Full report:
An experiment to legalise prostitution in Leeds has badly backfired. Charles Hymas and Corinne Redfern report
It was the sight of a prostitute injecting drugs into her groin on the back seat of a car, in full view of residents in a neat terraced street in Beeston, Leeds, that convinced Claire Bentley-smith it was time to act.
Britain’s first official red light district in neighbouring Holbeck, a sprawling mix of industrial units, car businesses and open wasteland, had until last summer rarely impinged on her life with her husband, a theatre set designer, and nine-year-old son.
Yet the artist returned with her son to school for the autumn term to hear parents and teachers tell of condoms, needles and soiled tissues discarded by prostitutes, not only in parks and woodland, but in the grounds of St Luke’s, her Church of England primary, which the caretaker had to clear each morning.
“We had girls staggering into moving traffic with no shoes on when it was snowing, in an absolute blind state from drugs,” she said. “It’s so distressing to see that on the school run in the morning.”
Not that Ms Bentley-smith feels anything but compassion for the “enslaved” prostitutes, and disdain for the men exploiting them. “These men don’t want to do it in a brothel, they just want to do it on the way from work. It’s almost as if the dirtier it is, the better,” she said.
Now Ms Bentley-smith and other residents are fighting to force Leeds council to rethink their “managed zone”, a liberal experiment in decriminalisation where soliciting, kerb crawling and loitering have been allowed between 8pm and 6am, seven days a week, since October 2014.
It is a battle that is raging in cities across the world, where similar attempts to decriminalise or legalise prostitution are foundering owing to their failure to stem violence, drugs and sexual diseases. Communities in countries as diverse as New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany and Bangladesh have all been affected.
Critics say such schemes have not only failed on their own terms and are not protecting prostituted women, but may have made matters worse. In many instances, far from controlling prostitution and the related crime that goes with it, they appear to have expanded the market and – most worrying of all – encouraged trafficking of women and girls by international criminal gangs.
In Leeds, as elsewhere, the statistics speak for themselves: complaints of rapes and sexual assaults have doubled in Holbeck and Beeston, and rates of gonorrhoea, syphilis and chlamydia are up, as is the prevalence of HIV. There was, at one point, a surge into the area of East European prostitutes, raising concerns over trafficking, and sparking a crackdown by the Border Force.
The council says the increase in crime is due to improved reporting, and includes Beeston, which is not part of the zone. Others disagree. “It was a disaster from day one,” a senior police officer told The Daily Telegraph on condition of anonymity. “Other criminals came into the area quick as a flash. Drug dealers, pimps, even traffickers who brought the women from Romania. There were loads of illegal immigrants, and complaint after complaint from people who worked and lived nearby.
“It was obvious we couldn’t contain it in the zone. The women were given carte blanche, and it was like there was a total amnesty on any of the scumbags that were buying and selling the girls. If we thought we had complaints from the public before, that paled in comparison after they set up the zone.
“We’ve had rapes, a murder (Daria Pionko, a Polish prostitute, was killed by a client in 2016), loads of women being beaten up, a massive health risk to kids and others because of the condoms and needles, and everyone’s forgotten about the state the girls are in.”
Liberal policy on prostitution – specifically decriminalisation – has been promoted globally for more than a decade as a means to fight HIV and Aids. The policy was given wings in 2014 when medical journal The Lancet published a peer-reviewed paper as part of a wider series that claimed decriminalisation could avert 33 per cent to 46 per cent of HIV infections across all settings, globally. Despite obvious drawbacks to the hypothetical modelling used, the journal gave it a blaze of publicity and it has been promoted widely by policymakers ever since. Leading health and aid agencies, including Amnesty International and UNAIDS, have all cited it when calling for decriminalisation.
But as Julie Bindel, the feminist and sex trade expert, writes overleaf, The Lancet’s modelling took no account of what might happen to the size of the market in prostitution if the legislative lid was taken off.
Prof Susan Bewley, a member of the 2017 WHO Guideline Development Group, which reported on sexual and reproductive health and rights of women living with HIV, said The Lancet’s claim that HIV would be reduced by up to 46 per cent was “dubious. First, this is just modelling, not hard evidence. Secondly, people do not always behave as predicted. That’s why you need to test everything in the real and complex world,” she said.
Prof Richard Byng, a specialist in evaluating interventions for vulnerable groups who, as a GP, works with women who have left the sex trade, said the assumptions on increased condom use and reduced sexual violence in decriminalised zones were “not supported by evidence”.
“Perhaps most importantly,” he adds, “the model is concerned solely with HIV transmission, and ignores both the direct physical and emotional harm of working in prostitution and the potential wider societal harms of endorsing the rights of men to buy sex.”
In few places are those harms more evident than in Kandipara – one of Bangladesh’s estimated 20 legal brothel “villages”, with approximately 400 sex workers employed within its mildewed pink and green concrete walls. According to Bangladeshi law, everyone employed by the brothel is supposed to be over 18 and in possession of a magistrate-issued licence that declares they’re fully prepared to work in prostitution.
But clamber past the crowds of wide-eyed girls squatting on red
‘It was like there was a total amnesty on the scumbags buying and selling the girls’
plastic buckets, by the entrance, to step inside, and you hear a different story. Out of 375 sex workers surveyed on behalf of a local NGO, Girls Not Brides, across four such brothels in Bangladesh last year, 47 per cent were former child brides, trafficked into prostitution against their will. Once inside the brothels, they’re held captive until they can save up enough money to buy their freedom, and vulnerable to violence, disease and psychological abuse.
Rupa, a local village girl who was married at 11 and then tricked into working at the brothels by traffickers when her husband died shortly after, is a case in point. “This one isn’t violent,” she says of one client, while lifting her sleeve to show a ladder of raised scars and blistered cigarette burns. “I get scared when the men start forcing me to do things I haven’t agreed to,” she says. “They say they’re paying me for a service, so it’s my job to make them happy.”
Rupa would like to use condoms, she says, but the 10 to 12 customers she sees daily tend to object. While condom usage in Kandipara used to hover at 40 per cent 20 years ago, following free distribution and peer awareness programmes, their popularity is now declining. Meanwhile, the last Ngo-run medical clinic closed its doors in the brothel in 2014, due to funding cuts, and Rupa hasn’t been tested for any STIS since, despite multiple studies claiming HIV and other STIS are steadily increasing.
In mainland Europe, as in Leeds and Bangladesh, the experience of legalised brothels appears little different. Jurgen Rudloff, the media-friendly owner of the Paradise brothel in Stuttgart, was ostensibly the clean face of German prostitution. He boasted his women were “independent entrepreneurs” working in a venue with bars, sauna, restaurant and in-house gynaecologist. In March, however, he appeared in court with three of his colleagues accused of human trafficking, exploiting prostitutes, pimping and fraud.
Police chiefs in Munich and Ulm said there had been an “explosive rise in human trafficking from Romania and Bulgaria” after legalisation in 2002, as brothels fuelled demand by advertising unprotected sex, and flat-rate offers of €99 (£88) for customers to have sex with as many women as they wanted from 4pm to dawn. Research by economists at the German university of Marburg used data from 149 countries from 2001 to 2011 to show liberalising prostitution laws increased demand for prostitutes, which led to more trafficking. This not only failed to reduce the violence and suffering of women but could actually make it worse.
“My empirical analysis using a global sample of data from 149 countries shows that the liberal prostitution regime is, at best, irrelevant to victim protection, if not negative,” said Prof Seo-young Cho.
One solution to all of this could come in the form of the Nordic model on prostitution, first introduced in Sweden in 1999 and now being implemented in countries including France, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Iceland. Under this model, prostitutes are decriminalised so that they can seek help, but the buying of sex is made a criminal offence. Proponents say the policy constricts rather than expands the market. In Sweden, trafficking has fallen away sharply.
Alan Caton, a former detective superintendent, trialled something similar to the Nordic model in Ipswich. The scheme was introduced after the murder of five street prostitutes in 2006 by Steven Wright, known as the Suffolk Strangler, who is now serving a life sentence. After leading the biggest investigation in Suffolk police’s history, Mr Caton took charge of a multi-agency strategy to eliminate prostitution through zero tolerance of kerb crawlers, and offering the women a way out of prostitution through an amnesty backed by intensive counselling and support. In the first two years, 140 kerb crawlers were arrested, with the option of avoiding publicity by admitting their guilt and getting a caution.
Most were married or in long-term relationships, and had children. “When I asked [the men] about it, they said, ‘I am paying for it, I can do what I want.’ That helped me form the view that this is not right. Men should not be able to exploit and abuse women in that way,” said Mr Caton.
The result, independently validated by the University of East Anglia, was that more than 80 women “made life changes to move on from prostitution”, kerb crawling and street prostitution were eliminated, 400 children were identified as being at risk of sexual exploitation, and criminal justice costs were halved. Police and charities say the zero tolerance continues, with nearly all the women still out of prostitution.
The contrast with Holbeck’s hands-off policy could not be sharper.
‘Most clients were married or in longterm relationships and had children’