First red-light zone ‘fails to protect women’
BRITAIN’S first “legal” red-light district has been branded a failure by one of its architects amid speculation that the scheme may be on the brink of collapse.
The politician who helped create the zone in Leeds admitted that the women working the streets were still at risk of violence and neighbouring residents had seen a surge in sex and drug-taking in their streets, parks and woods, sometimes in full view of children.
Mark Dobson, the executive councillor who helped set up the zone, said: “Unless the scheme is seen to work, it will fail – and it is failing.”
A meeting between residents, the council, police and health chiefs today will hear calls for the ending of the scheme. “Our argument is that it’s not appropriate to have girls bought and sold on our streets in 2018,” said Claire Bentley-smith, a resident.
The red-light zone, created in 2014, is at the heart of a debate over the most effective way of regulating prostitution to combat trafficking, violence and high rates of sexual diseases. A Daily Telegraph investigation in locations including Leeds, Bangladesh, Germany and Holland suggests the “hands-off” approach is creating more harm than it prevents. In Leeds, a senior police officer said the force had “given up”.
The Leeds zone is in the largely industrial district of Holbeck, with men free to kerb-crawl for prostitutes between 8pm and 6am. Sex in public, however, remained an offence against public decency. As a result, residents said it had turned into a “meet-andgreet” area with the prostitutes and their clients decamping to streets, parks and woodland to have sex.
Although prostitution is not illegal in Great Britain, soliciting for prostitution in a public place is illegal. However, street prostitutes in Holbeck were told they would not be prosecuted provided they operated within the designated hours.
Politicians consider themselves enlightened if they support ideas like licensed red-light areas. These so-called “zones of toleration” allow sex workers to ply their trade in a particular area without fear of prosecution. The concept has been around for many years and is justified by the certainty that the prostitutes and their clients are not going to go away, so why not facilitate the trade?
The most obvious answer is because it is illegal. However, the thinking has been that in controlled zones sex workers can be protected from abuse, disease, mistreatment or worse. So an experiment was launched a few years ago in an area of Leeds where prostitution has long been a problem.
After the first 12 months, police, the local council, social workers and academics judged it a success and carried on with it. But the people who actually lived in the area were far less impressed, as they watched their neighbourhood become a magnet for drug dealers and other criminals. The zone is now to be scrapped.
It should have been apparent to anyone that if you set up a discrete area like this it will attract people that decent local residents do not want in their midst. Furthermore, as criminals saw an opportunity to make money it led to an increase in the trafficking of women.
In Ipswich, where a no-tolerance approach to prostitution was taken – partly because of the activities of the serial killer Steven Wright – crime has fallen dramatically. What does this tell us? If the law is enforced and order imposed on the streets, crime falls. If a blind eye is turned to criminal activity because of some misplaced notion of what constitutes a progressive and modern approach, offending goes up. Funny that.