End this abuse of women
IT Is no surprise it took 19 years to get justice for the murder of Emma Caldwell given the disregard for women sold for sex every day in scotland.
There is now shock and consternation over this case from a nation which has always turned a blind eye to this sordid trade in women. Today on International Women’s Day, we will pat ourselves on the back as a progressive country aspiring to gender equality.
What a lie, when women are today being exploited by punters who on a whim may rape them, beat and abuse them and do so with impunity.
Over three decades I have spoken to dozens of these women and I will never see their exploitation as empowerment.
Katie haunts me still, a tiny woman thrown by a punter from the third floor of a car park.
she broke both her legs but with casts plastered to her thighs, her pimp still sold her as she lay immobile on a bed.
A former teacher, who was later imprisoned for 10 years for rape, smashed a hammer across her head when she asked for payment.
she and another girl were gang raped, beaten, spat on by 15 businessmen in a Glasgow hotel.
There are thousands of Katies and there will be more Emmas.
The scottish Government has declared the purchase of sex to be violence against women but for all its forests of strategies and consultations, it is still legal for a man to buy a woman’s body.
Labour’s Rhoda Grant MSP who spoke on commercial sexual exploitation in the scottish Parliament yesterday has spent decades, along with other female politicians, frontline support workers and health staff calling for the criminalisation of the purchase of sex.
These campaigners fighting for the most vulnerable women in our society are stymied at every turn by politicians who have no issue with a price tag on a woman.
Other nations including sweden, Ireland and Canada have successfully outlawed this sale of women, changing cultural attitudes and reducing trafficking.
It is nonsense to suggest that making this exploitation illegal drives women underground and puts them in danger.
If the punters can find them, they are not “underground”.
There is no safeguarding a woman who enters a car, a flat or a brothel to be sold to a stranger who considers her a purchase to do with what he will.
The SNP government must drive forward the criminalisation of the purchase of sex and demonstrate in modern scotland, women are at last, no longer commodities to be used, raped, beaten and murdered.