Hello all,
For my responses to the questions posed in this inquiry, I have used input from previous inquiries and from YOUR responses on these questions published here on SAAFE. Any feedback for me before I submit it? Can you help me fill in the gaps that I have left, for instance? (If this requires links, please pm me at braziliana007@gmail.com)
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What, harms, if any are associated with buying and selling sex? Who is affected? How?
For me "prostitution" means having sex for money (or for some other material reward) in the context where all transacting parties are consenting adults. This excludes all other practices where sex may be performed for money, as far as I am concerned. Given this, there are no intrinsic harms of any kind, in my view. This is quite on the contrary, in fact, I feel; nature intended sexual intercourse as a pleasurable activity.
How does buying and selling sex affect attitudes towards women more widely?
It doesn't, in my opinion. Furthermore, the vast majority of the men that I have sex with for money treat me with respect and warmth.
What local initiatives are you aware of that address these harms? Are they effective? Why?
Pass
What, if any, are the challenges for those facing harm in accessing services (for example, healthcare; support services; advice; exit services)? What needs to change?
Pass
What relevance does the Public Sector Equality Duty have for the way that public authorities address prostitution in their area?
Pass. (How should I know the answer to this anyway?)
How does the law currently treat paying for sex? How could law and policy be improved to address harm?
How does the law currently treat paying for sex?
In an unfair, vindictive, and stupid way. It is anti-freedom, anti-logic, and anti-common sense. It treats adults like children, intruding on their private lives as if we were in some sort of "nanny state".
How could law and policy be improved to address harm?
To me there is no intrinsic harm in prostitution (such as I have defined it). The law could - and SHOULD - be improved, even so, to improve a) the safety of prostitutes (the matter of vulnerability to acts of violence and other criminal offences being applicable to every single individual in the world, prostitute or not) and b) (what should be) the right and freedom of all adults to have sex with other consenting adults. To be exact:
Prostitutes should be allowed to share premises for their work.
In keeping with 1, it should be legal to manage, profit from, or gain from the prostitution of a third party when the third party duly consents. A number of sex workers choose to work at massage parlours and saunas, whose owners take a cut of the earnings of the prostitutes, because of the safety that they offer, for instance. (The law against managing, profiting from and gaining from the prostitution of a third party against the will of the third party - sexual slavery / trafficking, that is - should of course remain intact, in my view). Making consensual procuring legal, together with the managing, profiting from, and gaining from the prostitution of a third party necessarily involved in this, was recommended in the Home Affairs Select Committtee's Inquiry into Prostitution of 2016.
Public soliciting should be made fully legal (in line with the recommendations of the Home Affairs Select Committee's Inquiry into Prostitution, 2016). For some prostitutes, this is the only way to find customers (and I cannot see what purpose it serves to arrest an individual and pursue him or her through law - using up valuable police time and resources in the process - for doing so).
In line with 3, the Prostitute's Caution should be eliminated from law.
Anyone with convictions for the offences named above, which I believe should not be crimes in the first place but fully legal practices, should have those convictions written off and have any punishments - like a prison sentence - stopped. This is another recommendation from the Home Affairs Select Committee's Inquiry into Prostitution of 2016.
All further criminal offences relating to prostitution, where all parties involved have consented to the activities with which they have engaged, should be repealed and all those with convictions for those offences should again have their convictions overturned.
There should be a definitive dismissal of the proposal to make the buying of sex a criminal offence (aka the Nordic Model or the Sex-Buyer Law) in England, Scotland and Wales. Likewise, in Northern Ireland, where the Sex-Buyer Law is in place, this law should be overturned immediately (and anyone with a conviction for breaking this law should have their name cleared, as I say). I say more on this below.
There should be a definitive dismissal of the proposal to ban online sex work advertising platforms.
There should be a definitive dismissal of the proposal to introduce age-verification for porn websites. The "dark web", to which the young - and others - may turn for their online pornography contains sites with far more disturbing content than non-clandestine sites. Besides this, with a VPN or a Cloudflare web browser, for instance, age-blocks will be very easily bypassed. Responsible and authoritative parenting along with recourse, on the part of parents, to the software offering parental internet controls are the answer to under-age viewing of online porn, in my opinion.
As for policies relating to prostitution, in keeping with the clearly pro-freedom stance, on my part, behind points 1-9, this should actually be a non-starter, I feel; in my view, consensual sexual intercourse between adults, whether paid-for or not, is the business of the participating parties only and should accordingly not be subject to any form of intrusion from the law.
How effective are different international approaches at addressing any harms associated with buying and selling sex?
According to the prostitution charity Ugly Mugs, shortly after the Nordic Model came into force in Ireland in 2015, reports of violent attacks on prostitutes increased by 50%. In 2014 there were some 900 such reports. In 2016, this figure rose to in excess of 1400.
According to Fiona Bruce MP, chair of the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission whose report on prostitution, "The Limits of Consent" was published in July 2019, there is proof that the introduction of the Nordic Model in Norway and Sweden has reduced demand for buying sex. Conservative London Assembly Member Andrew Boff, however, points out that this is the (false) impression to be expected when a practice is criminalised since criminals (like those who pay for sex in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Norway, Sweden, France, Canada, Iceland, and Israel) naturally operate in secret (and so, necessarily, do those involved with the particular criminal activity of those paying for sex in the countries where the Nordic Model is in place: prostitutes).
In his academic book, "Criminalising the Purchase of Sex: Lessons from Sweden", the fruit of 3.5 years of research into the criminalisation of the purchase of sex in Sweden, Dr Jay Levy reports that
The Swedish Model has had a negative impact on the safety of sex workers
Contrary to the stated aims to decriminalise the sex workers themselves they are targeted by police, have been consistently evicted from accommodation, have had children removed by the state and migrant sex workers are deported and ‘outed’ as sex workers to the authorities.
Sex workers have been denied access to health information, harm reduction interventions, and condoms.
Harm reduction is seen to be incompatible with the so-called Swedish model.
There have been no demonstrable reductions in the levels of sex work, a principal ambition of the legislation.
Claims that the law has been a success should be viewed with scepticism due to the failure to achieve its aims and the significant impact it has had on the safety and welfare of sex workers.
Another prostitution charity, National Ugly Mugs (NUM) reports that, contrary to the aims of the Sex-Buyer Law, research has found that the Swedish Model had actually led to an increase in prices in indoor sex work which had led to some sex workers actually migrating to Sweden to sell sex for this reason. I agree with their view that this is highly ironic given that the stated aim of the law is to discourage and reduce levels of prostitution (Levy & Jakobsson, 201410).
I have made reference to the newest enquiry into prostitution, "The Limits of Consent", led by Fiona Bruce MP as well as to one criticism of its claims by Andrew Boff MP. Boff also deems that Bruce's report, which he says conflates human trafficking and sex work - a point with which I fully agree - and is “couched in terms of protecting women”, has “less to do with human rights and more to do with morality”. In line with Boff's reasoning, my choice to suck cocks for a living is, as far as I am concerned, no business whatsoever of Fiona Bruce's or of the UK-based pressure group Nordic Model Now! (two of the three women behind it having been victims of sexual abuse, the remaining one being an employee of a sexual abuse charity, all three, with their blinkered and biased thinking, as I see it, viewing sellers of sex invariably as victims), or of the police, or of anyone's but mine and my punters. Having anti-prostitution groups judging what I do for a living is one thing. Having them trying to force, by means of legislation, behaviour from me (and other prostitutes) that satisfies their moral beliefs is another entirely and their persistent efforts to have prostitution outlawed should, in my view, be blocked once and for all (as I said earlier).
To me, the Nordic Model is a disgrace not only to the countries where it is in force but to the rest of the world as a whole. Adults do not deserve to be treated like children, as I already implied. Moreover, creating a class of criminals who are, in principle, easy to catch but who, in reality, for the most part, do no harm whatsoever, as far as I am aware - who in fact, by enabling prostitutes to support both themselves and their families, do the exact opposite of harming them - is an insult to freedom and to common sense. In the UK at least, the matter of sexual exploitation (including sex trafficking), which the Sex-Buyer Law is meant to reduce, is already addressed by laws relating to slavery, false imprisonment, rape, and physical assault (amongst others). It is no justification for the Sex-Buyer Law at all, then, and, as stated above, the Sex-Buyer Law has been proven to increase the incidence of violence against prostitutes. Moreover sexual exploitation is a completely separate and distinct phenomenon to prostitution, such as I have defined it, so the laws against it should likewise be kept separate and distinct to the laws relating to prostitution. Furthermore, there do not seem to be any proposals to make the buying of a manicure, a car wash, or a Chinese takeaway a criminal offence despite the well-documented exploitation (by employers) of many people who perform those services.
Buyers of the services of street-prostitutes are the ones who I believe will be easy for police to catch. Personally, however, I believe most citizens would prefer the tax that they pay into policing to go on anti-terrorism initiatives, the catching of burglars and robbers, and reducing motoring offences, for instance, if for no other reason than the fact (as I understand it) that most people who buy sex do no harm whatsoever to the people from whom they buy, as I have said. Moreover, according to NUM, most prostitution is indoors-based. Personally, I cannot see how this form of prostitution - the dominant form, according to at least one source - can possibly be policed. More importantly, I do not believe that it should be a police matter in the first place, police time and resources being far better spent, in my view, in stopping true sexual exploitation (and other crimes) whose victims will duly appreciate police intervention, I believe.
Even without any examples of decriminalisation in other countries, it only requires common sense to recognise that sex between consenting adults is no-one's business but their own, whether money changes hands or not. On this basis, I make the recommendations presented in my answer to "How could law and policy be improved to address harm?"
Lastly, since there have already been at least 4 inquiries into prostitution in the last 4 years asking virtually the same questions as those in this new inquiry, what is the point of this new inquiry? The inquiries to which I am referring are:
The international symposium on the decriminalisation of prostitution held at Parliament in November 2015. Written report: (link to be provided in my submission)
The Home Affairs Select Committee's Inquiry into Prostitution 2016: (link to be provided in my submission)
Conservative Party Human Rights Commission Inquiry into Prostitution 2018-2019: (link to be provided in my submission)
University of Bristol Prostitution and Sex Work Survey 2018-2019. Report due to be published this September.
Topic: Women and Equalities Committee Enquiry into sex work (Read 4805 times)