Next week, on Report stage of the Policing and Crime Bill, the House will return to the provisions relating to prostitution. What is now Clause 14 (it was previously Clause 13) seeks to protect vulnerable and exploited women through making it an offence to pay for sex with someone who is subjected by a third party to force, threat or any form of coercion. The offence is a strict liability offence: in other words, it will not be a defence to say that you did not know that the person was forced to engage in prostitution.
The Bill itself can be read here. The provisions were debated in committee and there were some serious concerns raised about the clause. Baroness Hanham feared that it may mean that the Government was not planning a serious review of the issue. The problem, she argued, should be addressed by enforcing existing laws, not least in tackling the issue of trafficking. Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Dormer suggested the Government look at New Zealand’s decriminalisation of prostitution. Baroness Butler-Sloss, a former senior judge, worried that the clause may result in clients not being willing to go to the police when they felt that the women were being abused.
Lord Desai also developed the point that the clause may have unintended consequences:
“The clause implies that almost everyone supplying sexual services is somehow forced into it by the traffickers. It is essential to understand that there are women who provide sexual services either voluntarily, because of various circumstances which I do not have time to go into, or because they are trafficked. If you confuse the two and reduce demand, you are as likely to drive away the women who are voluntarily there and you will not do much to reduce trafficking. All that will happen if the price falls is that more ruthless and efficient suppliers will drive away the voluntary, one-person or two-person providers. You might therefore be just as likely to strengthen the traffickers. These sorts of perverse effects—or unintended consequences, as the noble Baroness pointed to in another context—are well known in economics.”
The Joint Committee on Human Rights has also raised concerns about the provisions. It too felt that they “run the real risk of making those engaged in prostitution even more vulnerable”.
What do readers think? Should we change the law to tackle the issue of prostitution? If so, is Clause 14 the way to go? Or should we have a more extensive review of the problem, perhaps even contemplating going down the route taken by New Zealand? Or should we be contemplating some other measures?
Lord Norton,
It may be helpful to remeber the role that prostitution has played in the developmnet of civilization. A good rule for me would be never to quote anything from memory but do you remeber Chaucer’s description of the Wife of Bath as a “a good Woman for any common man to wed and any Lord to bed”?
The social structure of providing sexual services to the elite by the less privileged mebers of society in circumastances which allowed the women doing so to maintainstable families beyond a class barrier and to work relatively few hours was used to spread the genes of the most successful males throughout many civilizations, to prevent inter-class hatreds and to transfer wealth between stable class communities. Prostitution was one part of a larger picture involving placed mistresses and widowed concubines.
Providing sexual services to the less weatlhy and to soldiers was always much riskier but in most civilized societies some of these women gained some support forom the other kind. It is in this latter riskier kind of prostitution that what Americans call pimps and madams play a major role. Leaving women in this situation without ties to more powerful people is not progress for anyone but predators. Traficking is not at all bad. I imagine that some Lords when they had finished doctoral studies as commoners hired a doctoral trafficker who placed them with a research firm, university or ministry and pimped them out of a percentage of their pay. If the goal is to wipe out the social structures by which the poor and naughty survive perhaps good old fashioned honest hatred is best. Otherwise it may be better to regulate the structures on which the aptly called underworld economy is based.
“should we have a more extensive review of the problem, perhaps even contemplating going down the route taken by New Zealand?”
Absolutely. We had problems with abuse in the sex industry prior to decriminalisation, which have been greatly reduced since then. Sex workers feel safer now than they did before. I’m not entirely sure of what the current UK law is (are sex workers themselves criminals, or just their clients, or just pimps and brother operators?), but the fact that nobody has to be afraid of going to the police has improved things a lot.
I should add, though, that we didn’t really have major problems with trafficking (being remote and all that), but a comprehensive review of all available options is definitely needed, and that includes looking at one of the most successful models in the world: New Zealand.
Is trafficking in the UK really as big a problem as some politicians like to make it out to be, though? The Guardian suggests otherwise.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails
Kadin, I’m so pleased to hear a New Zealand voice! I myself consider NZ to be at the forefront of dealing with the phenomenon of prostitution aka sex work to the optimum degree possible, ie at the cutting edge, so to speak.
Some states are regarded to be decriminalised, others regulated, in what might be termed by some the progressive, liberal approach to sex work, but by radical feminists the “commodification” and “objectification” of “prostituted women.”
My own view is that, given that those participating in the “sex industry” are consenting adults, able to exercise consent, and that their activities are not harmful to anyone else, this is no proper area for the law to intervene.
However, this is no reason for society to take no interest in the situation. It is surely in the interests of the wider community to ensure that the chances of sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV/Aids, spreading, and the chances of any violence or coercion occuring, are minimised.
It would surely also be better if those entering the sex industry did so fully aware of the risks that undoubtedly exist to some degree, as well as the opportunities that may not always fulfil expectations.
You mention the considerable improvement as a result of NZ sex workers feeling able to approach the police. I myself have written a posting on my blog entitled “Who Dials 999 in a Brothel?” which shows the sort of problem that arises in the UK, where, since 2003, owning, managing or assisting in the management of a brothel can result in imprisonment for seven years – twenty-eight times as long as the maximum sentence set by the Victorians for the offence in 1885.
http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/who-dials-999-in-a-brothel/
Don’t worry too much about confusion over UK laws. You share this problem with UK Home Office Ministers:
http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/human-trafficking-whats-human-trafficking/
Basically, so long as they’re not street soliciting, sex worker in the UK are acting perfectly legally in exchanging services for money.
However, this is more complicated in practice. The best guide on the web on UK sex industry law at present is here:
http://www.sw5.info/law.htm
I’m afraid I find in this case, and to be honest in almost all cases, that strict liability offences are invidious to natural justice in their indifferences to knowledge, intent or consequences. How two people paying for the same thing in the same way can result in one a criminal and the other not should cause the greatest concern. I don’t see you protect one group by almost randomly victimising another. If the offence was knowingly to use a trafficked prostitute or that a reasonable person would/should have have believed/realised them to be trafficked then I’d have fewer concerns.
As it is it just feels like an attempt to criminalise the use of prostitutes without actually being open about that or seeking public or parliamentary approval for the same and merely wrapping up this attempt in the clothes of preventing exploitation. The question surely is why with a pretty wide rage of powers to deal with trafficking and coercion that the present laws are not working – assuming even that statement is true. It does seem a familiar strand with this government that it passes criminal justice legislation and moves on to the next act with a lamentable concern as to whether the previous legislation is working, enforcible or has unintended consequences. Laws on their own are worthless and passing more no surer guarantee of success than the previous set.
What are the chances this clause will be defeated?
Croft – I think this clause in its original state will not survive the Lords. Whether the Parliament Act is finally used I know not, but the Committee Stage left me hopeful that some compromise might be reached on this and several other matters in Part 2 of the Bill.
Clause 14 (now) is positively dangerous for sex workers in that it draws the client into the web of potential defendent. It is a blackmailers’ charter every bit as much as the old laws against homosexuality.
Insofar as coerced sex workers exist, which is nothing like as far as some would have us believe, their chances of aid and rescue via a client would be reduced very considerably.
Consider, for example, this case, where a client aids a trafficked sex worker to escape:
http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/punter-rescues-29-year-old-thai-trafficking-victim-from-uk-brothel/
Today’s Judge “highly commends” such a man. Tomorrow’s judge won’t hand him out a fine, because if he’s any sense he’ll keep his name out of the papers, save his money,
leave the poor woman in situ, and walk away from the scene.
But poor Lord Brett at Lords Committee Stage! Where WAS Baroness Scotland? Somewhere in Clackmannanshire in a broom supboard if she’d any scence.
There he was, poor man, at Committee facing the combined forces of Baronesses Hanham, Miller, Stern and Howe, with many other Baronesses in the rearguard, together with the occasional Lord.
I mean, he did as competent a job as could have been done for the Government. He’s a good, solid bat. But he struck me as more of a Geoffrey Boycott than a Kevin Pieterson, if you know what I mean.
And what a dreadful wicket to be sent out to bat on! I can see Snowden from my window, and it must have seemed like batting at the lower end on the side of that.
I mean, really, how do you defend Part 2 of this Bill? It makes everything worse, exactly as Hilary Kinnell of the UK Network of Sex Projects told the Commons Committee it would.
Everything that’s already going wrong is made to go more wrong as if upping the penalty is the solution to everything, like turning up the gas on the back burner or something, and every so often you throw in a new offence if it improves the taste.
By the time the combined British Baronesses had finished with him, poor Lord Brett reminded me of the Bismark after the Fairey Swordfish torpedoed its rudder.
I’m unsure of where the ambiguity in the story you posted is. Entering an establishment, selecting a prostitute and then suspecting they are working against there will and leaving reporting it to the authorities should be a blameless act. Suspecting they are working against their will and having sex with them before reporting it to the authorities should be a crime. I don’t think “I helped her after I raped her” is a get out of jail free card (although I guess a Judge may accept that in mitigation).
Really the message should be to punters if you are not sure then don’t have sex with them.
I would have thought the parliament act couldn’t be used as there is a convention that it is only used when a proposal was part of an election manifesto, ot a constitutional matter. Or perhaps I’ve misunderstood.
There is a version of Hansard kindly provided by theyworkforyou.dom upon which outsiders such as myself may scribble our thoughts!
I have been carefully through a good section of the Lords Committee Stage debate, and utilised this adventure in democracy!
Anyone may view my thoughts on Clause 13 – the famous clause that makes clients responsible for the supply chain – and as many clauses as I’ve managed to get to by visiting the Lords Committee Stage debate at:
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/lords/?id=2009-07-01a.238.2
One has to scroll downwards.
Things get interrupted from time to time – the change in the Speaker of the Commons interrupted this Bill in both the Commons Report Stage and the Lords Committee Stage, which may be some kind of parliamentary record for a single Bill.
Anyway, apart from these interruptions, the Lords Committee Stage continues, inexorably, to progress, like the March of the Cybermen from Dr Who.
Anyway, I got as far as I could.
Now it should be pointed out that what I said was written before I discovered that the Home Office dossier on its famous 4,000 trafficked female sex slaves in Britain had finally been published by the Home Office after years of pestering and no doubt many Freedom of Information Act inquiries.
I deal with that in my blog here:
http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/exposed-the-home-office-dodgy-dossier-on-sex-slaves/
There have, of course, been other revelations on the Pentameter saga over the last week.
Finally, let me say this: the purpose of legislation is surely to ensure the necessary governance of a democratic society.
It is not to take the population as a whole and use the criminal law to bludgeon it into some notion of male and female equality as if the law were a club hammer, whether a lap dancing club hammer or otherwise.
Men and women are NOT EQUAL.
NEITHER is superior to the OTHER.
MEN AND WOMEN ARE AS BAD AS ONE ANOTHER.
Discuss.
I agree with Croft regarding strict liability. It’s unfair and it won’t help trafficked prostitutes.
Discouraging people from buying sex from exploited sex workers is surely a good thing, but when the customer is ignorant of the exploitation, no discouragement could happen. So, what does it achieve to prosecute people when they don’t know (or suspect) that the prostitute is forced? You might argue that it reduces the levels of prostitution overall by threatening potential customers with prosecution for an offence they can’t be sure whether they’re committing. But this would be a policy aimed at reducing all prostitution, and if that is the intention, it should be set out in the bill accordingly.
A measure should be clear in its objectives and aim to avoid side-effects. Otherwise it will not be clear why the measure is there, or how successful it is.
Perhaps the government wants to be able to say, ‘We caused the prosecution of X people for paying for sex with exploited sex workers,’ ignoring the split between those with different intentions/knowledge, and presenting as large a figure as possible. That would be a cynical attempt to give the impression of progress with the problem at the cost of criminalising people with no bad intentions.
jken146,
While I share some of your concerns about strict liability I agree with the principle of making potential customers consider if the prostitute is being forced against their will. Of course this would be easier if we had some sort of licensing regime that could give the customer confidence the premises was legitimate.
The balance needs to be struck so the customer doesn’t just go “I didn’t know because I didn’t check” but not so far that a reasonable person would have known something was wrong.
Writing as a historian of sexuality – in the late nineteenth century legislation was passed that indirectly criminalised prostitution. This appears to be the intention of the proposed legislation – and stopping all prostitution is certainly the ultimate goal of many of those currently campaigning against trafficking etc. There is convincing evidence in the 19th and early 20th century that numbers of prostitutes fell in the following decades – with an upward bounce during WWI. However this was achieved in the context of a culture in which all expression of sexuality was potentially shameful and subject to repressive control, and in which sexually active women were stigmatised. Women working as prostitutes were vulnerable and outcast from society. They were unable to leave prostitution accept by complete concealment of their former occupation.
We no longer live in such a culture and most of us no longer believe that sexually active women should be shunned or otherwise stigmatised. It is not clear on what moral basis our society today could, directly or indirectly, refuse women the choice to work as prostitutes. Therefore the aim should be to ensure that they can work in conditions of safety with the protection of the police and other regulatory bodies as appropriate. Existing law, if applied, is sufficient to enable the police to act against the genuine evils of force and coercion where they occur. Addressing these evils is often, in practice, no more straightforward than that experienced by police trying to deal with stalking, domestic violence and other abuse of women. It may well be the case that many sex workers have previously been abused but this does not give society the right to infantilise them or limit their autonomy. My belief is that feminist aims are best served by giving women who work as prostitutes equal rights with other members of society as workers. This means that sex workers cease to provide a reservoir of women who can be abused by men without fear of consequences. Legislation that decreases the visibility of prostitutes to police and encourages clients to hide or decreases client’s willingness to go to the police if they believe there are work place issues is unlikely to achieve the aim of increasing workplace safety for all sex workers. The New Zealand model seems most likely to achieve this. There has been some degree of community dissent in some NZ towns but this can be addressed on a case by case basis with the help of police and community groups and sex workers.
Clause 14 is going to have some serious negative consequences if you ask me.
I agree with the quote from Lord Desai, this clause strongly suggests that all women in prostitution are trafficked. Its wrong, but you hear arguements that rest on this principle all the time.
I think that the clause might have worse consequences that are currently being thought of. Because there is no method of accurately choosing between forced and voluntary sex work, clients may decide to go somewhere they know the women are trafficked.
That way, before they were going somewhere that may or may not be legitimate, but could still be risking a fine, but are now going somewhere that is not, but theres less chance of getting caught.
Theres also the matter of that bit about whether or not the client knows that the prostitue is forced or not. Thats very dangerous. How, exactly, are they supposed to find out? Ask? Its that bit that makes me agree with Lord Desai, that this clause is based off the idea that all women are trafficked. This is wrong. If there was a method of determining who is and who is not coerced, then I could agree.
And thats all that need to happen. Regulate it.
I think that a full review would be the best way to go. Tackle the issue and aim for legalisation. Instead of people not knowing if what they are doing is a crime or not, legalise prostitution and set firm boundaries.
Its not going to stop coercion, but it will help dry up business for those who do. I believe that it is the uncertainty of legitimacy and punishment that will drive clients away form uncoerced prostitutes and towards those who are.
And the clause highlighted by Lord Norton will do just that.
When considering the Governments response to the New Zealand model you need to realise that they are philosophically and emotionally opposed to it.
Nowhere is this clearer than two responses to questions raised to the Labour side. The first was regards to why the government had not taken a report from the NZ government on the success of the NZ model into account. The response from the Government was that they had not yet been able to obtain a copy of the report. Reasonable until you realise that the report had been available on the NZ government website for free download for the six months prior to the question being asked and that any teenager could have got the government a copy given about ten mins notice!
The second response to a question from one of the Lords was that the minister had “spoken to somebody who had spoken to somebody who had spoken to two NZ sex workers who said that the model did not work” could they have shown more clearly that they are not interested in letting facts get in the way of their policy!
The New Zealand model works because it gives power to the sex workers involved, something that the UK changes clearly do not address
I’ll start with the case where both participants are consenting to sex. Whether paid for or not I don’t see where the law should be getting involved. My remaining comments apply to the situation where one participant is not consenting.
Non-consensual sex is rape and rightly considered to be a very serious crime. I don’t think it’s something where a “I didn’t know” defence should be an easy one. Just as in non-paid for sex – it is beholden to the participants to be reasonably sure consent is being freely given. For example if one person is falling over drunk or high enough on drugs not to be giving lucid responses then the other participant should ere on the side of caution and not have sex with them. I appreciate this is a difficult area and have some concern about the strict liability clause, however it has to be a strong enough clause to make punters think about the consequences of their actions. If the alternative is to encourage a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mentality amongst customers the law would be failing those being exploited. The law should be encouraging potential customers to frequent establishments where they can be sure the prostitutes are not being forced into sex with them. Obviously this would be easier if we had some sort of licensing regime to separate legitimate establishments from the criminal underworld that operates with “sex slaves”.
Not being familiar with the Sexual Offences Act that is being amended in this bill (oh to have a copy of what the bill would look like after amendment!) I’m unsure if this bill addresses any of the other problems with our sex laws. Certainly I would prefer to see legally licensed brothels that would bring consensual prostitution off the streets so a clear distinction can be made between them and the criminal underworlds inhumane operations.
Alex Bennee – I agree with your basic line of thought. However, the present Clause 14 causes the offence to be committed at the point were a client “makes or promises payment for the sexual services of a prostitute,” wherever in the world we are talking about.
In these days of the internet, it is perfectly possible, indeed increasingly likely, that by the time the sex worker and the client meet, the client would already have committed the offence as drafted, and in terms of guilt or innocence (though not, perhaps, in terms of sentence) would have nothing to gain or lose whatever he or she did.
You seem to assume all encounters between sex workers and clients involve penetration in some form. It is by no means uncommon that they do not. Purist domiaatrixes in the world of BDSM would never countenance penetration by their clients, for example, and in the case of disabled male clients (and some others who employ sex workers) a significant proportion of clients are impotent.
Among the mainstream, some sessions consist purely of what might be considered counselling.
As there is no reason to believe establishments, licensed or otherwise, will know what motivates their sex workers any better than the clients will, without disproportionate delving into the sex worker’s privacy, I’m unsure what regulation has to offer in this regard.
If an adult is “falling over drunk or high enough on drugs” do they not have responsibility for their actions in reaching this state, though I agree this should not be a green light to others to take advantage, though commonly those others may be approaching a similar condition.
Personally, I think small brothels should be left alone by the Criminal Justice system unless there is good reason to intervene due to suspected breaches of other laws. I would draw the line at three sex workers, the Royal College of Nursing at four. After that, I think they should require planning permission. I also think managers and assistant managers should require low cost annual licences, but I do not think buildings should require licences because bricks and morter don’t create the problems licences seek to address.
Briefly I am with Croft and Stephenpaterson here. I haven’t been involved in this bill excpt as a glancing observer because of other bills taking up my time but I hope I shall be in Chamber to vote out this clause.
Alex,
I support your comment: “The law should be encouraging potential customers to frequent establishments where they can be sure the prostitutes are not being forced into sex with them. Obviously this would be easier if we had some sort of licensing regime to separate legitimate establishments from the criminal underworld that operates with “sex slaves”. Except perhaps i feel the law should tolerate rather than encourage porstitution. My comments were rather general but the truth is a “good” licensing regime — which is never easy to achieve — provides a thin end of a wedge in dark and dangerous places in society. First becuase if one can believe in the concept of a “good” pimp or madam or other such type in relative terms they will be effective in opposing the most destructive and corrupting parties who have made their lives hell. If the police are allowed to give them legitimacy then at least for a generation the worst actors will meet real opposition such as they are not likely to meet in any other circumstances. But their is another fact: Some costumers want to be abusive, cruel and dehumanizing and a society has to decide how much of human behavior to be aware of and how to prohibit the most dangerous parts of human sexual expression. Customers killing a sizable number prostitutes is fairly normal for example as something tolerated by many societies. I think effectively mitigating that tendency is a sign of what might be called goodness.
I am writing on behalf of the most vulnerable clients who hire sex workers – disabled men and women who find themselves rejected. Some cannot even masturbate, so they need sex workers in order to get sexual relief. It would be very difficult, indeed impossible for some of these people to know whether the sex worker had been pushed into the work or not. I run a website for disabled men and women to access responsible sex workers but we do not cover the entire country.
There will be a conference on this very subject at the Royal Society of Medicine on 13th November, with discussions and demonstrations to show the needs of disabled people being met by sex workers. A tetraplegic man who cannot feel beneath his neck and who cannot reach up to touch his own face, will be helped by a sex worker to enjoy sexual pleasures by her making love to his head. A deaf-blind man will enjoy a striptease act, using an interpreter.
This shows that sex work is very important work indeed, and should no longer be treated like a criminal activity. There are enough laws to stop trafficking, so leave sex work out of the equation.
I have spent the past fourteen years investigating the British sex industry from the point of view of preparing numerous guidebooks and now a website covering all aspects of it, most notably eleven editions of the McCoy’s British Massage Parlour Guide. In fact I discovered recently that my book had been used by the Home Office in assessing the scale of sex trafficking in Britain.
See Page 17 of the Home Office report covering this issue.
http://www.cscs.ucl.ac.uk/club/e-library/organised-crime/organised.pdf
In it the total number of ladies I indicate are working at massage parlours throughout Britain outside London is taken as an underestimate on a scale of 4.5 of the true number of ladies working in the sex industry, since I underestimated the figure for London by that scale when compared with the Poppy Project’s figures, who do their estimates purely over the phone and only in Greater London. For the past fourteen years, on average, I have spent two or three days each week on the road, visiting every corner of the country from Bodmin to Aberdeen.
My figures for London were underestimates because I was only considering ladies working from commercial premises and in 75% of London boroughs, including nearly all in South, Central and West London, such establishments are not tolerated. That is not the case in most other British cities. Furthermore they simply added the total number of ladies working at each parlour outside London and assumed that total was the total number of ladies working, before then multiplying it by 4.5, to get the total they used.
In fact many ladies each week work different days at different parlours, so adding my figures up was counting many women twice or even sometimes three or four times over. I even know of one lady who did a different day at a different parlour in Manchester every day of the week at one time. She was admittedly an extreme case, but lots of ladies work at two or three parlours, so the Home Office estimate for the scale of indoor sex workers should have taken my figures and reduced them, not increased them by a factor of 4.5.
Consequently it hardly surprised me that the Police should find so few trafficked women when they embarked on Operation Pentameter. What did surprise me in retrospect was that the Home Office despite using my figures, never asked me to comment on them before they used them to come up with their artificially inflated estimate.
Then again one has to remember the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman is on record saying she wants to see an end to prostitution and when one considers the reaction of the government to the recent case of Professor Nutt, I sense that Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman are not interested in facts, but simply their own prejudices. The fact that recently the Metropolitan Police have had no success in finding trafficked women bears this out. The police are not that inefficient.
Most people running massage parlours want to stay on the right side of the police and that means they know they need to do their best to stay clear of drugs, under age girls and coerced or trafficked women. I have even been given a letter which was distributed to parlours in Stoke-on-Trent by the local vice squad spelling this out. The vast majority follow these guidelines and while some have problems with drugs, they can easily tell if a woman has been trafficked.
And while I accept there is a very small problem of trafficking, mainly at a small percentage of those establishments run by people from the Far East or Eastern Europe, I urge all members of the Upper Chamber who read this to throw out as many of the clauses pertaining to prostitution as they feel they can. In particular the clause pertaining to the ability of the police to close down parlours instantly, which could easily then be adopted by misguidedly inexperienced yet zealous junior officers who will only drive the trade underground where they cannot monitor it.
I remain
Yours Faithfully
George McCoy
I think the actual intent of the clause was made clear by its original wording, which sought to criminalise being sexual with anyone ‘controlled for gain’. This, thanks to the Sexual Offences Act 2003, covers everyone and anyone who chooses to work for an agency, in a brothel, or in any other circumstances that would be seen as entirely usual in any other industry.
(It also leads to the hypocrisy that complains that criminals are involved in running agencies and brothels while simultaneously ensuring that everyone who does so is a criminal!)
Instead, we now have a clause that seeks to criminalise being sexual with someone who has been exploited, even if there is no possible way to determine in advance if that is the case.
Before, the agenda was to make it impossible to continue to use agencies and visit brothels legally (despite the now abandoned Government proposal made after the Paying The Price consultation to stop criminalising as a brothels anywhere with two people work).
Now, it’s to make it impossible to know if ANY commercial sex is legal.
Consider the case of someone who chooses to start sex work, and at some point visits a client who threatens them that if they don’t do X without payment, they will be beaten. They leave, instantly, but from the moment they are threatened, it will be illegal for anyone to pay to do X with them again.
A – the current client – has no knowledge of the incident and B – the worker – may well regard it as irrelevant to the current situation, but C – the past client – has “engaged in exploitative conduct of a kind likely to induce or encourage B to provide the sexual services for which A has made or promised payment” for something that’s a “gain” under the SOA 2003.
The strict liability has to go.
It would also be good to see a time limit on how long ago the exploitative behaviour was in the past. Thanks to the SOA 2003, once you offer sex for money to anyone for any reason – including being forced – you are legally a ‘prostitute’ for life and there is no way to stop being one.
Here, once you’ve been threatened, you are a legally untouchable prostitute for life… even in the circumstances above.
My background includes five years working at the leading sex work project for male and trans workers.
As a member project of the UK Network of Sex Work Projects (UKNSWP), SohoBoyz has contributed to towards the Networks response and concerns re: this Bill. The UKNSWP is concerned with the change in section 14 from ‘force, threats, violence/other coercion or deception’ to ‘exploitative conduct (including force, threats, violence/other coercion or deception)’. The UKNSWP is concerned regarding how vague and open to subjective, individual interpretation this terminology is. Like the previous terminology of ‘controlled for gain’, used in the Sex Offences Act 2003, ‘Exploitative Conduct’ is a contentious yet unclear term, which when brought to court could become piecemeal via case law, depending on the individual judges and juries interpretation of it.
The UKNSWP strongly believe in addressing violence against sex workers and that this must be taken seriously as an issue and addressed explicitly through the use of statutory law.
The UKNSWP wish also to make the point that criminalisation of paying for sex will not address many important issues:
• It does not address sex workers’ exposure to violence since violence against sex workers is frequently associated with refusal to pay. Criminalising payment for sexual services could increase this kind of violence and make prosecutions for violence more difficult.
• Criminalisation of clients through kerb-crawling legislation already undermines street sex workers’ safety by making their activities more covert and criminalisation of clients who patronise indoor workers is likely to have the same effect.
• UKNSWP also consider this approach to be ineffective and potentially counter-productive in addressing trafficking and coercion, since clients who might be helpful in reporting such situations will be discouraged from doing so for fear of incriminating themselves.
• The UKNSWP also consider that for men who sell sex (mostly to other men) this cause has the potential of taking gay rights back to pre-Wolfendon days, where “exploitation” and bribery were common place amongst sex workers and their clients (at that time related to the engagement in homosexual activity as opposed to prostitution), with an emphasis on the purchase of sex, rather than the issues of same sex liaisons.
• The proposed offence should specify that the crime is knowingly paying for sex with someone who has been trafficked or forced by another individual. Any such offence should not be a strict liability offence. Those accused of this offence should have the opportunity to show they did not know someone was “subject to exploitative conduct”.
While it would be relatively easy to debate the nuances of Section 2 of this Bill dealing with sex work, the danger would be in losing sight of the larger picture. While I agree with the commentators and legislators who have raised the issue of unintended consequences, the more important issue is the disastrous history of public policy in this field by HM Government over the last 150 years. The UK is not unique in this regard, indeed it is difficult to identify a jurisdiction in which legislation directed against sex work has achieved its stated objectives, including even China’s draconian laws. (1) The question of legislating morality is a vexed one with roots in the works of John Stuart Mill, Wolfenden, the Hart-Devlin debates and Joel Feinberg’s analyses of the principle of harm. (2) Even setting aside such legal philosophy, the history of laws prohibiting human behaviour on moral grounds has been a disastrous one, typified by the prohibition of alcohol and the war on drugs. Legislating sexuality is no exception. Basically such laws have been instrumental failures and thus lack legitimacy, while causing much harm by creating conditions conducive to the growth of organised crime and corruption. The noted Australian jurist, Marcia Neave who conducted a Royal Commission on Prostitution observed that the law shapes but does not influence the extent of prostitution. (3)
The current legislative zeal of New Labour to curb sex work appears to stem from moral panics around the White Slave Trade, the nature of which appears to have been as dubious today (4) as the original fabrications of William Stead in the 19th century, and an effort to appease the Neo-Gladstonian rescue industry (5). As other commentators have observed, the Government’s Nelsonian visual tactics with regards to the evaluation of the New Zealand (and similar Dutch and Australian) reforms is worthy of comment. Public policy should be soundly informed by and based on high quality evidence. In this regard it is worth noting that New Zealand’s reforms stemmed from another Labour Government’s interpretation of its obligations to promote health under the Ottawa Charter of the World Health Organisation. By funding and empowering New Zealand’s sex workers to promote sexual health the Government there set in motion a successful campaign for repeal of the repressive colonial legislation which created insurmountable barriers to achieving these health goals. In debating this piece of legislation, members might heed the words of Helen Clark, then Prime Minister, who stated that this is neither a matter of condemning nor condoning sex work, but a simple one of protecting the welfare of the vulnerable and marginalised. We must ask why this Labour Government seems intent on betraying its roots and further disadvantaging one of the more vulnerable groups in our society, under the guise of protecting them, substituting social exclusion for its vaunted theories of social inclusion. (6)
Abuse undoubtedly occurs in sex work, and would be hardly unique in employment. Improving working conditions will not be achieved by prohibition but by transparency and affording sex workers the employment and health and safety protections enjoyed by other workers. (7)
While calls for withdrawal of Part 2 and referral to a review process appear sound, the history of government reviews of sex work over the last two centuries demonstrate only a triumph of ideology over evidence and have been roundly condemned by researchers. Any review must be at arm’s length and provide appropriate deference to the women and men who actually work in sexual exchange, whose opinions have largely been ignored to date.
Dr Michael Goodyear, Department of Medicine and Women’s Centre, Dalhousie University, Canada
United Kingdom Centre for Sex Work Research and Policy
References
1. MDE Goodyear. Incarceration of female sex workers in China and STI/HIV. Programmes that are not rights-based are doomed to fail. Sex Transm Inf 2008 84: 1-2
http://sti.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/84/1/1
2. MDE Goodyear. Remembering Ipswich. The case for decriminalisation of prostitution: A human rights and public health perspective. Working Paper 2006
http://myweb.dal.ca/mgoodyea/files/criminology/Should%20Prostitution%20be%20Decriminalised
3. M Neave. Inquiry into Prostitution, Government Printer, Victoria 1985
4. N Davies. Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution. The Guardian. October 20 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails
5. L M Agustin. Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. Zed Books, 2007
6. MDE Goodyear, L Cusick. Protection of sex workers: Decriminalisation could restore public health priorities and human rights. British Medical Journal BMJ 2007;334:52-53 (13 January)
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/334/7584/52
7. K Shannon, T Kerr, SA Strathdee, J, Shoveller, JS Montaner, MW Tyndall. Prevalence and structural correlates of gender based violence among a prospective cohort of female sex workers. British Medical Journal BMJ 2009;339:b2939
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/339/aug11_3/b2939
So basically, because some prostitutes are trafficed, all prositutes are assumed to be trafficed.
Let me see. Some MPs have defrauded the tax payer, so all MPs must be assumed to be fraudsters.
Some Lords are under investigation by the police for fraud, so we have to assume that all Lords should be having their collars felt by plod.
Has a certain logic too it.
Well, it’s the eleventh hour, and it’s probably far too late in the day, but for the sake of the record, I’d like to propose a new clause in the Policing and Crime Bill.
My proposed clause is towards the end of this comment.
At the very least this should flag the matter up for consideration in the future. It would be nice, though, if it could be debated.
THE ISSUE
We have a problem over the word “control” in our “controlling [a sex worker] for gain” legislation, in that we lack any statutory definition of what ‘control’ means. At the same time we have a very wide definition of ‘gain’ including the goodwill of someone which may lead to future gain, which seems to me several bridges too far.
That the law is ineffectual is revealed in any case by the existence of Clause 14 in the present Bill, referred to in this post. Furthermore, the unsatisfactory nature of the lack of definition of ’control’ has caused the Government to twice (I believe) revise the draft Clause 14 already, so the Government itself cannot be happy with the situation.
This matter is exacerbated by the failure of the UK Government to adopt the internationally agreed definition of human trafficking for prostitution or sexual exploitation as laid down in Article 3 of the Palermo Protocol (which it has of course signed up to) and instead go off on a completely different tangent of its own making (in the Sexual Offences Act 2003) to justify the two Pentameter inquisitions of recent years.
The result of this is ridiculous charges in which persons can be accused of human trafficking for arranging a taxi for adult sex workers to voluntarily engage in consensual sex.
http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/ipswich-is-this-a-real-sex-slave-driver/
In fact, the present UK definition of human trafficking for prostitution or sexual exploitation is prohibited by the Protocol, through its very definition of what human trafficking “shall mean.”
See Article 3(a) here:
http://untreaty.un.org/English/TreatyEvent2003/Texts/treaty2E.pdf
And compare with Sections 57-60 here:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/Acts/acts2003/ukpga_20030042_en_5#pt1-pb15
* * *
But back to ‘control for gain.’ There is evidence to show that the lack of definition of ‘control’ affects the safety of sex workers involved in prostitution, by depriving them of the protection of someone near at hand to act on their behalf when things go awry with a client, or clients, who lose control.
A good example would be the case I know as the Wolverhampton Wanderers case, reported by the Worcester News. My version of this story, with the link to the source, is here:
http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/the-wolverhampton-wanderers/
We do, of course, only have the Worcester News’ account of the case to go on. It refers to mysterious complaints by neighbours without elaborating on the nature of the complaints. However, as the two women who constitute the Wolverhampton Wanderers returned home to Wolverhampton each night, whatever the complaints were presumably only occurred during the day.
It is difficult to think of justifiable complaints that do not have other remedies, for example through appropriate use of local government powers over noise, litter etc.
* * *
In the former UK colony of Hong Kong, the inheritance of UK legislation in this area has been blamed for causing a number of sex worker deaths:
http://stephenpaterson.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/uk-brothel-law-blamed-for-hong-kong-murders/
The UK authority on such matters is Hilary Kinnell and I am sure she could provide further data for the UK on sex workers murdered in similar circumstances.
* * *
Now it is obviously in the interests of an independent sex worker to have a person at hand in an emergency in a position to raise the alarm and to intervene if required on safety grounds.
Such persons cannot be expected to live off fresh air.
The present offence of controlling for gain, whilst aimed at those with pre-existing malicious intent, has a scattergun effect of bringing down also those who are valid stakeholders required for safety.
THE LEGISLATION
…is in Sections 53 and 54 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.
Section 53 creates the offence, and Section 54 defines some terms, but not control:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/Acts/acts2003/ukpga_20030042_en_4#pt1-pb13-l1g53
THE CASE: R v MASSEY
Only one significant case has occurred to provide case law in this area, R. v Massey in the Court of Appeal [2007] EWCA Crim 2664.
http://www.casetrack.com/crimeline/2007-247-1
However, this case is more useful in determining what control is not rather than what it is, for which purpose the Court turned to the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
Massey – who I will call ‘John’ (being averse to the common practice of naming one party by the surname and another by the forename), met Diane in 1997 when she was 19 and working as a street prostitute in Plymouth. ‘John’ was 35.
To quote the Court of Appeal judgement: “He picked her up and they went to his flat. She told him about her background, which had been troubled. She had been taken into care from the age of 2. While in care she committed offences of loitering, dishonesty and violence. She developed a drug habit. When released from care at 16, she took to working on the streets.
“….Within a few days he took her in to live with him. She lived with him until she finally left him on 3rd January 2006.”.
At this point she reported the matter to the police.
So their relationship lasted over eight years, during which it transpires she had left him and returned eight times, prior to her last departure.
John’s defence in court was that: “his reason for taking her in was a mixture of pity for her, because of her life story, and having strong immediate feelings for her. He did not like her working as a prostitute and, from the outset, he tried to dissuade her from doing so, but she would not give up the sex trade because of the money it brought her. She spent all that she earned on herself principally on clothes and betting. He supported himself by freelance photography, including nude shots of Diane, computer repairs and acting as independent bookmaker. Since she was insistent on continuing to work as a prostitute, he helped her organise her life in a way which would make things safer for her. He kept details of appointments in a diary at her request, because her own organisational skills were so poor.”
Diane, however, argued that “throughout the time they lived together he never worked. They both claimed income support and housing benefit. Apart from that, their income was what she earned from prostitution… he took all her money and decided how much she should have back. He used to gamble with it. He also organised her methods of work. Initially she was earning between £500 and £650 a week on the streets. At his instigation, she advertised in the ‘Free Ads’ and he decided on the wording. This meant that clients would then come to their flat and her earnings rose.
“He also set up a website for her. He arranged bookings with clients and he kept a diary which was produced as an exhibit. The diary recorded “in calls” and “out calls.” In calls were where the client came to the flat. According to Diane, [John] would on occasions watch through a spy hole and comment on her performance.
“Out calls” were when she went to the clients. [John] would drive her there. He would decide whether a client could take photographs, and he prepared a form of agreement for a client who wanted to take photographs to have to sign.
“According to Diane, he was domineering and violent towards her. Sometimes she did not want to perform particular acts, but he would go on about the money. She felt intimated and so did as he wanted.”
* * *
A number of observations can be made about this case. Whatever the ins and outs, at a strategic level effectively what John did was to take a street sex worker and attempt to transform her into what might be described in today’s UK as an escort.
We are limited in knowledge by what is said in the judgement and we are not jurors nor judge hearing first hand evidence in the case. There again, I am not attempting to retry the case nor defend either party.
The judgement states that Diane developed a drug habit whilst in care, but makes no reference to this continuing during the pair’s time together.
Studies reveal that life as a street sex worker is extremely dangerous, and that whilst life in the indoor sex market can hardly be described as universally safe, it is generally a great deal safer than the outdoor alternative. They also reveal that far fewer off-street workers use Class A or Class B drugs (this was before cannabis was reclassified as Class B). More are registered with GPs, less have sexually transmitted infections, their general aspirations are much higher etc.
All things being equal, then, meeting someone who would take her off the streets and enable her to work off-street, providing a venue where she could meet clients and providing transport to and from clients’ homes (and hopefully a first port of call for ‘out-calls’ should things go awry when dealing with new clients) should make Diane significantly safer than she was on the streets and be of major benefit to her as she was aged 19.
The reasons for this are not complex. All persons, including not only clients, but also those who are neither the general public nor potential clients, who might attack her on the streets, have been taken out of the equation. This would rule out a Peter Sutcliffe, a Steve Wright and a Jack the Ripper, for example, who all preyed on street prostitutes. It would also rule out the bulk of prostitute murderers, who are rarely serial killers.
Of those who remain, who would murder and assault indoor workers, they would surely be less likely to pick Diane as their prey given knowledge that an agency or third party knew of her whereabouts, given easier targets.
So John, it seems, had significant utility to Diane, whatever his bad points.
This goes further: she is in business as a sex worker. He provides a shop window for her on the web, produces marketing materials and handles basic administration in the form of a diary. Even she says her earnings rose, though we do not know to what level.
Despite all this, she is not happy. She leaves him eight times in as many years. Yet she comes back each time. As there is no evidence she is coerced into returning, it seems fairly clear that he fulfils certain needs for Diane that she, alone, cannot fulfil, whatever these needs may be. She may or may not have returned to the streets when she left him, we are not told.
John receives and handles the money. But there are innumerable partnerships outside the sex industry in which one or other partner handles the money, very often not the partner earning the money. And we should remember that Diane had committed offences of dishonesty whilst in care, as well as of violence.
Is he, all in all, a bad chap who deserves imprisonment? Well, we could clearly accuse both of benefit fraud and very possibly of tax evasion, but we are talking of an offence here which is applicable to one – John – and not the other, despite both being over 18 throughout the saga, clearly competent enough to give evidence, and the sexual exploits of Diane being a mutually recognised joint enterprise.
What we are ending up with here, then, is a two person relationship/business being wound up in neither the divorce nor the insolvency courts but the criminal court.
The kind of activity that we are surely aiming against is embedded in the following sole paragraph: “According to Diane, he was domineering and violent towards her. Sometimes she did not want to perform particular acts, but he would go on about the money. She felt intimated and so did as he wanted.”
But we have only Diane’s word for it. And she has a record for violence herself.
Nevertheless, this, I think, is where some external mechanism is required to put the situation between the pair to rights. But is the criminal law the right mechanism? The words mediation and arbitration spring to mind.
Does Diane want in or out od this relationship. Her behaviour appears eratic.
And yet it is difficult. If a sex workers’ business is in difficulty, or she/he wishes to expand it, there are various options available to her/him. They might tour various locations at home or abroad for extra money, networking amongst other sex workers they know of for venues etc: ie move services about.
They might lower their prices like any business to get more custom. They might have a ‘sale‘, auction, or raffle of their services – all of this actually happens every day.
And, of course, they might provide additional services that they haven’t previously provided, instead of or as well as existing services.
In many ways, the same pressures exist as in any business. Debts are incurred which require payment, cash flow problems can occur. But banks don’t like the sex industry, neither do a range of conventional institutions which require proof of means of income, even though sex work is, per se, perfectly legal.
This is, in effect, a form of institutionalised discrimination against women, as it is women who are in greatest demand as sex workers. Institutional discrimination by institutions, notably banks, is largely blamed by Dutch sex workers for difficulties faced in Amsterdam and accusations of ‘money laundering’ etc by the Dutch authorities.
This proposal does not solve everything, but would, I believe, improve matters:
PROPOSED ADDITIONAL CLAUSE to read:
Section 54 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 is hereby amended as follows:
Add new sub-clause to read:
“(3) In those sections, “control” shall require the engaging of the defendant in exploitative conduct of a kind likely to induce a prostitute to provide sexual services to a client or clients, through the use of means by which the prostitute’s volition is significantly reduced.”
* * *
There may be some technical requirement regarding schedules etc but I think that would constitute a significant improvement on the status quo.
This would at least deal with the Wolverhampton Wanderers case, and would, in my opinion, enable the R v Massey case to reach a more equitable result.
“But we have only Diane’s word for it.”
Had John and Diane not been involved in prostitution, this would be a domestic case. The fact that Diane returned on a regular basis does not mean that John was not coercive or abusive – indeed, a number of factors in the story from John’s side match up with other cases in which the male partner has used financial control to exert dominance over his female partner.
“Why didn’t she just leave him?” is a question often asked in domestic abuse cases, and it is as meaningless here as it is in the other cases. The lack of leaving (or the leaving and returning) does not mean there is no abuse or coercion.
However, another significant contributory factor to abuse of people in the sex industry is the shady, quasi-legal nature of the business. Unable to seek help from friends and family or authorities because of stigma or fear of arrest, abusive parties can become in some cases the best form of security for sex workers.
I fail to see how this law addresses that situation in any meaningful sense. Rather it just assumes that anyone who works in the sex industry and is not themselves a prostitute is de-facto abusive and criminal. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
Thanks McDuff. For anyone following this thread over email, I should point out that what we are talking about is my lengthy comment proposing a clause defining “Controlling” in the offence of “Controlling [prostitution] for gain.” Starting from scratch you only need to read that part of my original comment relating to the Case R v Massey (and McDuff’s following comment) at:
http://lordsoftheblog.net/2009/10/29/prostitution-and-the-policing-and-crime-bill/#comment-8261
to follow this sub-thread. I call Massey “John” – I don’t know his genuine forename.
Concerning the R v Massey case, I have only read the Court of Appeal judgement, which obviously cannot be as detailed as a transcript of the original trial, or even the full proceedings in the Court of Appeal.
Obviously John may have been violent, coercive or abusive, but no examples of such behaviour are recorded in the Appeal Court judgement, merely that the original sentencing judge recorded that he was satisfied that incidents of violence occurred from time to time. However, John had been simultaneously charged with rape and with assault causing actual bodily harm against Diane, on both of which he was found not guilty, and the Appeal Court judgement shows Diane herself had a record for both violence and dishonesty, which begs the question whether John may, from time to time, have been acting in self-defence.
In any event, there can be little doubt that the Home Office’s sex industry laws would, and almost certainly did, act as a huge deterrant on either John or Diane or – most probably – both, from seeking help earlier.
But the reason the case is important in case law is that it established that no violence, coercion or intimidation is necessary to prosecute for control for gain.
From the judgement:
“21. Sex workers are often vulnerable young women with disturbed backgrounds, who have never known a stable relationship or respect from others and are therefore prey to pimps. It is all too easy for such a person to fall under the influence of a dominant male, who exploits that vulnerability for financial gain. Exploitation of prostitution for financial gain is the broad mischief against which section 53 is aimed, whether or not it involves intimidation of the prostitute or prostitutes concerned….”
http://www.casetrack.com/crimeline/2007-247-1
Now the above extract can be critiqued from all sorts of perspectives. Like many judgements on prostitution in the UK, it would sit more happily in the field of Victorian theatrical melodrama than twenty-first century UK jurisprudence.
Many more of today’s escorts express concern about exploiting their clients than feel exploited by other persons within the sex industry, as Dr Suzanne Jenkins of Keele University discovered in her recent study:
http://www.sexworker.at/phpBB2/download.php?id=479
Furthermore, the judgement is overtly sexist. The ‘controlling for gain’ section of the 2003 Sexual Offences Act replaced “living off immoral earnings” for men and a separate, much more rarely used, charge for women in a bid to achieve gender equality. The purpose of changing this legislation is hardly likely to be fulfilled with judges talking, in the abstract, about “the influence of a dominant male, who exploits…vulnerability for financial gain” when it comes to judging.
No consideration is given to the straightforward fact that Diane is likely to have been considerably safer as a result of John’s intervention in her life than would otherwise have been the case, and his positive contributions towards their joint venture (diary, website, provision of accommodation, transport etc) ironically comprise much of the very evidence used against him!
The Appeal judges acknowledge that “we were told by Mr Gerasimidis [Massey’s barrister?] that it became common ground during the trial that there were significant periods when Diane was not working as a prostitute, and she accepted in cross-examination she kept rather more of her money for herself than she originally claimed.”
So what’s going on here? A teenage street sex worker with a record of loitering, violence and dishonesty whilst in care has met a man in his mid-30s. There is no record of him having any previous criminal record in the Appeal Court judgement.
He has taken her in and, according to him, attempted to dissuade her from prostitution. However, thwarted, he boosted her business, providing, it seems, all admin costs, time and effort. All studies suggest she was far safer in this set-up than she was when he found her.
There may or may not have been intimidation by both parties – after all, she disappeared eight times during their nine years together, and there were apparently “significant periods when Diane was not working as a prostitute” presumably amongst them. Nevertheless there is no evidence of coercion to return, so each of the eight times, she presumably chose to.
Nevertheless, whether there is intimidation or not is not relevant to guilt or innocence in the offence.
So we are left with a situation in which protection afforded to street – or indeed any – sex workers is not, de facto, being provided by the state, whilst the state renders it illegal for it to be provided by individuals or groups in the private sector if they could be accused of ‘controlling‘ (as still not defined) for gain.
From a legal perspective, this leaves the business either to volunteers and the voluntary sector; or to criminals and the criminal sector. After that, we run out of sectors.
As the voluntary sector has quite enough to do in the UK already; as it seems unlikely the Charity Commission would register a charity whose aims were to enable prostitution; and as such a venture would leave sex workers’ lives in the hands of (hopefully and at best) well-meaning amateurs, it seems that it is to criminals and the criminal sector we must turn to by default in order to protect sex workers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for the foreseeable future.
As, indeed, we always have since Victorian times.
This bill appears to being pushed through on grossly inflated figures of trafficking which have been proven wrong by scientifically gathered evidence. Yes trafficking does happen but current law deals with it and keeps it under control. There will always be those in society, be they traffickers or politicians that seek personal gain from someone elses loss or pain.Financial gain through false expences is theft and is not a victimless crime.
The bill,if passed, will see good men blemished,tainted and their families split asunder for what in most cases will be a consensual act of nature. An act that can be forced on a women in marriage under Muslim law. A man will never know if a women is being coerced/forced into an act by threats so will always be presumably guilty and if we do know these women are being forced then the law at present is sufficient to deal with this.
Presumably for the Police to arrest a man for the offence they would have to have evidence the prostitute was being forced or coerced. If this is the case, I ask, why have the Police not acted before ?
If we wish to crimninalise society, in this case men mainly, for what maybe morally wrong can we not start at the top. The majority of the electorate are more concerned with Politicians appearing to steal through false accounting than from a man commiting a consensual act in a private abode.
Through my work I meet many prostitutes at various establishments, none of which I can say, hand on heart, are to my knowledge forced or coerced. The only force these girls are submited to are the same as yours and mine, financial. Take away their work and as a society we burden ourselves, we also take away their independence.
I do not believe the public, the police or prostitutes will benefit from this bill. Nor do I believe it will be policeable, if the client doesn`t know about coercion how will the Police ?
Sex workers live in fear of the law. Sex workers are already stigmatised, alienated and criminalised by existing bad laws. This government’s response is to propose further legislation to again punish sex workers. I am a gay male sex worker who has worked for the past 11 years and I understand first hand the distrust sex workers hold toward the law. The law should be our protection but instead it is feared and mistrusted. Clause 14 in the policing and crime bill proposes to criminalise the clients of sex workers on a strict liability offence should the sex worker be coerced or forced. Laws already exist that deal with rape, coercion and trafficking. This new proposal is meant to intimidate clients who are expected to know the circumstances of individual sex workers. This proposal is based not on a desire to protect sex workers from abusive working conditions but rather on a desire to deprive sex workers of clients.
Clause 14 along with the other proposals on prostitution with in the policing and crime bill is based on two premises that conveniently support each other. The proposals are based on a moral panic created around human trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation which has been exploited to justify the ideology that sex work is violence toward women and that sex workers objectify all women as disposable sexual objects.
The moral panic created and hyped by various government ministers has been recently shown as just that. The ideology that both supported and encouraged the exaggeration of the numbers of victims trafficked is a moral and political position that conveniently ignores the experiences of sex workers. Sex workers have been both ignored and excluded from involvement in the policy decisions that affect them. The majority of independent academic research supports sex workers in their call for decriminalisation on the New Zealand model as a starting point for justice. The Royal College of Nursing and organisation like the UKNSWP which works nationally with sex workers on a daily basis supports decriminalisation and not further criminalisation. The evidence on sex work that understands sex workers and our needs is there but has been ignored by this government..
Clause 14 along with the other proposals will punish sex workers and push sex work further underground. It specifically punishes sex workers who are already vulnerable because of present legislation while ignoring industries such as agriculture, domestic services and manufacturing where trafficking also occurs and statistically it would seem in far greater numbers. Real victims of trafficking (which do exist) will be further isolated because other sex workers will fear reprisals from the law and likewise clients if they report concerns. Proposals to close brothels on suspicion will along with clause 14 will not only make the sex work more dangerous but will increase the isolation of sex workers and create opportunities for exploitation and blackmail of both sex workers and clients alike. Again the most vulnerable will suffer.
I urge you to support sex workers and reject the government’s proposals. I urge you to encourage the government to look again at sex work and produce positive proposals based on evidence and on the experiences of sex workers and not a moral and ideological agenda that is both ignorant and prejudiced about sex work.
http://www.uknswp.org/resources%5CAcademicResponseBigBrothelFinSept2008.pdf
http://www.harlots-parlour.com/2009/10/working-in-european-sex-industry.html#idc-container
http://www.nursingtimes.net/whats-new-in-nursing/rcn-congress/rcn-motion-calls-for-new-legislation-for-sex-workers/5001470.article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated
http://WWW.Harlots-parlour.com
Douglas Fox
Sex workers live in fear of the law. Sex workers are already stigmatised, alienated and criminalised by existing bad laws. This government’s response is to propose further legislation to again punish sex workers. I am a gay male sex worker who has worked for the past 11 years and I understand first hand the distrust sex workers hold toward the law. The law should be our protection but instead it is feared and mistrusted. Clause 14 in the policing and crime bill proposes to criminalise the clients of sex workers on a strict liability offence should the sex worker be coerced or forced. Laws already exist that deal with rape, coercion and trafficking. This new proposal is meant to intimidate clients who are expected to know the circumstances of individual sex workers. This proposal is based not on a desire to protect sex workers from abusive working conditions but rather on a desire to deprive sex workers of clients.
Clause 14 along with the other proposals on prostitution with in the policing and crime bill is based on two premises that conveniently support each other. The proposals are based on a moral panic created around human trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation whipped up to justify the ideology that sex work is violence toward women and that sex workers objectify all women as disposable sexual objects.
The moral panic created and hyped by various government ministers has been recently shown as just that. The ideology that both supported and encouraged the exaggeration of the numbers of victims trafficked is a moral and political position that conveniently ignores the experiences of sex workers. Sex workers have been both ignored and excluded from involvement in the policy decisions that affect them. The majority of independent academic research supports sex workers in their call for decriminalisation on the New Zealand model as a starting point for justice. The Royal College of Nursing and organisation like the UKNSWP which works nationally with sex workers on a daily basis supports decriminalisation and not further criminalisation. The evidence on sex work that understands sex workers and our needs is there but has been ignored by this government..
Clause 14 along with the other proposals will punish sex workers and push sex work further underground. It specifically punishes sex workers who are already vulnerable because of present legislation while ignoring industries such as agriculture, domestic services and manufacturing where trafficking also occurs and probably in greater numbers. Real victims of trafficking (which do exist) will be further isolated because other sex workers will fear reprisals from the law and likewise clients if they report concerns. Proposals to close brothels on suspicion will along with clause 14 will not only make the sex work more dangerous but will increase the isolation of sex workers and create opportunities for exploitation and blackmail of both sex workers and clients alike. Again the most vulnerable will suffer.
I urge you to support sex workers and reject the government’s proposals. I urge you to encourage the government to look again at sex work and produce positive proposals based on evidence and on the experiences of sex workers and not a moral and ideological agenda that is both ignorant and prejudiced about sex work.
http://www.uknswp.org/resources%5CAcademicResponseBigBrothelFinSept2008.pdf
http://www.harlots-parlour.com/2009/10/working-in-european-sex-industry.html#idc-container
http://www.nursingtimes.net/whats-new-in-nursing/rcn-congress/rcn-motion-calls-for-new-legislation-for-sex-workers/5001470.article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated
http://WWW.Harlots-parlour.com
Dear Lord Norton,
I reproduce below a minor edit to a letter that I have just e-mailed to various of your colleagues in connection with this bill:
I write to urge you to oppose Clauses 20 (especially) and 13 of the Policing and Crime Bill, now in its Report stage and heading to Third Reading on 11th November.
Clause 20 facilitates the summary closure and sealing of brothels by the police. It is open to abuse when it is realised that a ‘brothel’ may be no more than two women working and living together for reasons of company and safety. If these women are forced out of premises it is likely that they will seek to continue working, but in more dangerous circumstances. For an example, please see:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23644695-rector-in-court-to-support-soho-brothel.do and http://www.prostitutescollective.net/SohoJusticePrevails.htm
where the police sought to close prostitute flats in 61 Dean Street, Soho -on evidence later thrown out by the magistrate- and where at least one displaced woman then took to the greater danger of the King’s Cross streets.
What possible good is achieved by such closures? If the concern is about women’s safety it is surely safer if prostitutes can work together. If the concern is about trafficking –of which more below– then it is easier for the police to ‘keep an eye’ on established brothels than on dispersed prostitutes. This was perfectly understood by the present Government in 2005/6 when it proposed legalisation of ‘mini-brothels’http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article789549.ece
The volte face from this earlier policy has not been explained, and it is hard to escape the view that is reflects only a triumph of the views of the present Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and the recent Home Secretary over evidence and common sense. This is a poor basis for legislation.
Beyond urging you to reject Clause 20 I would urge you to support any amendments restoring the former policy of allowing mini-brothels.
Clause 13 (now apparently 14) creates a strict liability offence of having sex with a prostitute who has been forced. ‘Forced’ includes ‘coerced by threats and other psychological means including exploitation of vulnerability’.
I would agree that any punter who knowingly has sex with a forced prostitute is guilty of rape and deserves to be punished accordingly. But strict liability means that a client can be fined up to £1000 even if he does not know the prostitute’s circumstance or if she has lied to him about them. This goes against legal principle and natural justice and, as the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights noted:
… [there] should be a requirement that the defendant was aware or at least ought to have been aware that the prostitute was controlled. We suggest amendments in the format that has also been suggested by the JCHR in its report on the Bill…
The clause on ‘other psychological means including exploitation of vulnerability’ is particularly iniquitous, for how is the court to decide on the psychological state of the woman at the time she became a prostitute?
I suspect that the purpose of Clause 13 is to ‘send a message to punters’ and that there will be few prosecutions, not least because it is so hard to find and keep track of the very few trafficked or coerced prostitutes who are identified- see e.g. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6194734/Two-in-three-rescued-women-have-vanished-again.html
Consequently the clause probably shouldn’t worry clients very much. However a malign unintended consequence will be that a client who suspects ‘his’ prostitute was trafficked will be less likely to inform the police, for fear that he will be prosecuted. Punters do report cases, as detailed in Case A (p28 para 1) of http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/prgpdfs/fprs125.pdf. Surely the legislative framework should seek to encourage such reporting, not to discourage?
Turning to the background, I am aware that you are receiving much lobbying in support of clauses 13 and 20. Many supporters are motivated by a moral view of prostitution based on particular religious or feminist precepts, but seek to justify their opinions on a series of assertions, summarised by the Archbishop of York in a recent Sunday Times article (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article6869550.ece) that:
· Many prostitutes are trafficked, including 4 of 5 in London brothels
· Many suffer post-traumatic stress disorder
· Many begin at disturbingly young ages
· Many suffer violence, with 65 murders in 18 years
I believe that these assertions are either incorrect or based on highly selected subsets
Trafficking and coercion. The assertion that 4 out of 5 prostitutes in London brothels are trafficked comes from the Poppy Project’s, Big Brothel report, which notoriously assumed that any foreign woman was trafficked and not acting of her free will. This is disingenuous and insulting to foreign women, as well as to the reader, see e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/oct/03/research.women
The wider assertion that numerous prostitutes were forced sex slaves was never compatible with the claimed numbers of prostitutes and clients. At the extreme (Channel 4 News, 19 Nov. 2008) Harriet Harman asserted that there were 80000 prostitutes, 70% of them forced, seeing up to 30 punters per day. Even at 15 clients per day this would require 840,000 punters per day (0.7 x 80000 x 15) plus however many saw the remaining 16000 women. With 4-11% of the male population said to pay for sex this would require most to do so 2 or 3 times per week! Taking the Home Office (Tackling Demand) claim of 4000 sex slaves seeing the extreme 30 punters per day plus five punters per day for the remaining 76000 women would imply 500,000 paid sexual encounters daily ([4000 x 30] + [76000 x 5]), which remains absurdly high for a total of 3 million punters (taken as 10% of a adult male population. It was certainly incompatible with Tackling Demand’s assertion that turnover was £1 billion per annum, for it would imply that the price for sex was only a bit over a fiver (£1,000,000,000 / 500,000 / 365) when, in reality, half an hour in a massage parlour is ten times that, and an hour with an escort starts at around £120. Since these assertions appeared in the Home Office Tackling Demand report I followed up, asserting statistic incompetence…. and ultimately received a response that:
“…… the data were from different sources. It was not their intention for the different statistics to be used to inform further calculations and nor did they attempt to make any further calculation or draw any further conclusions in the report based on the statistics presented”
…a remarkable statement, which I take as an admission of statistical incompatibility.
More recently Nick Davies, writing for the Guardian newspaper has shown how –though a synergy between (i) Government ministers, (ii) pressure groups with an axe to grind and (iii) papers with an appetite for peddling moral panic – an identified total of 71 trafficked women was multiplied into 25000 (Denis McShane MP) or 64000 (80% x 80000 Fiona MacTaggart MP) ‘victims of trafficking’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated
There are a few women who have been tricked into prostitution and trafficked. Those who trafficked them should be punished, as should anyone who knowingly has sex with them—– but all solid evidence suggests that they are a tiny fraction of all prostitutes. They therefore should not be the basis for legislation that affects all prostitutes and their clients.
Psychological damage. As noted in the Archbishop’s article several studies claim a high rate of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among prostitutes. If you go to the medical search engine http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez and type-in ‘prostitution’ and ‘PTSD,’ you get 20 ‘hits’, not all of them relevant. Many do appear to support this PTSD claim but, dig a little deeper and to find that most, including the original http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/prostitution_research/000021.html looked largely or entirely at streetwalkers, whilst a few looked at prostitutes in ‘rescue shelters’ or prison. What relevance does this have to Polish, Latvian and Czech prostitutes working in a London massage parlour, let alone as agency call girls? Street prostitution is a tiny fraction of the market, populated by the most desperate and disorganised prostitutes, most likely to be scarred by their experiences. They are not representative. Recruiting interviewees in rescue shelters or prison is even more ridiculous: it is like studying the institution of marriage by conducting interviews in a battered wives’ refuge or investigating the totality of athletics from the sole vantage of a sports injuries clinic. The results are guaranteed to be loaded.
It is striking too that the studies linking PTSD with prostitution appear in third-line journals and not in e.g. the Lancet, BMJ or New England Journal, also that the British Psychological Society (the main UK professional organisation – with which I have no connection) argues strongly against the prostitution clauses of the Policing and Crime Bill in its submission to the House of Commons Scrutiny Committee. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmpublic/policing/memos/ucm4602.htm
Age of entry to prostitution. I am unable to trace any article suggesting that the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 in Europe, as asserted in the Archbishop’s article, and suspect that, once again, we have data for one subset of prostitutes being extrapolated to the general case. Quotes like this often trace back to the US Department of Justice’s report that the average age for street children entering prostitution is 12-14: http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/prostitution.html. No doubt this is true and tragic; however, once again, it is obviously based a particular and specific subset — you’d struggle to find a UK prostitute who ever was an American runaway— it’s uncommon even among US prostitutes.
Violence towards prostitutes. Prostitution is not a completely safe profession and most who enter it are offsetting the risks against the fact that they can make £100-200 per hour vs. £6 per hour in the safety of a shop or café. One may think their judgement wise or otherwise, but the financial reward to risk profile is better than that for enlisted squaddie or subaltern likely to be posted to Afghanistan or for the deep-sea trawlerman, and 65 murders in 18 years compare with 100 UK deaths per annum in horse-riding accidents. At bottom, though, we live (I hope) in a free society where people are allowed to take risks of their own volition. The role of the state surely should be to minimise those risks, yet the prostitute’s work is only likely to be made more dangerous by Clauses 13 and 20, a point recognised e.g. by the Royal College of Nursing: http://www.nursingtimes.net/whats-new-in-nursing/rcn-congress/rcn-motion-calls-for-new-legislation-for-sex-workers/5001470.article
I am a scientist and have based this letter on hard, dry evidence, as I would in writing any professional report. In researching the material I have been appalled by the deliberately biased samples and data manipulation used by those who would further criminalise prostitutes and their clients. If I extrapolated similarly in my own work I would be torn apart by my academic peers, and deservedly so. Having a strong moral belief does not justify the promulgation of bad science or social science. I realise, though –as a human being- that the case histories of individual trafficking victims will influence some of you more than all the dry statistics in the world. Tragic case histories, however unrepresentative of the totality of prostitution, have been widely circulated by organisations, notably the Poppy Project, with a fundamental objection to all professional sex. For balance I would urge you to read the chat among escorts and parlour girls on http://www.saafe.info, and the responses of prostitutes to Harriet Harman on http://www.punternet.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22529 or even the assortment of ladies’ blogs, summarised and linked on http://www.punterlink.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=23217&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=80. These writers are not the abused and broken women of the abolitionists’ mythology, upon whom these Clauses are ostensibly predicated.
Thank you for your time in reading this letter and the supportive evidence that I have linked. I hope I have made my case and that you will work to delete, amend or vote down these harmful clauses of the Policing and Crime Bill.
Yours sincerely,
Dear Lord Norton
Please see below a minor edit of a letter I have this day sent to many of your colleagues.
David L
I write to urge you to oppose Clauses 20 (especially) and 13 of the Policing and Crime Bill, now in its Report stage and heading to Third Reading on 11th November.
Clause 20 facilitates the summary closure and sealing of brothels by the police. It is open to abuse when it is realised that a ‘brothel’ may be no more than two women working and living together for reasons of company and safety. If these women are forced out of premises it is likely that they will seek to continue working, but in more dangerous circumstances. For an example, please see:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23644695-rector-in-court-to-support-soho-brothel.do and http://www.prostitutescollective.net/SohoJusticePrevails.htm
where the police sought to close prostitute flats in 61 Dean Street, Soho -on evidence later thrown out by the magistrate- and where at least one displaced woman then took to the greater danger of the King’s Cross streets.
What possible good is achieved by such closures? If the concern is about women’s safety it is surely safer if prostitutes can work together. If the concern is about trafficking –of which more below– then it is easier for the police to ‘keep an eye’ on established brothels than on dispersed prostitutes. This was perfectly understood by the present Government in 2005/6 when it proposed legalisation of ‘mini-brothels’http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article789549.ece
The volte face from this earlier policy has not been explained, and it is hard to escape the view that is reflects only a triumph of the views of the present Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and the recent Home Secretary over evidence and common sense. This is a poor basis for legislation.
Beyond urging you to reject Clause 20 I would urge you to support any amendments restoring the former policy of allowing mini-brothels.
Clause 13 (now apparently 14) creates a strict liability offence of having sex with a prostitute who has been forced. ‘Forced’ includes ‘coerced by threats and other psychological means including exploitation of vulnerability’.
I would agree that any punter who knowingly has sex with a forced prostitute is guilty of rape and deserves to be punished accordingly. But strict liability means that a client can be fined up to £1000 even if he does not know the prostitute’s circumstance or if she has lied to him about them. This goes against legal principle and natural justice and, as the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights noted:
… [there] should be a requirement that the defendant was aware or at least ought to have been aware that the prostitute was controlled. We suggest amendments in the format that has also been suggested by the JCHR in its report on the Bill…
The clause on ‘other psychological means including exploitation of vulnerability’ is particularly iniquitous, for how is the court to decide on the psychological state of the woman at the time she became a prostitute?
I suspect that the purpose of Clause 13 is to ‘send a message to punters’ and that there will be few prosecutions, not least because it is so hard to find and keep track of the very few trafficked or coerced prostitutes who are identified- see e.g. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6194734/Two-in-three-rescued-women-have-vanished-again.html
Consequently the clause probably shouldn’t worry clients very much. However a malign unintended consequence will be that a client who suspects ‘his’ prostitute was trafficked will be less likely to inform the police, for fear that he will be prosecuted. Punters do report cases, as detailed in Case A (p28 para 1) of http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/prgpdfs/fprs125.pdf. Surely the legislative framework should seek to encourage such reporting, not to discourage?
Turning to the background, I am aware that you are receiving much lobbying in support of clauses 13 and 20. Many supporters are motivated by a moral view of prostitution based on particular religious or feminist precepts, but seek to justify their opinions on a series of assertions, summarised by the Archbishop of York in a recent Sunday Times article (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article6869550.ece) that:
· Many prostitutes are trafficked, including 4 of 5 in London brothels
· Many suffer post-traumatic stress disorder
· Many begin at disturbingly young ages
· Many suffer violence, with 65 murders in 18 years
I believe that these assertions are either incorrect or based on highly selected subsets
Trafficking and coercion. The assertion that 4 out of 5 prostitutes in London brothels are trafficked comes from the Poppy Project’s, Big Brothel report, which notoriously assumed that any foreign woman was trafficked and not acting of her free will. This is disingenuous and insulting to foreign women, as well as to the reader, see e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/oct/03/research.women
The wider assertion that numerous prostitutes were forced sex slaves was never compatible with the claimed numbers of prostitutes and clients. At the extreme (Channel 4 News, 19 Nov. 2008) Harriet Harman asserted that there were 80000 prostitutes, 70% of them forced, seeing up to 30 punters per day. Even at 15 clients per day this would require 840,000 punters per day (0.7 x 80000 x 15) plus however many saw the remaining 16000 women. With 4-11% of the male population said to pay for sex this would require most to do so 2 or 3 times per week! Taking the Home Office (Tackling Demand) claim of 4000 sex slaves seeing the extreme 30 punters per day plus five punters per day for the remaining 76000 women would imply 500,000 paid sexual encounters daily ([4000 x 30] + [76000 x 5]), which remains absurdly high for a total of 3 million punters (taken as 10% of a adult male population. It was certainly incompatible with Tackling Demand’s assertion that turnover was £1 billion per annum, for it would imply that the price for sex was only a bit over a fiver (£1,000,000,000 / 500,000 / 365) when, in reality, half an hour in a massage parlour is ten times that, and an hour with an escort starts at around £120. Since these assertions appeared Tackling Demand report I followed up, asserting statistic naivety in the Home Office…. and ultimately received a response that:
“…… the data were from different sources. It was not their intention for the different statistics to be used to inform further calculations and nor did they attempt to make any further calculation or draw any further conclusions in the report based on the statistics presented”
…a remarkable statement, which I take as an admission of statistical incompatibility.
More recently Nick Davies, writing for the Guardian newspaper has shown how –though a synergy between (i) Government ministers, (ii) pressure groups with an axe to grind and (iii) papers with an appetite for peddling moral panic – an identified total of 71 trafficked women was multiplied into 25000 (Denis McShane MP) or 64000 (80% x 80000 Fiona MacTaggart MP) ‘victims of trafficking’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated
There are a few women who have been tricked into prostitution and trafficked. Those who trafficked them should be punished, as should anyone who knowingly has sex with them—– but all solid evidence suggests that they are a tiny fraction of all prostitutes. They therefore should not be the basis for legislation that affects all prostitutes and their clients.
Psychological damage. As noted in the Archbishop’s article several studies claim a high rate of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among prostitutes. If you go to the medical search engine http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez and type-in ‘prostitution’ and ‘PTSD,’ you get 20 ‘hits’, not all of them relevant. Many do appear to support this PTSD claim but, dig a little deeper and to find that most, including the original http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/prostitution_research/000021.html looked largely or entirely at streetwalkers, whilst a few looked at prostitutes in ‘rescue shelters’ or prison. What relevance does this have to Polish, Latvian and Czech prostitutes working in a London massage parlour, let alone as agency call girls? Street prostitution is a tiny fraction of the market, populated by the most desperate and disorganised prostitutes, most likely to be scarred by their experiences. They are not representative. Recruiting interviewees in rescue shelters or prison is even more ridiculous: it is like studying the institution of marriage by conducting interviews in a battered wives’ refuge or investigating the totality of athletics from the sole vantage of a sports injuries clinic. The results are guaranteed to be loaded.
It is striking too that the studies linking PTSD with prostitution appear in third-line journals and not in e.g. the Lancet, BMJ or New England Journal, also that the British Psychological Society (the main UK professional organisation – with which I have no connection) argues strongly against the prostitution clauses of the Policing and Crime Bill in its submission to the House of Commons Scrutiny Committee. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmpublic/policing/memos/ucm4602.htm
Age of entry to prostitution. I am unable to trace any article suggesting that the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 in Europe, as asserted in the Archbishop’s article, and suspect that, once again, we have data for one subset of prostitutes being extrapolated to the general case. Quotes like this often trace back to the US Department of Justice’s report that the average age for street children entering prostitution is 12-14: http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/prostitution.html. No doubt this is true and tragic; however, once again, it is obviously based a particular and specific subset — you’d struggle to find a UK prostitute who ever was an American runaway— it’s uncommon even among US prostitutes.
Violence towards prostitutes. Prostitution is not a completely safe profession and most who enter it are offsetting the risks against the fact that they can make £100-200 per hour vs. £6 per hour in the safety of a shop or café. One may think their judgement wise or otherwise, but the financial reward to risk profile is better than that for enlisted squaddie or subaltern likely to be posted to Afghanistan or for the deep-sea trawlerman, and 65 murders in 18 years compare with 100 UK deaths per annum in horse-riding accidents. At bottom, though, we live (I hope) in a free society where people are allowed to take risks of their own volition. The role of the state surely should be to minimise those risks, yet the prostitute’s work is only likely to be made more dangerous by Clauses 13 and 20, a point recognised e.g. by the Royal College of Nursing: http://www.nursingtimes.net/whats-new-in-nursing/rcn-congress/rcn-motion-calls-for-new-legislation-for-sex-workers/5001470.article
I am a scientist and have based this letter on hard, dry evidence, as I would in writing any professional report. In researching the material I have been appalled by the deliberately biased samples and data manipulation used by those who would further criminalise prostitutes and their clients. If I extrapolated similarly in my own work I would be torn apart by my academic peers, and deservedly so. Having a strong moral belief does not justify the promulgation of bad science or social science. I realise, though –as a human being- that the case histories of individual trafficking victims will influence some of you more than all the dry statistics in the world. Tragic case histories, however unrepresentative of the totality of prostitution, have been widely circulated by organisations, notably the Poppy Project, with a fundamental objection to all professional sex. For balance I would urge you to read the chat among escorts and parlour girls on http://www.saafe.info, and the responses of prostitutes to Harriet Harman on http://www.punternet.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22529 or even the assortment of ladies’ blogs, summarised and linked on http://www.punterlink.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=23217&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=80. These writers are not the abused and broken women of the abolitionists’ mythology, upon whom these Clauses are ostensibly predicated.
Thank you for your time in reading this letter and the supportive evidence that I have linked. I hope I have made my case and that you will work to delete, amend or vote down these harmful clauses of the Policing and Crime Bill.
Yours sincerely,
I believe clause 14 cannot go through as it is now.
Strict liability exists in other offences, some minor and some serious, however it is always theoretically possible to avoid committing the offence.
The most serious strict liability offence I’m aware of is sex with a child under 13 which is classed as rape. There have been cases where the prosection have agreed that the child appeared older and that the defendant was reasonable in his belief that the child was 16+. However you can ask to see ID. You can confirm, absoultely, a person’s age. The offence is a serious one with a serious punishment and requiring people to check ID, perhaps needlessly is worth it when you consider who you’re protecting. This is why stict liability has been upheld for that offence. This is not the case with the offence being created in clause 14. Any client asking a woman if she’s being forced will be told “No, of course not”. Either because it’s true, or because the woman fears repercussions from the trafficker. There is nothing else a client can do. No matter how careful you are, no matter what you do, you have no way to avoid the risk of prosection, other than avoid paid sex altogether. Even the police won’t be able to say the woman is being forced unless she admits it. Which she may still not do even with her trafficker in jail. So what hope does the client have? All for an offence with a £1000 fine as the maximum punishment.
This is the only offence I’m aware of where it appears to be the DESIGN of the offence to prosecute people who are unaware they’re breaking the law. If you know a person is being forced then you’re already committing rape, or sexual assault. The only people who are going to be prosecuted with this law, if any, are those who are unaware of their criminal behaviour. It goes against every legal principle I know. You cannot have a deterrent to criminality when the people you’re prosecuting intrinsically don’t and CAN’T know of their offending. What you’re actually deterring is paid sex itself. Which is supposed to remain a legal activity.
The only solution would be a guilty until proven innocent type of offence, where you have to show you took reasonable steps to avoid a forced woman. However, this would probably be unuseable as I can’t imagine any prosecution where a client wouldn’t be able to come up with something. The clause really needs to be removed and rethought out. With strict liability it will collapse under legal challenge, and without it, it will be useless from the outset.
It is blatently an attempt to reduce the demand for paid sex in it’s entirety, but by the back door. It cannot be allowed to stand.
the govt ignored the most important people in the debate,the sex workers themselves.
women should have the right to work in a safe and secure environment,this bill will make sex workers lives far more dangerous
womens health,safety and well being are more important than moral judgments
The fact that this legislation has been twice watered down, firstly from an initial suggestion of a complete ban on buying sexual services, and secondly from a proposal to ban paying for sex with someone who is ‘controlled for gain’ (an alarmingly vague phrase) is something we should be grateful for. However, the strict liability offence of ‘paying for sex with someone who is subjected by a third party to force, threat or any form of coercion’ is still unacceptable.
If the legislation is passed, someone could be brought before a court accused of this offence, and the judge or jury could convict even if they accepted that the defendant had no reason at all to think that the person that they paid for sex was being in any way coerced. And this conviction could result in devastating repercussions for that defendent.
Given that such an outcome would be contrary to natural justice, I believe that peers should do their best to ammend the proposed legislation to something more reasonable. My own suggestion would be that the legislation could be ammended to make it an offence for a person to pay for sex with someone who they KNOW OR SUSPECT is being coerced into this act.
The only argument that I can imagine being put forward against this change is that it would make obtaining a conviction more difficult, and that this would therefore reduce the deterrent-effect of the law.
However, if a man is about to pay for sex with a woman who he suspects of having been coerced, it’s difficuly to see why he would be less deterred by an offence phrased in the way that I’ve suggested than by the strict liability offence. Moreover, I suspect that many men will respond to the proposed strict liability offence by thinking “Even if I try to avoid paying for sex with a women who’ve been coerced, I could still end up in court, so I might as well not bother trying at all.” By contrast, a law which criminalizes a man for paying for sex with a woman that he knows or suspects is being coerced would, in my opinion, send out a much stronger message to men to be vigilant of the signs that a woman is being coerced into prostitution.
When oh when is Parliamemt going to accept that the law has nothing useful to say about the phenomenon of prostitution? This initiative was misconceived by Puritanism and is the bane of the sex workers life. It’s also a method of having men, in the shape of the police, exert an abritary control over the activity of women. The best thing the Lords could do for sex workers is to decriminilise prostitution. Legislaton dealing with kidnapping, trafficking, extortion and pimping is already covered by existing legislation. Do lets try and be progressive and ignore Puritans.
As a historian of prostitution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it feels like these moral crusades, the bills containing unenforceable proposals, and the largely unheard liberal feminist and prostitute protest against them has all happened before. From a historical perspective, the government has spent the better part of one and half centuries experimenting with how to deal with prostitution, and women working in commercial sex have been the primary victims of it.
The period between 1885 and 1959 was marked by a steady increase in laws and policies that cracked down on prostitution in the UK. In 1885, the Criminal Law Amendment Act made brothels illegal. While this was done with the understanding that brothels were inherently exploitative, in reality it resulted in the hounding of women who worked as prostitutes out of their homes and away from each other. Women came to depend on third parties, who were mostly men, to secure them accommodation and advertise their services in a more clandestine work environment.
A few years later, in the 1890s and 1910s, measures were taken to make mid-nineteenth century laws against street solicitation easier to enforce. The requirement that a woman be proven to be annoying people around her before she could be arrested was ignored by police and magistrates alike. Conviction rates skyrocketed. In an age that claimed to be concerned for the welfare of women exploited within prostitution, more and more prostitutes found themselves in the limelight of the criminal justice system.
Moreover, as women who solicited on the street were more subject to arrests, fines, and prison time, third parties were given more opportunities to profit from prostitution by acting as lookouts, paying bail and fines, and finding women opportunities to work off the street. Prostitution, more criminalized than ever before, became more closely associated with organized crime, with substance abuse, and with violence. Crime syndicates like the Messina brothers in the 1940s and the Krays in the 1960s played on prostitutes’ vulnerability to arrest and prosecution in order to get women to work for them.
Around the same time, fears about sexual trafficking and concerns about immigration coalesced to produce increasingly strict immigration laws (that grow harsher all the time). This was the most golden opportunity of all for men who hoped to ‘control women for gain’. By offering to facilitate entry into the UK, traffickers were able to make a great deal of money from sex workers. Once in the UK, men were able to indenture and abuse these migrant sex workers, knowing that a woman was unlikely to seek help because it would mean her deportation. These sorts of trafficking businesses had become extensive and very profitable by the 1930s; they are even more extensive and profitable today.
A few decades later, in the 1980s, the UK adopted what became known as ‘kerb crawling’ laws, in an effort to crack down further on street prostitution while at the same time answering ‘women’s movement’ demands to do something about the men who bought sex. Today, these laws are not only poorly enforced, but seem to have exacerbated the furtiveness of street sex transactions, forcing women to make snap–and not always wise–decisions about whether to get in someone’s car. Similar situations seem to have been created in Sweden, where buying sex has been illegal since 1999.
The crusades to legislate against prostitution in the past have been led by lobby groups (usually alliances of conservative women’s organizations, men’s moral reform groups, and church groups) who presented a very simplistic, exclusionary, and polemic view of prostitution. Tapping into the public’s (especially women’s) confusion and anger about violence against women and women’s endemic inequality, these groups have been very good at setting up prostitutes as helpless and passive victims and inciting moral panic about prostitution, presented as the ultimate manifestation of male violence rather than as a complex phenomenon that is a product of a number of different kinds of inequality, and frequently engaged in by women as thinking human beings who make difficult choices. The tactics of these lobby groups tended to emphasize the preventative power of the law. William Coote, zealous secretary of the social purity group the National Vigilance Association between 1885 and 1920, stalwartly defended the concept that ‘one can make men moral by an Act of Parliament’ in the face of libertarian and legal criticism of the measures he proposed.
Interestingly, popular culture and, for the most part, academia, have characterized these late Victorian campaigns as moralistic, authoritarian, illiberal, and frequently punitive toward women; and yet we entertain their rhetoric today in a slightly different form, and allow a small number of radical feminists, allied with conservative and moralistic organizations, to dictate the terms of the debate. And, just like in the past, these lobby groups are drowning out more measured voices who base their opinions upon extensive and ethical research and upon the political traditions of liberal feminism.
Certain ministers today sound a lot like William Coote. They have responded to criticism that her proposed measures will be unenforceable by claiming that the existence of the law will act as a deterrent for men who purchase sex. They would, like Coote, attempt to make men moral by an Act of Parliament. While legislators in the present day may not realise this, proposals to make the purchase of sex illegal are not at all novel, and have been supported by moralists like Coote since the mid-1880s. Similarly, since the late 1880s, they have been opposed on constitutional, feminist, and libertarian grounds, and accused of perpetrating ‘an equality of injustice’ whereby both prostitutes and their clients would be prosecuted, without ample evidence, for consensual acts that did not disturb the public peace.
This new proposal is not only as equally unenforceable as previous ones, it threatens yet again to do far more harm than good. For instance, how vital will the testimony, and therefore the exposure (and likely deportation), of the person ‘controlled by gain’ be in this process? Who will be more frequently prosecuted: abusive customers and traffickers, or women working on the street and soliciting in this so-called ‘persistent’ manner? How can we avoid harassing women working in the sex industry who are not ‘controlled for gain’ while trying to enforce this law? For despite what radical feminists say, these women do exist. Most importantly of all, what measures will clients and prostitutes take to avoid detection? How much more clandestine and dangerous will legislators make prostitution?
It is difficult to convince people who believe that all prostitutes are victims that a proposal such as this has no place in the statute book, but the historical record proves that laws against commercial sex invariably make women working in prostitution—the ‘victims’—more vulnerable to further victimization. It is with this in mind that feminist Teresa Billington Greig, writing in 1912, declared ‘the ordinary citizen who detests exploited prostitution has no unbalanced desire for legislation at any price. He, or she, is prepared to face the inescapable truth that the causes of this evil cannot be touched by law, however perfectly administered.’
If prostitution is not freely available without fear of prosecution there will be an explosion of rape and other sex crimes, this avenue of curtailing prostitution has not been explored, if the lid is placed one aspect of sexual release, then another more sinster and serious avenue will open up. Prostitution is a fact of life and woven into the fabric of Society, women want to offer the service and men want to buy the service it is as simple as that, prostitution is NOT illegal in the UK, it is the “workings” of prostituion that is, it is the “business” side of paid sexual services that needs to be legalised and brought into the mainstream of commerce, if a Brothel was just like any other service outlet then most of the criminality would disappear, there will always be crime, there is in all business, paid sexual services, being out the open, the criminality would be easier to identify and police. Legal Brothels operating just like any other “shop” on the High Street is the way forward, a clean, safe and properly presented business, like many many good “Massage Palours” up and down the UK currently offer “illegally”, only tolerated at the behest of the local Constabulary, this has to change as this in itself brings a “cloak and dagger” approach to prostitution, and ties the hands of those who want to operate an honest reputable business, giving a safe clean environment for those who ply their trade in this way. The future is NOT Draconia it is Open UK, a free and tolerant Society, where common sense prevails, this approach also needs to be applied to the hideous laws surrounding children, where Naturists can be labelled paedophiles and sex offenders for the possession of totally innocent pictures and videos of theirs’ and friends children in the naturist environment. Artistic nudity of children is another area where the law needs to be in line with the rest of the World, many art exhibitions have been subjected to criminal investigation because of ARTISTIC images of children they wish to exhibit. The UK is one the most backward countries in the modern world when comes to law relating to sexual content and display, it is about time the UK took the lead and became open about this subject, it is here, always has been and always will be, address the issue honestly and with an open mind, not deceptively and a “head in the sand” mentality.
Are you saying that all punters are repressed rapists held only in check by the ease with which they can lay down $150 for two hours’ company? I appreciate that you believe you’re on the side of the prostitutes here, but if this assertion is true, it supports those who hold that the moral deviancy of those who use prostitution should be kept in check.
Luckily, I find it unlikely from personal experience that those who seek out prostitutes are in fact barely-repressed violent rapists. If they were, I would be far more worried about the safety of my whore friends.
I’m fed up with all the nonsense. I’ve been the industry for over 35 yrs. Nothing will change the minds of these hypocrites in the government. I’m a taxpaying parlour owner and it makes me sick to think my tax helps too pay for porn films and duck ponds yet they are trying to put me and the girls out of work. The strict liability law is totally unforceable and the police know this. I think its a disgrace that non of the sister hood have even bothered to talk to a prostitute during all of this. The police often rely on information from good parlour owners to find trafficked girls so pushing the industry underground which this will no doubt do will only play into the hands of traffickers. Legalise the damn business and let us get on with it like any other business. These new laws are going to give the traffickers an open ticket and the police more work, not to mention a source of important information that will no doubt dry up.
Hear, hear!
I wonder how many people actually working in the industry have been consulted about these changes. It seems to me they should be the first people government talk to when considering changes to sex laws.
No-one as far as I know has been consulted about anything yet it’s our lives and income that will be disrupted. I agree trafficked girls need help and I would be the first to help them if and when needed. I have been in the business 35 years, more than most MPs have been in office and they are talking utter nonsense. Legalising the profession would be more helpful to everyone. We can detect the trafficked girls a lot easier and quicker than anyone. A properly run brothel can be trouble free and tax paying owners and workers could even go a long way into helping the state of this country!! I have always been willing to talk to any MP but they don’t want to know. Its ignorance and hypocrisy at its highest level.
This comment thread is, in fact, bloody excellent. How such a thing can happen on the internet is beyond me – won’t someone come in and demand we think of the children? Or call someone else Hitler?
I really have very little to add that hasn’t already been said, apart from a few little asides upthread. I’d recommend reading Petra Boynton’s blog – including this post, in general, but overall I think for a change the sex workers and people who care more about evidence than moralising have been properly represented. Good show!
Of course, as the Johnson Nutt Sacking shows, it won’t make a blind bit of difference to the philistines in the Commons, but hurrah for us finding some sliver of government willing to listen to us!
Many thanks to everyone who has commented. I rather share McDuff’s view as to the quality of the responses to the post. I have read all the comments and have found them invaluable. I am especially grateful to those who have been commenting for the first time.
I have now done a separate post (11 November) on what has happened in the Policing and Crime Bill. I was persuaded, not least as a result of the comments on this thread, that the provisions of Clause 14 of the Bill constitute bad law and should not be allowed to stand. I fear that the Government wanted to retain the clause and had some support from some others in the House. Though there were some of us who wanted to vote out the clause, we were in a minority. Nonetheless, as I mention in my latest post, I would have preferred a vote so that I could register my opposition to the provision. I know some members were annoyed that the amendment was not put to a vote. What we have here is bad law.
The problems I see with the sex traffic idea is that suppose some of the women were not forced into this type of prostitution, but were willing and wanted to do this type of work, and went out of their way to do this type of work. (It is a lot of fast easy money, they don’t need a degree, or a green card.) All they have to do is lie and say that someone forced them into it. When perhaps, no one did. While there are some women who may be true victims. This is a small rare group of people.
Everything I heard about this problem was Americans complaining about it, but I never heard from the so-called victims themselves complaining about it. Why is that? Many of the self appointed experts complaining about this have never even met or seen a real victim. They make up a large figure out of thin air that 2 million or more women and children become sex slaves each year. They have been saying this for over 15 years so this means that 15 X 2, 000,000 equals 30,000,000 yet no one can find all these women and children. They have no evidence to back up these numbers, and no one questions them about it. Their sources have no sources, and are made up numbers.
The numbers of sex trafficking sex slaves:
There is a lot of controversy over the numbers of adult woman who are forced sex slaves. The real factual answer is that no one knows. There is hard evidence that the sex slavery/sex trafficking issue continues to report false information and is greatly exaggerated by politicians, the media, and aid groups, feminist and religious orgainzations that receive funds from the government, The estimate of women who become new sex slaves ranges anywhere from 20 million a year to 5,000 per year all of which appear to be much too high. They have no evidence to back up these numbers, and no one questions them about it. Their sources have no sources, and are made up numbers. In fact if some of these numbers are to believed which have either not changed or have been increased each year for the past twenty years, all woman and children on earth would currently be sex slaves. Yet, very few real sex slaves have been found.
“If media reports on sex trafficking in Nepal are to be believed, there would be no young girls left in Nepal at this time”
A key point is that on the sidelines the prostitutes themselves are not being listened to. They oppose laws against prostitution. But no one wants to listen to the prostitutites themsleves. Only to the self appointed experts that make up numbers and stories.
This is a story that continues to give false information and is greatly exaggerated by politicians, aid groups, and the media.
It is not easy for criminals to engage in this acitvity:
Sex trafficking is illegal and the pentities are very severe. It is very difficult to force someone to be a sex slave, they would have to have 24 hour guards posted and be watched 365 days a year, 24 hours per day. Have the threat of violence if they refused, and have no one notice and complain to the authorities or police. They would need to hide from the general public yet still manage to see customers from the general public. They would need to provide them with medical care, food, shelter, and have all their basic needs met. They would need to have the sex slaves put on a fake front that they enjoyed what they were doing, act flirtatious and do their job well. They would have to deal with the authorities looking for the missing women, and hide any money they may make, since it comes from illegal activity. They must do all of this while constantly trying to prevent the sex slaves from escaping and reporting them to the police. This is extremely difficult to do, which makes this activity rare.
So the problem you see is, maybe some of them will cry fake rape? Like women are so wont to do?
Oh, I see, you’ve tried it have you?
The big thing you’re omitting is that people who want to abuse women in the sex industry have a large and powerful ally – the British Legal System. Why would abused women flee, especially those of dubious immigration status? By going to the police they would be risking arrest, imprisonment and deportation – a step up, perhaps, but only marginally so, and perhaps not if the country we deport them back to has elements from which they wished to flee.
I do not think your analysis of the dangers of the sex trade, or the problems of this law, are at all correct.
SWA groups do not claim that women are not abused in sex work. We claim that women are not protected by these laws. That is fundamentally different from what you are claiming.
When did the blockquote tag stop working?
All they have to do is lie and say that someone forced them into it. When perhaps, no one did.
If they lie here are their benefits based on the new anti-traffic laws:
1. They don’t have to go to jail or be arrested.
2. They get to stay and live in America for an indefinite amount of time.
3. The U.S. Government will provide them with housing, food, education and will cater to them since they will be considered victims.
The way I see it is that this system will encourage people to lie in order to receive all the benefits listed above.
All they have to do is lie and say that someone forced them into it. When perhaps, no one did.
If they lie here are their benefits based on the new anti-traffic laws:
1. They don’t have to go to jail or be arrested.
2. They get to stay and live here in this country for an indefinite amount of time and become a citizen.
3. The Government will provide them with housing, food, education and will cater to them since they will be considered victims.
The way I see it is that this system will encourage people to lie in order to receive all the benefits listed above.
Workers from the remainder of the EU generally have a right to live and work in the UK. Those deemed trafficked who do not have such a right do not gain such a right to permanent residency by virtue of being trafficked, as you suggest, but a temporary right for a period of recuperation. Generally they leave voluntarily, but on occasion they are deported.
It is a condition of any extended support from the Poppy Project (but not from other bodies eg the Salvation Army) that they give evidence about their alleged traffickers, this on the insistence of the Home Office. It is almost unheard of for alleged trafficking victims to appear in court – instead they make statements – and they have frequently returned to their home countries or moved elsewhere by the time the cases come for trial. Consequently, their evidence cannot be tested by cross-examination.
Trafficked persons have rights to compensation via a number of routes. It is not clear what the uptake on these are – I understand quite low – but there have certainly been instances of trafficked persons being awarded significant sums.
Trafficked persons comprise a very diverse group of people. Besides the kidnapped so beloved of the media, there are clearly those who use the trafficking networks to move and provide themselves with subsistence due to the weakness of their social networks.
I might recommend this work:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=24WyKgtxGSIC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false
It is interesting that your reaction to this was to immediately think how foreigners could use it to get one over on the poor unsuspecting British Taxpayer again.
Do your knees hurt?
Re Stephen Paterson at 3.21 PM on 7/1/10
Fascinating.
“It is almost unheard of for alleged trafficking victims to appear in court – instead they make statements – and they have frequently returned to their home countries or moved elsewhere by the time the cases come for trial. Consequently, their evidence cannot be tested by cross-examination”
So, suppose a client is charged with having had sex with a trafficked prostitute. His defence is to assert that she is lying, because she gained advantage (support and delay to deportation) by asserting that she was trafficked. She is no longer in the country to provide further evidence; her alleged traffickers are overseas too or (at least) remain at large. Is he likely to be convicted, even under strict liability? Is this law workable? How much taxpayers’ money was spent passing it?
David L: Is this law workable? The short answer is no. How much taxpayers’ money was spent on passing it? Good question. Remarkably, there is no estimate of how much it costs to pass a Bill. A colleague (Lord Patten) recently put down a question to try to find out the cost of passing a piece of legislation, only to get the reply that it was not possible to cost it.
It would seem to me that given the offence is strict liability and the only evidence of guilt will be the evidence of the girl herself, it would be unavoidable that she would need to be in court. Unless she’s available for cross examination you’re effectively prevented from defending yourself at all. Then you still have all the other arguments e.g. that you’re effectively being prosecuted for something that a 3rd party has done. That the law is designed to be used only on people who are unaware on their guilt (if they were aware rape or sexual assault could already be used); therefore the law is not a deterrent, it’s simply an arbitrary stick to beat people with when they’re unlucky. etc.etc. Is there any reason for the delay in issuing the commencement order? and what would happen if it wasn’t issued before the election and the Conservatives got in? Could it then end up never being put into actual law?
What do you mean ‘Good question’?
I’ve pointed out repeatedly the cost that you as a Lord run up.
2,000 pounds a minute to run the Lords.
2,000 pounds a day to us for each Lord.
ie. You’re completely out of control. You spend millions and haven’t a clue.
The reason is you don’t care. You’re spending other people’s money. It’s great isn’t it.
You get a great club, invite people round to tea, subsidise all over the place. Receipts and expenses all round. Even for properties that don’t exist.
And someone else pays for it.
It’s a mystery where the money goes apparently.
Kevin – Lord Brett, for the Government, said during the passage of the Bill that there is often a passage of days or weeks between the police locating a venue used to house eg trafficked persons and the police raiding the place, during which time the location is monitored in a bid to establish a trafficking network, and possible other venues, through the comings and goings.
Police have also used CCTV to monitor comings and goings to establish that locations are brothels.
I imagine telephone conversations may be tapped and computer hard drive records checked. Remember that it is the mere arrangement of sex for payment that is the offence – whether sex actually takes place is deemed irrelevant. So only evidence of an arrangement would be required. It would be perfectly possible for the offence to be committed without the accused having ever met the sex worker.
yes I know that, but what I meant was that although the bill has been passed by both houses and received royal assent, there is no “commencement order”; this means that the clauses are not yet law i.e if a sex slave was found today and a client was present then this law could NOT be used. Several parts of the policing and crime bill ARE now law i.e you can be prosecuted already, but not clause 14. I would have thought that would have been one of the first, given the effort they put in to get it passed.
Also given the legal minefield that is already being trodden with this law, there is no way that the police will attempt to prosecute anyone unless they’re caught in person with a real sex slave. It would be legal suicide for them to prosecute someone with strict liability for making an arrangements to have sex with a person who they had not yet met or actually handed over money to (although yes I agree clause 14 could be interpreted to allow that). It will only be punters caught with their trousers down when a brothel is raided that would need to worry.
oh and the police aren’t going to tap your phone or search your computer at a cost of thousands of pounds just to slap you with a fine of (maybe) £1000. Give yourself a slap if you think that’s going to happen.
Interpreted? It’s not a question of interpretation:
(1) A person (A) commits an offence if—
(a) A makes or promises payment for the sexual services of a prostitute (B),
(b) a third person (C) has engaged in exploitative conduct of a kind likely to induce or encourage B to provide the sexual services for which A has made or promised payment, and
(c) C engaged in that conduct for or in the expectation of gain for C or another person (apart from A or B).
(2) The following are irrelevant—
(a) where in the world the sexual services are to be provided and whether those services are provided,
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2009/ukpga_20090026_en_4#pt2-pb1-l1g14
One has to look at the subtexts. The purpose, although not explicit, is to arrest, convict and otherwise harass clients in order to (in the words of the Strategy) ‘disrupt the indoor markets’. That is to say, it is a prohibitionist policy. Examination of the political rhetoric before and after passage of the bill reveals some very strategic elisions.
By suggesting, for instance as Mactaggart does (BBC Jan 9 2009) (1), that the very experience of sexual exchange is synonymous or converges with trafficking and control, and hence all exchange can be seen to be in the context of control, is a very dangerous argument. It essentially criminalises all persons who purchase sex.
This only makes sense when seen in terms of the two dimensional depiction of sexual exchange engaged in by prohibitionists, and seemingly adopted by HM Government, in which predatory males prey on (rape in some rhetoric) vulnerable exploited women.
The reality is far more nuanced, but this has been submerged by the prevailing neoliberal ethos of increasing social control and surveillance and the erosion of cultural citizenship.
References
(1) More or Less. BBC Jan 9 2009. “Is the number of trafficked call girls a myth?”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7819984.stm
Transcript:
http://www.prostitutescollective.net/TraffickingMoreOrLessRadioProg.htm
Well MacTaggart isn’t really the face of the bill. She was a rent-a-quote for most news organisations because she was fairly rabid that she wanted an outright ban and made, as you say, some fairly startling comments linking “foreign” women to “trafficked” and claiming that 18000 women or 25000 women were sex slaves long after all the “real” politicians had shut up out of embarrassment regarding those figures. I believe that Clause 14 itself will have very little effect. It came out of a desire to ban prostitution entirely but when they couldn’t do that due to insufficient support they tried to change it to banning sex with women “controlled for gain”. But then when that was pointed out as amounting to the original total ban they had to re-word it again. I think the offence we’re left with will be used to make headlines and there is a possibility of a caution or two being handed out by police, but any real attempt to use it and charge a punter in court will end up with the law being thrown out, or at least the strict liability aspect being thrown out. They can’t haul punters before the courts for an offence which he was unaware of and which was, essentially, committed by a third party (i.e the pimp who forced the girl). Even the police have to rely on the evidence of the girl who was allegedly “forced etc.”. The punter is left with no way to punt (which is perfectly legal) without a risk of (therefore)arbitrary arrest, and prosecution. It’ll never hold up in court.
Yes I know the offence is worded that way.
If you want to get paranoid, theoretically the act COULD be used to prosecute someone who phoned up a pimp as a result of a newspaper advert he or she placed, and made a booking with a willing prostitute who had been told she would earn 80% of the takings but actually only got 75%. This would be covered by “deception” I believe, and you could be arrested before you even put the phone down, and clause 14 would fit perfectly.
The point of my post was to say that irrespective of these possibilities, it would be committing hari-kiri as far as clause 14 goes if they attempted to prosecute anyone who wasn’t caught with a real sex slave who he had begun or finished having sex with. They could not POSSIBLY hope to successfully prosecute (with strict liability) someone on the basis of just a booking he made with a girl he’d never met. It would be ripped to shreds by a half decent first year law student.
If and when the commencement order is made, and if and when the police decide to use it it will be as a result of a normal raid where they find a client in situ with a girl who turns out to be there against her will. This will be a very rare occurance, and there will still be lawyers lining up to represent the first person who is charged. So don’t get worked up about “what does deception mean?” or “What does ‘promised to pay’ mean?”.
In effect we actually have no idea how this piece of legislation will be used in prosecution and how the courts will interpret it, if it makes it to court. This might be a piece of legislation that ends up in the European Courts of Justice or Human Rights.
well probably it could go that far, however the legislation that has recently gone that far that I’m aware of is “storing DNA of anyone arrested irrespective of whether they’re charged/convicted”, and just this morning I’ve read of the legislation re: “random stop and search under terrorism act” being challenged successfully in the EU courts. The point with both of these challenges is that it only got that far because the govt clearly feels both pieces of legislation are VERY important to crime fighting, and fought back against the human rights issues with everything they had. I don’t think they’d kick up such a fuss over this legislation being challenged. Also I think that the problems are so fundamental that the courts in this country would declare that it was unlawful without it having to get that far.
1)) You’re being held in strict liability for a “wrong” which is primarily committed by a 3rd party whose existence you’re possibly not even aware of.
2) Uniquely in this offence, there is no way for anyone to independently confirm whether the law has been broken. You can confirm a whether you’re speeding in your car by looking at the speedo, and whether you have insurance by contacting the insurance company. If you’re worried a girl’s underage (under 13 is strict liability) you can ask to see ID. If she’s old enough she should have something. And the courts and police can certainly find out for certain without any help from the girl. But in this case everything rests on the what the girl says. When the client turns up she’s clearly going to pretend to be fine. Even the police will have to drop the case if she changes her mind just before it goes to court. This leads on to…
3)You’re being denied the right to defend yourself, in that you have no way to go about legal activities (visiting a prostitute) without an inherent and unavoidable risk that you’ll be arrested when it turns out the girl is a sex slave.
The law is supposed to be there as a list of what society won’t accept and what the penalties are for breaking these laws, in order to deter people from law breaking. In this case you’re not being deterred from breaking the law as there’s no way to know. You’re being deterred from visiting a prostitute but not from visiting a “forced” prostitute as no one knowinly does that. You’re being deterred from lawful activity.
I don’t believe this will ever need to get as far as the EU courts. All these breaches of basic rights simply for a £1000 fine. The seriousness of the offence does not warrant such harsh measures, and the penalties clearly show it’s not a serious offence.
Interestingly, Lord Norton thinks otherwise when it comes to the Lords and changing legistlation for cash. Perhaps he can comment?
ie. Paying cash for Lords to change legistlation isn’t a problem because it wouldn’t have worked.
The analogy with this bill is obvious
W.
PS. It’s still a criminal offence to commission or to offer to commit a criminal offence, even if you would never get away with it.
While we can argue theoretically about law and rights, there is usually a symbolic subtext to instrumental legislation.
In the debates in Sweden around the legislation criminalising purchase of sex this was very apparent. Indeed one could go so far as to say that those who crafted the law did not particularly care about the instrumental effectiveness.
In this case one could infer from all the considerations raised to date that this is clearly a case of caveat emptor. Since the buyer has no way of knowing the consequences of their actions, the prudent client will avoid entering a situation of unknown risk and penalty.
Ergo prostitution will disappear because demand has been successfully eliminated or at least decimated. Quod erat faciendum.
Then world hunger will be ended and peace shall decend upon the world. Prostitution has always existed and exists today in every country including Sweden and even in Middle Eastern coutries where the punishments for being caught are far worse than anything this govt has proposed. The new law will either never be used or will be rendered useless by case law. The law is specifically designed to be only used with strict liability. Other offences have it but it’s there as a safeguard to ensure that ignorance is not a defence; in this case ignorance is necessary….otherwise it’s already rape or sexual assault, unless they want to try experimenting with the definition of “deception” but then it will fail for being too minor an offence to warrant such harsh enforcement.
I know I keep going on, and maybe I’m being overly confident in my opinion but….that’s just how I am. The law is bound to fail. I think it’s no coincidence that they plan to bring this law into force in the spring i.e around the election time. Just in time to get positive headlines re:being tough on trafficked women etc. but not soon enough for any embarrassing court cases to be headlines instead.
Ergo prostitution will disappear because demand has been successfully eliminated or at least decimated. Quod erat faciendum.
I can only assume you are being sarcastic here.
There are many anti prostitution/Anti men groups who use the Sex Trafficking/Slavery idea as an attempt to unlaw all prostitution around the world by saying that all women that have sex are victims even if they do it willing. Regardless of the situation.
This hurts any real victims because it labels all sex workers as victims.
This is done by the media, aid groups, feminists, politicians and religious organizations that receive funds from the government. There are very strong groups who promote that all adult women who have sex are victims even if they are willing, enjoy it and go out of there way to get it. These groups try to get the public to believe that no adult women in their right mind would ever go into the sex business unless she was forced to do so, weather she knew it or not. They say that 100% of all sex workers are trafficking victims. They do this in order to label all men as sex offenders and wipe out all consensual prostitution. Which is what their real goal is. There is almost no one who challenges or questions them about their false beliefs. Therefore, the only voices you hear are of these extreme groups. These groups want to label all men as terrible sex offenders for seeing a willing adult sex worker.No one stands up to say this is foolish, the passive public says nothing. These groups even say that all men who marry foreign women are terrible sex predators who take advange of these “helpless foreign women wives”. This is an example of feminists and other groups exploiting the suffering of a small minority of vulnerable and abused women in order to further their own collective interests. For example, getting money from the government into their organizations. Rather than wanting to find the truth.
== In the United Kingdom ==
In October, 2009 – The biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country. The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.
Nick Davis of the Guardian newspaper writes:
Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.
== World Cup 2006 ==
Politicians, religious and aid groups, still repeat the media story that 40,000 prostitutes were trafficked into Germany for the 2006 world cup – long after leaked police documents revealed there was no truth at all in the tale. A baseless claim of 25,000 trafficking victims is still being quoted, recently, for example, by the Salvation Army in written evidence to the home affairs select committee, in which they added: “Other studies done by media have suggested much higher numbers.” Which has been proven by the German police to be completely false. Yet people still talk about these false numbers as if it were fact.
== In the USA ==
On August 5, 2008
U.S. Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine uncovered discrepancies in a program dedicated to cracking down on human trafficking, McClatchy Newspapers report. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales spent millions of dollars on combating the international trafficking of indentured servants and sex slaves, including by creating task forces across the U.S. that identified and helped victims. Over four years, the department paid $50 million to the task forces and other groups. Conservative groups, who pressured the administration to go after sex trafficking more aggressively, applauded his efforts.
Critics have questioned whether the problem was being hyped. Fine found in an audit issued that the task forces and other groups set up to help were ‘significantly’ overstating the number of victims they served. By examining a sampling of cases, Fine found the task forces had exaggerated by as much as 165 percent. Making matters worse, the inflated numbers were included in annual reports to Congress.
===In India and Nepal===
If media reports are to be believed, there would be no young girls left in Nepal. Oft-quoted figures such as 5,000-7,000 Nepali girls being trafficked across the border to India every year and 150,000-200,000 Nepali women and girls being trapped in brothels in various Indian cities, were first disseminated in 1986, and have remained unaltered over the next two decades. The report that first quoted these statistics was from the Indian Health Association, Mumbai, written by AIDS Society of India secretary general, Dr. I S Gilada, and presented in a workshop in 1986. Subsequently, a version of this report was published as an article in The Times of India on January 2, 1989. To date, the source of this figure remains a mystery. Unfortunately, such a lack of clarity is more the norm than the exception when it comes to reporting on trafficking in women and girls.
Sex slaves smuggled illegally into Britain are to share millions of pounds in compensation for their ‘pain and trauma’, it has emerged.
The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority – slated for long delays in making payments to the victims of violent crime – agreed to hand over £140,000 to the first four cases last week.
The women had suffered a ‘sustained period of sexual abuse’ after being trafficked into the UK.
Another 10,000 are estimated to be eligible under a new interpretation of guidelines drawn up by CICA, a Government agency
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-502644/Sex-slaves-set-receive-millions-pounds-compensation-taxpayer.html#ixzz0cfCuixsh
Here are some good links about this topic of sex trafficking:
News night BBC video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtaEdI3aiwg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rvA60zdkD8
http://mensnewsdaily.com/glennsacks/2009/10/30/more-on-the-great-sex-trafficking-scam-in-the-u-k/
Guardian newspaper:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/22/gov_proposals/print.html
Washington post article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/22/AR2007092201401.html
Human traffic website:
http://traffickingwatch.org/node/18
There’s an adage, the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. The prolific posting of Mr Lewis above appeared to be vaguely in favour of keeping the law as-is – although the law is now not as-it-was so he is somewhat late to the party. But a series of linkdumps, jibes against “feminists” etc seem to speak ill of the motive.
What, for example, are we to take from the Daily Mail article? Although the article itself fails to be the worst thing Paul Dacre has ever allowed to sully newsprint, there is still a sniff of the “foreigners taking our money” about it. Mr Lewis offers the article merely quoted without comment, making me wonder what it is he thinks we will get from reading it. Are we to be outraged that these trafficked women – many of whom are, by his reckoning, imaginary – are to get our money in another NuLab giveaway for People Who Are Not Daily Mail Readers? Or are we to be outraged that a woman subjected to abduction, rapes, beatings and forced prostitution should only receive £62K in compensation? Given Mr Lewis’ contribution above, I think I know which way the wind is blowing.
SWR groups clash with other feminist groups all the time, but this does not mean we wish to find ourselves sharing table-room with people who define any group talking about the troubles of marginalised women as inherently “anti-men”. It’s a sign of the sheer self-involvement of some of these reactionary types that they simply cannot believe that it’s not about them somehow, that SWR groups and feminist groups are both having an argument about the best way to secure rights for women rather than the best way to kick poor maligned men. Surely women aren’t that important, right?
The Witch Hunt begins on 1st April 2010, the new law is so vague in it’s definition, the police will have open season on the estimated 3,000,000 punters who visit prostitutes, another debacle of ill justice just like the Witch Hunt of Operation Ore/Candyman where Gamble then head of operations blatently lied about the criteria surrounding, accusing scores of innocent people pleading the family break-ups, deaths and ruined lives. This new bad law is Strict Liablility and will have a vast scope for police to abuse, leading to more family misery and lives ruined and for what, where ARE all these so called coerced women and what happened to the aim of the law to protect trafficked prostitues. A thoroughly bad law and ill concieved, which has nothing to do with it’s said aims, and everything to do with a minority of extreme feminists in the Labour Party wanted to end for good organised prostitution. Let the Witch Hunt begin……….
Perhaps some academic data demonstrating positive self-assessment and choice concerning work in the sex industry might be appropriate, giving substance to what many people suspect anyway.
http://download962.mediafire.com/elzojbtehmdg/d2mvonlz0gn/dissertation+for+punternet.docx#_Toc260126895