Do shut up Louis, sex work isn’t a valid job – it’s abuse

HOW has it come to this? Just as the Government is trying to prevent young people being polluted by online pornography, respected commentators and purveyors of the finest arts and culture are promoting the dangerous idea that sex work is an acceptable alternative to a traditional career.

I’m thinking of you, Louis Theroux. he’s hugely popular, but admits to having used porn, compares it to ‘junk food’, argues sex work is valid work, but warns his children that, when they stumble across porn, they should know it’s not how people have sex. Does he not think those performing for his titillation are real people?

Some years ago, I spoke to the American journalist Peggy Orenstein, the author of Girls & Sex, about what she’d learned from interviewing teenage girls across the U.S.

She was horrified at the damage to girls’ ability to find and express pleasure in a sexual relationship because of the bizarre and unpleasant acts performed on them by boys who thought their girlfriends would enjoy being treated like pieces of meat in a porn movie.

I’m also thinking about the Institute of Contemporary Arts granted £2.7million for an exhibition called Decriminalising Futures. It will feature work by sex workers, more correctly known as prostitutes, a porn star and strippers alongside works of ‘art’ featuring sex, nudity and violence.

The publicity material states that full decriminalisation is the rallying cry that unites the sex worker rights movement across the world. I have yet to meet the prostitute who feels she would benefit from decriminalisation or legalisation of the trade.

In my early days as a reporter, I met numerous women in Southampton who spoke of cruelty and abuse, and offered themselves for sex for only one reason — they had no means of support but needed money to feed and clothe their children.

A young woman from Romania who was trafficked to Ireland’s sex trade told me the most horrific stories of rape and beatings.

Fiona Broadfoot is one of two women who were groomed as girls into prostitution by men they thought were boyfriends. They have escaped the trade and are trying to get criminal records of arrests for soliciting removed from their history. I have no doubt they would wish the money spent on the ICA’s exhibition had been used to help women get out of the sex trade.

The feminist journalist Julie Bindel has travelled the world talking to women who have described the suffering they have endured in countries such as New Zealand and Australia where the trade has been decriminalised or legalised. The only benefit she sees is they don’t get arrested.

The men, as they do the world over, get what they want. The girls are getting younger, punters often demand sex without a condom. It is, says Julie, the world’s oldest oppression. There is only one way to put an end to these horrors. It’s the men, the pimps or punters, who should be treated as criminals.

The pimps should never be seen as legitimate businessmen. The punters are not buying a service. Pornography is not ‘junk food’, as Theroux describes it, ‘like when you can’t get a decent meal or you’re in a rush or you’re just trying to get a need met’.

The sex trade, in whatever form, is none of those things. It’s abuse. Women and girls must know their bodies are their own, not objects to be bought and sold.