It appears that the law on prostitution could be changed following a “lengthy consultation process”. Fiona Mactaggart, a junior Minister at the Home Office announced the Government’s new strategy last Wednesday 18th January 2006.
Rejecting amongst other things, David Plunkett’s “red light zones”, the new proposals for instance suggest allowing “worker run” brothels involving two or three women, replace financial penalties for soliciting with an “intervention penalty” and amend legislation which results women convicted of soliciting being official designated as being “common prostitutes”.
This is all really “bog standard” New Labour reform, all style, no substance and it achieves little, if anything. The idea of allowing up to three women work together is to enable them to “protect themselves”, we are told. The intervention policy is to “ensure that prostitutes receive help with drug or alcohol problems”. The term common prostitute is “outdated and offensive”. All of these laudable aims could be achieved so much more effectively simply by a change of attitude to the idea of prostitution.
Ms Mactaggart’s real attitude to prostitution can be gleaned from various public pronouncements she has made this week and late last year. Rejecting any suggestion that many women make a choice to undertake this life style and were workers in the ordinary sense of the word, Ms Mactaggart announced that,
“[It is] wrong to regard those involved in prostitution as sex workers…”
She went on to say,
“Tough measures were needed to tackle the markets for prostitution”
and
“I’m not tolerant of the view that prostitution is the oldest professional in the world and there is nothing we can to do to reduce it. Prostitution blights communities…Men who use prostitutes are indirectly supporting drugs dealers and abusers.”
Last Wednesday, she was reiterating that,
“We are not going to eradicate prostitution overnight.”
To round off Ms Mactaggart’s fifteen minutes of fame we were treated to a television news item by the BBC where the Minister accompanied some vice officers on a curb crawler bust. An unfortunate punter was detained and processed by the Police whilst the hapless young lady who had been the object of his attention was subjected to a condescending, patronising lecture by the all knowing Ms Mactaggart.
When you know that there are 80,000 prostitutes in the country, 95% of whom are dependent on crack and heroin and that they are all abused by their pimps, clients and are unfortunate victims of a cruel Society it is hard to take against Ms Mactaggart’s Wilberforcian crusade.
The problem arises when you examine the facts. It is the Home Office that estimates (my emphasis) the number of prostitutes in this country. Facts and figures emanating from the Home Office in recent years have been shown to be highly dubious and very often wrong. In this age of New Labour spin so many facts and figures are massaged when being used in support of Government policy, it is hard to accept anything unless it can be independently verified. What of the statistic that 95% of prostitutes are crack and heroin addicts (not just drug users, of say cannabis, amphetamines or cocaine, but the seriously addictive substances?) I do not believe it. It is preposterous.
The arguments of those “in the know” who are more sympathetic to working girls are minimised and dismissed out of hand. The truth is that people who inhabit the sex industry need the protection of being involved in an activity which is lawful and socially tolerated, if not accepted. Legalised brothels for instance would ensure protection of those persons involved in that section of the industry from violent criminals who current pimp and the abusive clients. Health care for these workers (including drug counselling for the small number who need it) would be so much easier to provide. Social acceptance would raise the esteem of these working girls so much more than changing an old law that describes them as common prostitutes if they are convicted of soliciting more than once. Does Ms Mactaggart intend to proscribe the use of words such as “tart”, “slapper” and “whore” (to name just a few) which are derogatory terms that have arisen over the years entirely because of the attitude of people like her towards the provision of sex for money?
The anti libertines might find comfort in the fact that less than half of men use prostitutes now than was the case in 1949. They are winning the War. However, if they are deluded enough to think that prostitution can be eradicated, then they are fools. It is natural for men to seek sexual gratification. Women are naturally suited to providing that gratification for something in return, be that by way of a complicated social contract called marriage, cash or benefit in kind, or for the less adept, for free following the provision of too many alco-pops. You are not going to be able to prevent these sex-for-money contracts without increasingly draconian (but ultimately ineffectual) laws.
To feminists, a woman selling her body to a man is subjugating herself to him, and this must not be allowed to happen. Faced with evidence that a woman might choose to earn money in this manner, feminists ignore it, choosing to believe that the girls are forced into such behaviour by one means or another. In their view of the Universe, men (which, for the theory to work, are all intrinsically evil) are always the cause for the girls' downfall. As many working girls will admit, their choice to earn money by offering sex was made because they could not earn so much working as, for example, a sales assistant at Woolworths. Many part time working girls (who I suspect, without anything other than empirical evidence, represent the majority) supplement their income even though they do possess other employment or forms of income. Perhaps if the more mundane jobs were better paid, many girls would choose those and not sell sexual services, though I am not entirely sure. Some women appear to be comfortable with the concept of charging for their services and do not feel that they have diminished themselves in any way by doing so.
That a few influential feminists had pronounced a Holy Jihad against prostitution was not of great significance. We know who they are and instinctively take a pinch of salt with anything they say. However, a more worrying development of recent years is the rise of a new Puritanism which has allied itself with the feminists. This is all the more worrying as New Labour is heavily infected by this Puritanism. There is always something unsavoury about a creed that is so intense and inward looking that it wishes to impose itself upon unbelievers. It is worse when that creed is laced with large helpings of hypocrisy. It is a politically correct Puritanism.
Only fifty years ago, men who indulged in sexual practises with other men were considered by most “right thinking people” as disgusting perverts. The most innocuous homosexual acts were punished with imprisonment for months and the more intimate acts were visited with sentences of years. The uninformed “straight” majority were all convinced that these vile individuals were also routinely a threat to our children. The Police expended much time and effort tackling the “threat” that these practising homosexual males posed to Society. Common sense eventually prevailed. The bogus facts upon which bogus arguments were based were gradually exposed. Homosexual behaviour was finally legalised and gay relationships absorbed into the mainstream of Society. As one of Kinsey’s subjects once announced when questioned about why he saw himself as a heterosexual male when he regularly indulged in the “habit” (as it was then called in the US, apparently) he answered, “sex is sex”. Exactly. If consenting adults wish to indulge in a particular sexual activity, it matters not whether it is man on man, woman on woman or man on woman upon the payment of a fee of fifty quid. Of course, homosexuality is protected by being one of those politically correct lifestyles/conditions and there lies the hypocrisy. A woman charging for sex or a man being prepared to pay for it is no more reprehensible than two men wishing to be sexually intimate with each other, or any opposite sex couple indulging in pre marital sex. Call me a Jeremy Benthamite, but I say that any consensual, adult human to human sexual behaviour should not be proscribed and the moralisers should butt-out and mind their own business.
Much misinformation is published to support the case of the New Puritans in their War against men and prostitutes. We are led to believe that many women are trafficked to the
I have already stated that the figures concerning hard drug abuse amongst working girls looks dubious to say the least, but we have to examine what else the puritans have to say in this respect. It is this equally fabricated fact; that the girls are introduced to drugs which are used to trap them into prostitution. Forgive me for pointing this out, but it is highly improbable that 95% of our 80,000.00 working girls (that is 76,000.00 girls) were tricked into drug addiction so that they then had to become prostitutes. Think about it. It does not add up. I do not have any gripe with the proposition that many girls use might use drugs. It goes with the territory and the socio-economic class from which they derive in the main. That this use is other than largely recreational, under control and involves the “lesser” drugs, is simply not believable. That some chaotic drug users do “go on the game” to pay for their habit is correct, but the point is that they were already heroin and crack addicts. I would not even disagree that there are many hundreds of such girls. I cannot imagine that they would have a lot of business, or repeat business. They are likely to be so desperate for a fix that they continue to brazenly solicit such that their arrest becomes inevitable and routine (and documented; Oh! And there the puritans have their evidence!)
In essence, the “case” against prostitution is just another example of dangerous, woolly thinking by those amongst our political classes who have an axe to grind, in this instance an alliance of feminists, moralists and fellow travellers. It is complete and utter humbug.
“I don’t like what you do and I’ll fight to my dying breath to stop you doing it!”
Voltaire will be turning in his grave.