Britain’s War on Prostitution

Working in the Adult Industry making leather bondage equipment, we at Affordable Leather Products always try to keep tabs on what else is going on in related areas and one that has popped up several times on the radar recently, is that of sex work.

It is a sad fact that, whilst most people believe in “live and let live” and letting consenting adults get on with their own lives without interference, there are some (and, regrettably too many in our government) who believe that anything they don’t like is wrong and must, therefore, be stopped.

Who thinks prostitution should be stopped?

The latest example is the conflation between “Modern Slavery” and legal, consensual prostitution by Kevin Hyland, the government’s “Independent Anti-slavery Commissioner” who has urged Londoners to contact the Police to look out for brothels because sex workers in the capital were being “beaten, raped and sometimes starved by the men controlling them in a form of human slavery that was blighting the capital”.

Now, whilst we absolutely abhor this sort of behaviour and consider it completely unacceptable, what is disappointing and regrettable is that he makes absolutely no distinction between premises which are operated by men who are exploiting women in this way and those which are being used by fully informed and consenting adult women.

He went on to say: “A lot of these premises set up on residential streets and people see these things and sometimes wonder what they should do.

“They should contact the police or, if they don’t feel comfortable with that, contact the local authority or one of the non-government organisations or the modern slavery helpline.”

Note here how he implies that ALL such premises must be involved in the exploitation of women, even though he has no proof of this because the truth of the matter is very much to the contrary.

He also claims that the Metropolitan Police are on course to identify about 1,000 people held as slaves in London this year (presumably simply extrapolating from how many have been found so far) yet it is not necessarily the case that all of them were involved in the sex trade at all.

Another of his assertions is that “more than 3,000 potential slavery victims had been identified nationwide last year and numbers were still rising”, but this reminds us of the claims that tens of thousands of women were going to be trafficked into London for the 2012 Olympics, yet, when the organisation pushing these figures lost its government funding, suddenly all these news stories evaporated.

For more information about the London 2012 crackdown, see this article on how London 2012 was not responsible for an increase in sex trafficking by Georgina Perry, the service manager for Open Doors, a clinical, case management and outreach service for sex workers in City & Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets in the UK since 2003

Who is Kevin Hyland?

Kevin Hyland was previously head of the London Metropolitan Police’s Human Trafficking Unit who were criticised for “heavy handed” raids on brothels before the London 2012 Olympics. They had claimed before the event that there would be an increase in trafficked women and prostitution, yet were eventually forced to admit that they had failed to find any evidence of such increase, despite being given an extra £500,000 of public money to target this predicted crime.

The criticism also stated that the Police were carrying out raids without any complaints having been raised about the establishments, nor any intelligence that trafficking was taking place. Georgina Perry said “Women are terrified to report violent crimes that take place against them for fear of being arrested. This situation neither helps to bring real criminals to justice nor gives intelligence that may combat trafficking.” In other words, the efforts to “protect” women were actually having the opposite effect.

There is a parallel example in the USA, where Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes about “The truth of about the biggest US Sex Trafficking Story of the Year” revealing that, for all the media hype and hysteria, most of the “facts” of a story about so-called “sex trafficking” are actually completely fictitious.

Of course it is a fact that the current lamentable state of the law in Britain today means that, although it is not illegal to be a prostitute or accept money for sex, it is illegal to run a Brothel (which is defined as two sex workers operating at the same address). The result of this is that it makes life more difficult and dangerous for women because if a customer gets aggressive or abusive, they have no one to call on for protection.

Is it all doom and gloom in the sex industry?

Well, possibly not. There are those who understand that sex work and trafficking are not the same thing and there have been calls by Jeremy Corbyn to decriminalise the sex industry and the Lib-Dems have had decriminalisation as a party policy since 1994.

Additionally, recently the Liberal Democrats have launched a 33-page policy consultation paper, to go before the party’s conference in Brighton this month, which argues that “criminalisation” of sex workers is drawing vulnerable people into the justice system and jeopardising women’s safety by forcing them to take greater risks by working alone,

At the same time the Parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee has also echoed the call for decriminalisation of prostitution, pointing out that neither criminalising the workers, nor the customers (the so-called Nordic model) has actually had any effect in reducing demand or violence against women.

Unfortunately this has been undermined by the gutter press by doing a “fearless expose” of Keith Vaz for using the services of male prostitutes, even though he was committing no offences thereby, and him being forced to resign from his position.

What about the “Nordic Model”?

In Sweden, the government’s attempts to deal with prostitution have resulted in a change in the law whereby those who sell sex are not committing a crime, but those who buy it are.

The idea behind this is to reduce demand and protect women because making it a crime to pay for the services of a prostitue will, supposedly, deter men from doing so, but in actual fact not only has demand barely changed, but it puts women more at risk because the men will try their best to conceal their identities, meaning that the women will find it much harder to screen out dangerous customers.

More details on the failure of the Nordic Model for prostitution can be found in our blog post on how the Irish anti-prostitution law has had no prosecutions

Similarly, a study in Australia has determined that decriminalisation of sex work is not associated with more men paying for sex, however criminalistion actually leads to more exploitation and trafficking, higher rates of sexually transmittable infections, drug use, and risk of physical abuse.

So what’s the problem in the sex trade?

The problem is, frankly, that the Tory Party has a Nanny State attitude that “We don’t like this and we say it’s bad for you, so we’re going to stop it happening, no matter what the evidence is”.

They want to pander to the Mumsnet and Daily Mail reading public, showing how they are being “tough on crime” and getting headlines about how they are “protecting women” even though the evidence is quite to the contrary.

Is this going to affect the rest of the Adult Industry?

Well, fortunately, at the moment, nobody is trying to make manufacturing or selling leather bondage equipment illegal, but nonetheless, this and the government’s attempts to force adult websites to impose age verification schemes show that the Tories have a comprehensive “anti-sex” agenda (or, at least, anti-any sex they don’t like) and this is something that needs to be stopped because they are trampling on the rights of everyone to express themselves in ways that the government don’t approve of.

Have you been affected by this?

Are you a worker in the sex industry or know others who are? Have the Police crackdowns affected your life or your business?

Tell your story or give us your views in the comments below.