction? The clients.

It is a reflection of the nasty double standards that persist in the UK sex industry that this approach is often rejected at the local level. It appears that key figures veto it without giving any reasons.

You don’t have to think about it for very long to work out why.

See BBC NEWS | England | London | Human smuggling racket ’smashed’ and BBC News | A Modern Slave’s Brutal Odyssey

People trafficking should be at the top of the world’s agenda. Along with modern slavery - unpaid labour under the threat of violence - it is the most widespread form of man’s inhumanity to man. Slave produced products include Chinese paperclips, carpets from India, Pakistan and Nepal, chocolate from the Ivory Coast, charcoal from Brazil, and sugar from the Dominican Republic (Source Abolish.

20 million people across the world (source UN) are subject to bonded labour. Up to 179 million children suffer under the worst forms of child labour (source ILO) An estimated 5 million women and children are trafficked every year (UN). A recent US Government report estimated 600,000-800,000 people are trafficked across borders each year.

As far as the UK is concerned, Home Office research in 2000 estimated between 142 and 1,420 women and children trafficked into the country each year - but this figure was based solely on reported cases - and trafficking is one of the most clandestine crimes, it’s victims by and large unable to testify.