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Posted by Joan Smith on February 14, 2006, 11:44 pm, in reply to "Why British men are rapists //Joan Smith" What is becoming clear is that men who use brothels, massage parlours This is happening up and down the country, even though it is clear in The willingness of so many clients to pay for sex without bothering to "Prostitution is sexual exploitation, one of the worst forms of women's The effect has been dramatic. Official figures show that the number of Supporters of the law say it has also had an impact on trafficking into The Swedish example could hardly be more relevant to the UK, as the Home *A life of prostitution* *95%* of female street prostitutes in the UK use heroin or crack cocaine /Research by Sam Alexandroni/
Link: http://www.newstatesman.com/200601230006
83.84.50.118
and street prostitutes are the missing link, invisible in most
discussions of the sex trade. This has led to a bizarre anomaly: men who
supply girls and women for sex are liable to receive lengthy prison
sentences, but those who use them, and create the demand in the first
place, go scot-free. When a brothel or massage parlour is raided by the
police, the customers are allowed to leave before it has even been
established whether the women are working there voluntarily. This
absurdity was illustrated when, in September, 19 women were rescued in a
raid on Cuddles, a massage parlour in Birmingham. West Midlands Police
announced a big victory in the campaign against trafficking. The
following week it emerged that six of the 19 were being held at the
Yarl's Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire, awaiting deportation, yet
all the men present at the time of the raid were released without charge.
law that men who have sex with trafficked women are committing rape:
women who have been threatened and beaten into working as prostitutes
cannot give meaningful consent, as Harriet Harman argued in a landmark
speech last year. A Home Office minister, Paul Goggins, agreed with this
proposition in a discussion with me on BBC /Woman's Hour/ last autumn,
and a second minister, Tony McNulty, confirmed it in the House of
Commons. With such clear ministerial support, the first rape prosecution
of a prostitute's "client" is long overdue.
find out whether or not the woman has been coerced is significant for
another reason, however, because it exposes the pernicious assumptions
at the heart of prostitution. One is the rarely challenged claim that
there is something peculiar to male sexuality which makes men entitled
to sexual release whenever they want it; another is that women are a
class from which men should expect to get sex, regardless of the damage
they inflict on individuals. In that sense, it is just as much an abuse
of human rights as conventional slavery, which assumed that Africans
could be bought and sold for use by white people. Naturally this
argument arouses furious resistance - after all, it threatens the entire
sex trade - and is often caricatured as an anti-sex position when it is
actually the opposite.
inequality, and a violation of any person's human rights." So wrote a
group of survivors of prostitution and trafficking from five countries
who launched a manifesto at the European Parliament last autumn. Since
1999 this has been the official view of the Swedish government, which in
that year removed penalties for selling sex and imposed them instead on
men who buy it. Gunilla Ekberg, a special adviser at Sweden's ministry
of industry, employment and communications, explained the thinking
behind the law: "In Sweden it is understood that any society that claims
to defend principles of legal, political, economic and social equality
for women and girls must reject the idea that women and children, mostly
girls, are commodities that can be bought, sold and sexually exploited
by men." In the most radical approach ever adopted by any state, the
Swedish government argues that "the legalisation of prostitution will
inevitably normalise an extreme form of sexual discrimination and
violence and strengthen male domination of all female human beings". Men
who seek to buy sex can be punished by a fine or up to six months in
jail, while women (and men) who sell it have a right to assistance to
escape from prostitution.
women involved in prostitution fell from 2,500 before the law came into
force in 1999 to 1,500 in 2002. By 2004 the recruitment of women into
street prostitution had almost halted. With a population of nine
million, Sweden is estimated to have only 500 street prostitutes, while
neighbouring Denmark, with a population just over half that size, had
between 5,500 and 7,800 in 2004, half of whom, it is estima-ted, were
victims of trafficking.
Sweden, with the National Criminal Investigation Department (NCID)
reporting that the country is no longer an attractive market for foreign
gangs. Intercepted telephone conversations show that pimps and
traffickers express frustration about setting up shop in Sweden,
preferring to operate in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. In
its 2004 report the NCID concluded that the law "continues to function
as a barrier against the establishment of traffickers in Sweden"; it
estimates that roughly 400-600 women are trafficked into Sweden each
year, compared with between 10,000 and 15,000 into Finland. The law's
opponents claim it has made street prostitution more risky because the
few remaining clients tend to be more "perverted", but most of them
concede that it has reduced demand.
Office announced its new "co-ordinated strategy for prostitution" in
England and Wales. The proposed policy includes some steps in the right
direction. It reverses plans, for example, to give local authorities
discretion to set up "tolerance zones", and proposes ways of helping
women escape from the sex trade and of clamping down on kerb crawlers.
It also includes an utterly misguided proposal: to permit small brothels
where two or three women can work together - an idea wide open to abuse
by traffickers. This is an aberration. A philosophical shift seems to
have begun, and as long as it is combined with realistic and properly
funded measures to help women, including access to education and decent
housing, we should welcome it. Trafficking and prostitution are
expressions of a gross form of misogyny which, by denying bodily
integrity to the weakest women in society - young, poor, sexually
abused, dependent on alcohol or drugs, foreign and coerced - denies it
to women everywhere.
*76%* of the public favour introducing some form of regulation to the
sex industry
*69%* of prostitutes say they report no or hardly any attacks to the police
*60%* of prostitutes say they have been beaten up or raped in the past year
*55%* of prostitutes say men have refused to pay them for their services
*50%* of working prostitutes are under the age of 25
*27%* of the public believe prostitution should be stamped out altogether
*10%* of men admit to having used prostitutes
*1%* of prostitutes say they have stopped street sex work as a result of
police activity
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