Sex work isn’t ‘just another job’
I have been campaigning against the global sex trade for 20 years. I have spent time in legal or semilegal brothels in the West. I have also visited red light districts in many developing world countries, where the same well-meaning but misplaced liberalism has led local authorities to decriminalise prostitution.
In all these places, just as in Holbeck in Leeds, deregulation has not only failed on its own terms, condemning women involved to lives of appalling physical and mental degradation, but it has led to a surge in demand and aggravated the problem. In the worst instances, now evident in Europe and much of the developing world, it has led to a boom in the trafficking of young women and girls.
There are many well-intentioned people who believe that decriminalisation will rid the trade of the violence, disease and coercion that has always characterised it. At the international Aids conference in Amsterdam this week, the myth of the “happy hooker” is once again being propagated. If you legalise and celebrate prostitution, the argument goes, you give prostitutes the “agency” they require to lead healthy lives. Prostitution, or “sex work” as it is now called, becomes a job “just like any other”.
But, as The Daily
Telegraph reports today, prostitution is not just another job. For every happy prostitute (if one really exists) there are thousands for whom life is sordid and dangerous; dozens of liaisons a day with strangers in alleyways or slums; routine beatings, rapes and extortion; HIV and syphilis; cheap spirits and ruinous drugs.
What the liberal analysis ignores is the market. Prostitution is seldom a simple transaction between two consenting adults – it’s a racket run for profit. Pimps, brothel owners, gangs and crime syndicates are behind every red light zone from Holbeck to Harare. Their public face is just a slightly more respectable lobby of sex profiteers, such as those running escort agencies and strip clubs.
The tide is turning. A sharp increase in people trafficking and a rash of child protection scandals here and abroad are causing policymakers to think again. Even in Amsterdam’s famous red-light district, the original “tolerance zone” on which so many others have been modelled, the writing is on the wall. A third of its window brothels are closing down after the city’s mayor admitted its presence was attracting drug dealing, pimping, trafficking and violence.
In Britain, it is the “Nordic model” that politicians are now looking to, whereby prostitutes are decriminalised and offered help. However, it also becomes a criminal offence to purchase sex. This flips the balance of power between prostitutes and those that exploit them on its head. It also effectively restricts the sale of sex to those rare instances where it is genuinely a transaction between two consenting adults.
The Nordic model has been introduced in France, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Norway and Iceland. Even Nevada, the only US state where prostitution is legal, is considering closing its bordellos. In Germany too, where brothels offer “a beer, a burger, and bang all you can”, policymakers are questioning the logic of legalisation.
There is something else about the Nordic model as it is operated in Sweden that gives cause for hope. Those who introduced it do not see their role as limited to harm reduction, contenting themselves with distributing condoms and HIV tests. Instead, they have instituted comprehensive exit programmes to assist women to leave prostitution for good.
People tell me it sounds “judgmental” to ask someone if they wish to exit prostitution. Yet every one of the many women in prostitution have interviewed over the years has been desperate to get out.