KEY FACTS ON WOMEN

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.”[1] 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.

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

[1] “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