Why it's time to decriminalise selling sex – and make buying it illegal instead
Today, the Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Act Private Members’ Bill will be launched by Ash Regan. Here’s why her fellow MSPs must back it
Imagine we had a referendum tomorrow on this question: “Do you believe that a Scottish citizen should have the right to buy the use of another person’s body for their own sexual pleasure with legal impunity?” How would you answer?
You may think this is some sort of joke – obviously every decent person would say no. That would be tantamount to slavery and utterly preposterous in terms of their human rights. Yet, for millions of women and girls across the world, including Scotland, that’s exactly what prostitution is.
The situation reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s iconic song, Everybody Knows. We can pretend prostitution is consensual between adults, and maybe for a very few it is, but ‘everybody knows’ the consent of a woman to have sex with an unknown man is often a choice of the Hobson variety.
READ MORE: Pimping websites that advertise trafficked women for rape must be prosecuted – Dr Jacci Stoyle
Child sex abuse survivors
For a homeless woman, her consent may be a matter of ‘do I have paid sex with this man in a warm flat or risk being attacked in a doorway of a cold street?’ Or, for a trafficked or pimped woman, ‘do I have sex with this punter, or risk a beating and my family being harmed?’
Research shows most women who end up in prostitution experienced child sexual abuse, where they learnt the skills of dissociation as a way of ‘getting it over with’. The average age of entry to commercial sexual exploitation worldwide is 13. Reports of schoolgirls being bought and sold by grooming gangs have brought this to the light, but it has been around in various guises since time immemorial.
The Cross-Party Group for Commercial Sexual Exploitation undertook a parliamentary inquiry into sexual exploitation advertising websites which clearly demonstrated how pimping websites facilitate trafficking for the indoor market of prostitution, making it much easier to give access and anonymity to the buyer and vast sums of money to the pimps.
If you were particularly sceptical of the term ‘legal impunity’ in the referendum question, you only need to check the conviction rate for traffickers and pimps to realise the risk of being prosecuted is negligible and the reward is riches beyond belief.
A woman can be sold repeatedly and the catalogue of physical injuries from repeated rape, strangulation and beatings from large numbers of men destroys women’s bodies and minds. Research has shown that 70 per cent of women involved in prostitution suffer from PTSD comparable with Vietnam veterans.
Loving husband, doting father
Last, but very much not least, it's time to consider the person who has been missing so far from the referendum question – the ‘citizen’ with the money to buy access to this market of women and girls. Who is this invisible man?
When it comes to women locked up in flats and advertised on pimping websites as ‘independent’, the police never go looking for him. He has legal impunity because the women and girls will be too frightened to say they didn’t consent.
But surely, this is the man raping, strangling and beating the women’s bodies that they’ve bought? Who is he? He is the loving husband, doting father, your lovely big brother, your son, grandfather, neighbour and colleague. He has turned hiding in plain sight into an art form, and his biggest fear is being found out.
No consent
We know from research undertaken on punter websites, where buyers rate their ‘purchases’, that they know full well that their prostituted woman was trafficked, drugged, ill, bruised, undernourished, frightened and not wanting to perform a sexual service, because they tell us.
They describe how they have been cheated, and how they took out their frustration in a violent act on the vulnerable woman. They agree with the pro-prostitution lobby that prostitution is ‘sex-work’. As one punter said: “I don’t ask how the girl got her job at Tesco’s, so I don’t ask how she ended up here, I’ve paid for a service, that’s all there is to it.”
They always use her, whatever the circumstances. They don’t report the traffickers, they know full well there is no consent, they know these women and girls can’t report them, because buying sex is legal in Scotland.
To stop this appalling slave trade in human misery, we need to end the demand for prostitution and close the market down. By criminalising the men who buy, the police must go after him, the punter. This simple action brings the buyer out of hiding, which will stop most men from pursuing their activity, as the law on kerb crawling (when fully implemented) has shown. Buyers are otherwise law-abiding men, in respectable jobs, with wives, partners and families; they have a lot to lose.
Making sex ‘Unbuyable’
For those concerned about the fiscal impact on the state of releasing vulnerable women from their pimps and traffickers, yes, there is likely to be an initial need to provide emergency financial support, which is the state’s responsibility to anyone in dire straits.
However, these costs will be recouped again and again over time. Research undertaken by NGO Nordic Model Now demonstrates, unequivocally, that the cost to the NHS, social services and other public services is far greater when women are prostituted, than it is in helping them to exit and flourish.
Today, the Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Act Private Members’ Bill will be launched by Ash Regan MSP. This bill is also aptly titled ‘Unbuyable’ and follows the principles of the Nordic or Equality Model, a ground-breaking, iconic law first passed in Sweden in 1999. As well as criminalising the purchase of sexual services, it also decriminalises selling, removes previous prostitution offences from women’s records and provides support for women to exit.
I began this article with an imaginary referendum question, but it will be the question your MSPs will have to vote on (even if phrased differently). If you answered no, please demand they vote Unbuyable for Scotland and set all our sisters free.
Dr Jacci Stoyle is secretary of the Scottish Parliament’s Cross-Party Group for Commercial Sexual Exploitation