PRESS RELEASE

The Policing and Crime Bill is going through Parliament at the same time as the Welfare Reform Bill which will have a devastating impact on women and what’s left of the Welfare State. As the economic recession hits, more women, especially mothers, are likely to resort to prostitution to support their families. Together these Bills are legislating for destitution and prostitution, and therefore the criminalisation of many more women and the neglect of many more children.

New Zealand successfully decriminalised all prostitution, both indoors and on the street, six years ago. There has been no increase in prostitution and women find it safer. Why isn’t New Zealand being followed?

The English Collective of Prostitutes and the Safety First Coalition can be contacted at:

Whatever you may think of prostitution, please look at the measures in this Bill from the point of view of women’s safety and of legal rights. It has been claimed that ‘tackling the demand’ by criminalising men who buy sexual services will increase safety, and the spectre of trafficking has been used to stifle debate and hide the evidence that points to the contrary.

1. Distinguished organisations like the Royal College of Nursing and Women Against Rape oppose criminalisation on grounds of health and safety. Their views are critical given that they are independent of government and their members deal with concrete situations involving health and safety. The RCN voted to decriminalise by a staggering 93%. Women Against Rape makes a clear distinction between “rape and consenting sex (whether in a relationship, casual or paid for)” and opposes the criminalisation of clients: http://www.womenagainstrape.net.

3. An opinion poll carried out over the weekend found that 2/3 of the UK population support decriminalisation on grounds of safety.

6. Sweden is a false analogy. The example of Sweden has been widely used to claim that criminalising clients has reduced prostitution there and increased safety. This is a false analogy since Sweden has criminalised clients but not sex workers, while the Policing and Crime Bill would further criminalise sex workers as well as clients. There is evidence that in Sweden prostitution has been forced underground via the internet and other means, and that women are in more danger. http://www.allwomencount.net/EWC%20Sex%20Workers/SwedenhasnNoMadeItSafer.htm

7. Evidence from the US where both sex workers and clients are criminalised, has not even been considered. It indicates high levels of violence against women. Findings from New York (a city more like London than Stockholm in terms of size) show widespread violence against women, including from law enforcement. 80% of street workers and 46% of indoor workers experienced violence or threats; 27% of street workers and 14% of indoor workers at the hands of police. http://www.urbanjustice.org/pdf/publications/RevolvingDoorExecSum.pdf and http://www.urbanjustice.org/pdf/publications/BehindDoorsExecSum.pdf

9. Those who are pressing for criminalisation totally ignore the reality of women’s lives and the impoverishment and lack of choices that many are up against, especially during the recession. They use flawed trafficking statistics to justify measures which target anyone involved in prostitution, whether or not there is force or coercion. Given the lack of jobs and the low wages pushing so many people into poverty, and combined with the Welfare Reform Bill also going through parliament which abolishes Income Support, criminalisation will have a devastating effect, first of all on women and their families. They would drive prostitution further underground and sex workers into even more danger.

10. Criminal records trap women in prostitution, making it harder to get other jobs.

11. As a result of widespread public opposition, the government was forced to amend the offence which criminalised clients but nothing has been said about the continuing raids, prosecutions and convictions against women who are working collectively and independently, and usually discreetly. This shows the government is not really concerned about women’s safety.

1. The UK charge of trafficking for prostitution, unlike trafficking for any other industry, does not require force or coercion. This enables every woman with a foreign accent to be falsely labelled a victim of trafficking!

3. In response to questions by John McDonnell MP, the Home Office claims that 4,000 women are trafficked into the UK a year. But this research is based on incredulous claims such as: “every single foreign woman in the ‘walk-up’ flats in Soho had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as a prostitute.”[2] This would come as a surprise to the over 60 women who work in walk-up flats in Soho who regularly attend our meetings, do interviews with the press, meet parliamentarians and who describe their situation as mothers supporting families or working to send money back home.

4. Information that the phones at the UK Trafficking Centre are answered by immigration officers indicates that far from providing protection anti-trafficking initiatives are primary aimed at the targeting and deportation of immigrant women.

5. Victims of trafficking are not being helped. Despite government claims about prioritising trafficking, most victims get no protection. In the last few weeks the Guardian exposed that 77 suspected child victims of trafficking went missing from a local authority care home over a period of two years. Only four children have been found and there have been no prosecutions. A surveillance operation at the home was cancelled, and despite it being known that children were disappearing more young people kept on being sent there. What does this say about the priority given to cases of trafficking where harm may be occurring that resources couldn’t be found to place two officers outside the home to stop the children disappearing? What does it say about the immigration authorities which worked hand in hand with the police and kept sending children there? These children would not be better protected with the measures in the Bill.

Since clients were criminalised in October 2007, the number of assaults on sex workers has soared. Attacks reported to one project have almost doubled from 66 in 2006 to 126 last year, including eight reported rapes and 55 violent assaults. The Scotsman 18 April 2008.

There are few similarities between the UK and Sweden. Stockholm has a total urban area of only 1,252,020. Sweden criminalised men who buy sex in 1999. Sex workers were decriminalised but there is no proposal to do that in the UK. Claims that by reducing “demand” both trafficking and prostitution are reduced are countered by sex workers.[3] (http://www.sans.nu/sans_eng.htm) who report that the industry is just less visible, more mobile (many women have moved to border towns) and therefore less safe. Whatever is claimed about the reduction in numbers there is no evidence of an improvement in safety or welfare for sex workers.

A much closer comparison can be made between the UK and the US. In the US both the selling and buying of sex is criminalised but there has been no reduction in prostitution or improvement in rights or safety for sex workers. Recent research from New York makes harrowing reading: 80% of street workers and 46% of indoor workers experienced violence or threats in the course of their work. More worryingly, 27% of street workers and 14% of indoor workers had experienced violence at the hands of police and 16% of indoor workers had been involved in sexual situations with the police. http://www.urbanjustice.org/pdf/publications/RevolvingDoorExecSum.pdf and http://www.urbanjustice.org/pdf/publications/BehindDoorsExecSum.pdf.

Commenting on the impact of US anti-trafficking law, Ann Jordan, Director of the Initiative against Trafficking in Persons Global Rights, testified before the US House of Representatives in March 2007 “over the last six years, the broad scope of the U.S. anti-trafficking policy has been gradually narrowed to fit an anti-prostitution agenda that is based on the unproven belief that all prostitution (even legal prostitution in Nevada) is trafficking, and so criminalizing prostitution, as well as clients, is promoted as a purported means to stop prostitution and to stop trafficking for prostitution. Jordan expressed concern that the US anti-prostitution campaign envisioned within the 2005 US Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act encroaches upon anti-trafficking enforcement activities and may well divert federal funding, investigators and prosecutors and badly-needed anti-trafficking resources to non-trafficking prostitution activities, potentially leaving traffickers free to operate with impunity and contributing to the stigma suffered by persons in the sex sector.[4]

The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Bill was recently defeated on the grounds that it “would have further stigmatized sex workers by criminalizing the purchase of sexual services.” Sex workers who vehemently opposed these measures, because it would “violate their human rights” commented: “While the political appeal of criminalizing clients of sex workers is clear, there is no evidence from any country that this is an effective strategy for preventing violence against sex workers.”[5]

Under pressure from the United States, Cambodia outlawed prostitution in February this year. Under the new law, the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation Law, brothels have closed or gone underground, along with bars, karaoke clubs and street areas. “Hundreds of women have been arrested, jailed or displaced, while dozens have been raped and beaten by police and prison guards. The HIV prevention and care programs that were working have collapsed. The law encourages trafficking and exploitation because it makes sex workers easier prey: the workers can no longer seek clients in public and must depend upon others to introduce them.” Account & video: http://www.blip.tv/file/953418/

Recent research from Vancouver found that: "The persistent relationship between enforcement of prostitution and drug use policies (e.g. confiscation of drug use paraphernalia without arrest, and enforced displacement to outlying areas) suggests that criminalization may enhance the likelihood of violence against street-based female sex workers."[6]

In 2003, the New Zealand Prostitution Reform Act (PRA) decriminalised prostitution of persons over 18 on grounds of "sex workers' human rights, protection from exploitation and promotion of occupational health and safety". The June 2008 PRA statutory five year review concluded that:

“The PRA has been in force for five years. During that time, the sex industry has not increased in size, and many of the social evils predicted by some who opposed the decriminalisation of the sex industry have not been experienced. On the whole, the PRA has been effective in achieving its purpose, and the Committee is confident that the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry are better off under the PRA than they were previously.”

§ There has been no rise in numbers of women working, including of young people who feel able to contact agencies for help.

§ Sex workers are more likely to report incidents of violence to the police and other agencies. This was particularly true for the street workers.

§ There has been a change of attitude by members of the police. Some individual officers and some police districts have gone out of their way to work with the sex industry, with Christchurch being the obvious example. However, stigmatisation still plays a key role in the non-reporting of incidents. This is the inevitable result of years of the sex industry operating illegally, with the police seen as posing a threat rather than offering protection.

§ Judges have ruled that sex workers are entitled to expect the same protection under the law as anyone else.

§ Attacks are cleared up more quickly as women are more likely to come forward with information without fear of arrest, making all women safer.

§ Women find it easier to leave prostitution as convictions have been cleared from their records.

“ . . . refrain from criminalising and penalising prostitutes . . . respect the right of prostitutes who freely choose to work as prostitutes to have a say in any policies at national, regional and local level . . . ensure . . . access to safe sexual practices and enough independence to impose these on their clients”.[7]

The recent UN Report of the Commission on AIDS in Asia noted that sex workers are part of the solution to preventing the spread of HIV, and advised countries to "avoid programs that accentuate AIDS-related stigma and can be counterproductive. Such programs may include ‘crack-downs' on red-light areas and arrest of sex workers."

[1] "Prevalence and structural correlates of gender based violence among a prospective cohort of female sex workers" Kate Shannon, assistant professor, T Kerr, assistant professor, S A Strathdee, professor and chair, J Shoveller, professor, J S Montaner, professor and director, M W Tyndall, associate professor, BMJ 2009; 339:b2939, bmj.com

[2] “Three years after the Kelly/Regan work was published, in 2003, a second team of researchers was commissioned by the Home Office to tackle the same area. They, too, were forced to make a set of highly speculative assumptions: that every single foreign woman in the "walk-up" flats in Soho had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as a prostitute; that the same was true of 75% of foreign women in other flats around the UK and of 10% of foreign women working for escort agencies. Crunching these percentages into estimates of the number of foreign women in the various forms of sex work, they came up with an estimate of 3,812 women working against their will in the UK sex trade. The researchers ringed this figure with warnings. The data, they said, was "very poor" and quantifying the subject was "extremely difficult". Their final estimate was "very approximate", "subject to a very large margin of error" and "should be treated with great caution" and the figure of 3,812 ‘should be regarded as an upper bound’.” “Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic”, Guardian, 20 October

[3] “Those who are worst afflicted are unfortunately the most vulnerable sexworkers, the street prostitutes, addicts and sexworkers from other countries. On the streets the negotiations must happen a lot faster than before since the police can be around the corner. … it is therefore hard to do a correct risk assessment . . . if a customer meets a sexworker that he/she suspects is the victim of sexual trafficking, that person is today scared of going to the police. Before you could obtain evidence against traffickers and pimps based on customer’s testimony.” (http://www.sans.nu/sans_eng.htm)

[4] “Human Trafficking, Sex Work Safety and the 2010 Games”, June 10, 2009. Sex Industry Worker Safety Action Group, Canada.

[5] Indian Sex Workers Fight Penalization, by Meena Seshu on March 3, 2009, Asia, Sex Work

[6] "Prevalence and structural correlates of gender based violence among a prospective cohort of female sex workers" Kate Shannon, assistant professor, T Kerr, assistant professor, S A Strathdee, professor and chair, J Shoveller, professor, J S Montaner, professor and director, M W Tyndall, associate professor, BMJ 2009; 339:b2939, bmj.com

[7] Assembly debate on 4 October 2007 (35th Sitting) (see Doc. 11352, report of the Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men, rapporteur: Mr Platvoet). Text adopted by the Assembly on 4 October 2007 (35th Sitting).

SUMMARY