Jacqui Smith and the New Prostitution Laws in the UK
As I'm sure you'll be aware, the UK's Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is proposing to change the law on prostitution. Councils would be given more power to close down brothels, clients would be "named and shamed" and sex with someone "controlled" for another's gain would be outlawed.
It's not a good move, let's face it. Throwing women out into the street and denying workers the right to a safe environment to work in (and this is a Labour government?!), fostering a climate of fear, don't get me started on "naming and shaming..." This is bad news, quite simply. How bad? Read more.
Now, sex workers and allies have spoken out against this in no uncertain terms. Cari Mitchel of the ECP said,
The plan is puritanical.
If they make solicitation illegal and start outing clients, men are going to be more nervous and women will be forced to make hasty decisions to survive economically.
The International Union of Sex Workers' Douglas Fox points out the apparently-not-obvious-to-Jacqui-Smith,
Most of the working population choose to work for or through a third party and therefore are controlled for gain. Sex workers are to be denied this basic human right taken as granted by the rest of the population.
Catherine Stephens (also of the IUSW) talks about the research that informed Smith's proposals -
Yesterday the Home Office announced new proposals intended to "protect the thousands of vulnerable women coerced, exploited or trafficked into prostitution in our country, and to bring those who take advantage of them to justice". It's a great story, with drama, heroism, anguish and a big white horse for Jacqui Smith to ride as she swoops in to rescue tearful hookers from foreign countries.
Unfortunately, it's pretty much fact-free and bears no relationship to the reality of the sex industry: it will in actuality increase the vulnerability of all women who sell sex, even privileged, educated, white, British passport holding women like me. How come?
In short, there's lots being said by sex workers in the UK. See the IUSW's site for more. Problem is? Well, no one at Number 10 seems to be listening.
And let's be clear - it's not only sex workers who don't support this law (although given that they're they experts, one would have thought it would be enough).Commander Allan Gibson, head of the Met's anti-trafficking unit, said to the Commons home affairs committee, said he felt the laws would be very difficult to enforce.
There are also other MPs who have expressed their doubt. The Liberal Democrat's Shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne believes,
The proposal to close brothels runs the risk of driving already vulnerable women underground and into the hands of pimps and pushers.
Also worth noting from Huhne -
Help for the victims would be more convincing if the Government hadn't slashed the budget for human trafficking investigations last week and shut down the leading unit.
Dominic Grieve, Shadow Home Secretary for the Conservatives, says -
Yet again, the Home Secretary's rhetoric is defied by reality.
The Government wants to rush through new criminal laws without any consideration as to whether they will work.
In the meantime, it neglects the basics of law enforcement - funding for the Met's human trafficking unit has been slashed, whilst the conviction rate for trafficking for sexual exploitation has plummeted.
And if I may quote Grieve further,
Take the blight of those trafficked into forced prostitution.
Last week Jacqui Smith proposed yet another law.
But what has she actually been doing about the problem?Upper estimates of the number of women and girls trafficked into Britain for prostitution have quadrupled on her watch.
She's not provided any extra places in rescue hostels.
And convictions of those who perpetrate these barbaric crimes are down by 40%.
We don't need yet another Home Office Bill.
So what can we do? Even the media seem to recognise that this is very bad news for sex workers in the UK, a lot of what I've read has been supportive of sex workers rights (although, of course, there are many parts of the media who are very much not so much pro-Smith as anti-sex work in general).
There is a petition that has gone up on Number10.gov.uk - to defer any bill on prostitution until after the next general election. Signing this would be a good start to stopping Jacqui Smith's proposals coming to fruition.
As the petition states, you must be a British citizen or resident to sign it. If you are, I would urge you very strongly to sign it. If you're not, but you do support it then please do spread the word. If you have a website or blog it's most likely you have British citizens and residents reading, so please link, post widely and encourage others to do so.
Simple logic tells us that these proposals becoming laws spell very seriously bad news for UK sex workers, and sex workers unions have very clearly stated that these laws will endanger a great many women. So please do sign the petition if you're able and spread the word as much as you can.
If you want more, there's information on the IUSW page. There's also a blog about Prostitution Law in the UK, only recently started, which will be an excellent resource on this. I also have a page on my blog including links to further commentary. I've written a great deal on my blog and some on Shiraz Socialist.
Here's that link again, people!
The Eve Discourse
Caroline,
"Fact-free" pretty well sums up the legislative approach of Her Majesty's Government. They have systematically ignored expert advice in favour of rhetoric and ideology. You ask whether this is consistent with Labour values. There is no surprise that New Labour is pursuing such ideals, in that it is more closely following the Swedish Social Democrats and the "Swedish Model" (den Svenska Modellen) of paternalistic social engineering, and social exclusion, than its own ideological roots. This Orwellian attribute allows the State to intrude into private lives for the collective good. The Prime Minister appears to have failed to notice that the Swedish Model faltered and failed in the 1990s.
The fundamental fact they are ignoring is thousands of years of history of regulation of the sex industry which has been marked by one singular particularity - its total inability to achieve its stated objectives.
HMG purportedly carried out research in the Netherlands and Sweden in reaching its conclusions. The qulity of that research appears to be pretty superficial. I have written a working paper - Controlling Loose Women - detailing the social and political culture that led to the legislative changes in those countries. The other model, that of New Zealand's decriminalisation and subsequent evalution was dismissed as an inconvenient truth. (I will add a section on New Zealand and the role of their Labour party in due course)
The Swedes also eschew empiricism in favour of symbolic legislation. One does not really need to dissect Ms Smith's proposals, it is the underlying philosophy that is fundamentally flawed. I would however make one observation in relation to your comment about throwing women out in to the street, since this is history revisited, namely the grim sequelae of the social purity driven Criminal Law Amendment 1885 which suppressed brothels. Merton's law of unintended consequences will continue to haunt legislators.
Patriarchy subjugates women by imposing divisive binaries upon them (for which we can thank St Augustine), this legislation continues the tradition of the Madonna-Whore dichotomy. It harms all women.
Michael
Accurate Comment
Michael,
Having read the Home Office Report on their review, http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/tackling-demand?view=Binary, & it is a shockingly poor piece of work. The Home Secretary is, apparently, a former Head Teacher, but this report wouldn't even pass muster at GCSE level.
One is staggered by the fact that the only referenced sources consist of Poppy Project's "Big Brothel Report"; the critique of which you youself contributed to, a peice which advocates "John's Schools"; despite thier having been rejected by every UK Police force to have tried them, & an, unpublished, study by Huddersfield University.
There is, as you have pointed out, no attempt to utilise the wealth of properly conducted, empirical, research into the various aspects of sex work & no evidence of any consideration of the views of sex workers themselves; despite a rather rushed consultation with both sex workers & sex worker rights advocacy groups, possibly because the inclusion of such evidence mightg just go against the dogma that is clearly behind the proposed legislation.
One should also note that, throughout the document, there are no references to male or transgender sex workers, nor to female - female, male - male or male/female - transgender commercial sex encounters; again, this is probably the result of the "scientific advisors" (I do use the term very loosely), adhering to a dogma that holds that such people & things either don't exist or don't count.
Ther is no attempt to explain current legal situation applying to sex workers, nor to properly detail the various options for any proposed legislation to adopt; i.e. criminalisation, regulation or decriminalisation & it is noticeable that the review of the regimes inforce in Sweden & The Netherlands is very brief on the situation pertaining in the latter (only highlighting problems encountered) whilst unquestioningly extolling the virtues of the former.
Throughout the document, there is the use of emotive language, with prostitution being equated with trafficking & "controlling for gain" being equated with "pimping" , "coercion" & "grooming" of sex workers; failing to mention that simply being a maid who answers the phone for a sex worker can lead to being charged with this offence, as can providing any service which facilitates a sex worker conducting their business.
Finally, the list of stakeholders, on page 25, is noticealbe for the near complete absence of any group representing sex workers themselves.
Further worrying points, regarding this legislation, & the report that purportedly inspired it are thatL
1. The proposed legislation was announced, by Jacqui Smith, at the Labour Party Conference, in September, several weeks before the closing date for submissions of evidence, for consideratgion by the Parliamentary Review;
2. The "Scientific Advisor", who was allowed to set the terms of reference for the Parliamentary Review, is in fact a self-described journalist & political activist, well known for her anti-sex work views & advocacy of the Swedish Model (think the Bollocks blog piece, Caroline). This would, naturally give any policy or evidence supporting the criminalisation of clients & closure of brothels, undue weight;
3. As mentioned above, why, if we were promised a comprehensive review, is there no sign that any evidence, other than that which supported the report's recommendations, appears to have been considered?
The whole thing smacks of having been a PR exercise that was intended to facilitate the introduction of a predetermined policy.
I did try posing these questions to Fionna McTaggart, in a Guardian Cif piece, but she didn't seem to want to respond.
I look forward to the release of UKNSWP's response, though I fear that, with the second reading scheduled for 12 January, Smith & her allies are trying to rush this legislation through, before any such response can be produced.
Glen
Missing Links
Thought it best to add links to the various Guardian Comment is Free (Cif) pieces; even though Caroline has provided most of them on her blog:
In all cases, the comments for The Guardian items are against the proposed legislation, but it is those comments which support it which were given prominence by the editors.
Post new comment