Over on The Daily (Maybe) Jim sets out the thinking behind the Green Party policy on prostitution – decrimininalistion – so well that I won’t bother to repeat it.
He was prompted, as will be many commentators in the next few days, by the confirmation, if it were needed, that a serial killer has been targetting street sex workers in Ipswich: the death toll now has risen to five.
In the less likely surroundings of The Times, Alice Miles arrives at the same conclusion:
The solutions are too unpalatable for polite politics, which relies on middle-class votes in “nice†areas like Suffolk for election.
First, brothels: proper, clean, large-as-you-like, licensed knocking shops, with medical checks and protection for the girls. And tax credits too. Not all prostitutes would want to join one, but at least they would have a choice. At the beginning of this year Labour launched a “prostitution strategyâ€, after the most thorough review of the law in half a century. It abandoned ideas for managed zones in non-residential areas and instead prescribed a crackdown on kerb crawling, early intervention, efforts to tackle demand and new attempts to help women to escape from the lifestyle. It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious and so sad: a pathetic range of tried and failed “policiesâ€. The only promising proposal was to allow up to three women to operate from the same premises in sort of mini-brothels without facing prosecution; but there has been no sign since of the legislation needed to implement it.
I’d add a still more radical line – we should stop regarding sex work as having any sort of stigma; should try very hard to remove any of our lingering Judeao-Christian hang-ups about sex. It should be a job choice like any other – and one that attracts exactly the same – indeed given the level of risk, higher, levels of health and safety protection. (I have no doubt that the rate of death and injury among sex workers is higher than that of any other line of work – higher than fishermen, building workers et al) .
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These sex workers were all street workers who frequented the same series of three streets next to the football ground – and I think this shows in a very grisly way how vulnerable pushing sex work to the fringes really is.
There are, I think, only around forty such workers in Ipswich, so for five of them to be killed in such quick succession is just too horrible to think about.
As you say we need less moralising and distaste and more progressive realism. Prostitution is a fact – lets make it safe, legal and regulated – and incidently that goes for the drugs some of these women are addicted to as well.
Indeed – I was thinking about the soliciting law, but drug law is almost as responsible.
[Sex work] “should be a job choice like any other…”
Come now, Natalie, you really shouldn’t make satirical remarks like this which might be taken seriously by the kind of idiots who coined the phrase “sex worker” in the first place, and who tell us that middle managers in a safe, legal and regulated sex industry will no longer be called “pimps”, and that their equivalent in a safe, legal and regulated dangerous drug supply industry will no longer be referred to as “pushers”.
Look over the Channel to The Netherlands where prostitution was never illegal, though solicting was, and brothels were. Those laws have been changed (brothels allowed since 2000; soliciting is more problematic0. The safety and health of the women are now (supposed to be) paramount considerations, though, of course, the reality is far from perfect. Prostitutes are represented in a Trust and now have an official trade union: read about this in English: http://www.rodedraad.nl/index.php?id=1
Sorry Tony, I am entirely serious. What after all is the difference between a “legitimate” sports massage and a sexual one – they might happen to use and touch slightly different parts of the body, but it is only because we are so hung up about sex that this distinction has any meaning.
If you really need an answer to that question then you cannot have had – or administered – many of either.
Not being a Jew or a Christian, I honestly think I am free of hang-ups about sex, but I cannot subscribe to your view that, given proper regulation and a different attitude, a job in prostitution could be like any other: I really feel that you haven’t thought it through: recruitment? training? career paths? recognised qualifications?
And surely the idea that many prostitutes would “choose” the job if they had a real choice and the working conditions were improved is preposterous? Or do you believe in the myth of the Happy Hooker?
Don’t need to, Tony. There’s nothing romanticised about this. If sex work were legalised it would still be boring, dead end, underpaid labour that no one would choose if they could find a better alternative. Which would be exactly like most jobs.
Hope you find a good job one of these days, Sharon.
Garbage collector, call centre operative, factory machinist, sex worker? If you took away the stigma, then the choice among those would be a choice dependent on individual preferences.
And you think that enough would choose prostitution to cater for the demand? You may be right but I don’t quite get your point here.
Anyway, this discussion is becoming a bit diffuse so I will leave you now and perhaps revert to the topic in my own blog one of these days.
I think I’m with Tony on this. Those caught up in street prostitution are mostly (90+%)addicted to drugs, also funding their ‘boyfriends’ habits. Whilst there is clearly a need to effectively treat drug addiction – not everbody who is on drugs goes into prostitution. Studies show that most have a lot of violence and abuse in their past and often ‘boyfriends’ who are coercive to some degree.
Not good circumstances to make ‘choices’ about prostitution as a job.
I am not at all convinced that legalised brothels would stop street prostitution – most of these women would never pass the health requirements (and who would be licensing this anyway – not any government agency in my name!). There is a market for cheap and risky sex – thats why street prostitutes can get a couple of quid more for unprotected sex – legalised brothels won’t do away with this market so drug addicted prostitutes will be further abused, having to take more extreme risks for even less money.
Until we break the ‘Pretty Woman’ myths around prostitution, and tackle the market for buying sex, we won’t really make true progress on this.
Yes, we need to reduce risks to existing prostitutes as much as we can, whilst helping them out of prostitution, we also need to protect communities affected by prostitution – whether on the street or by having flats used as brothels. They are not good neighbours – constant flow of ‘punters’, hassling other women residents, not what you want children to see or be around, antisocial behaviour etc.
Delurking to agree with Sabele on this one. Australia, or more particularly Victoria, has some of the most liberal prostitution laws in the world; introduced in the 1980s to reduce the incidence in street prostitution. In fact, in the time brothels have been legalised the number of prostitutes working on Melbourne’s streets has risen exponentially.
An outreach worker I interviewed recently for a short documentary told me that research showed only 50% of women in the industry felt safer in brothels, the remaining 50% feeling safer while working on the street. The women I interviewed for the same doco told the same story. All had experienced violent physical and sexual assault while working in legal brothels. Legalising the industry doesn’t protect the women from the people most likely to hurt them; the clients. Nor does it prevent criminal involvement in the industry: a large proportion of women found to have been trafficked to Australia have been discovered in legal brothels.
As for it being work like any other: they didn’t see it that way. They were very conscious of the enormous physical and emotional toll it took on them. And desperate for the exit programs Alice Miles derides as ‘laughable’.
Despite lives marked by poverty, childhood sexual abuse, parental neglect and domestic violence (and that’s not the half of it) they were also some of the kindest and funniest people I’ve had the luck to meet. They deserve more than our complaisance in their misfortune.
Decriminalising heroin may actually increase prostitution. It won’t make heroin any less addictive, just easier to buy-if you have the money. And if you have nothing else to sell to pay for it, you’ll have to sell yourself. Nobody is going to start giving their workers heroin breaks, and a legal smackhead with an addiction will be as unemployable as an illegal smackhead with an addicition. Prostitution is probably the only job someone with a serious drug habit can hold down, largely because it is entirely unregulated.
We already have too many damaging addictive drugs out there, too many alcoholics and too many full cancer wards. Do you really want to add another to the list of mainstream social disasters, and give it the blessing of legitimacy?
Let’s get the eumphemisms out the way first. I have a mate who is a programmer for a giant US corporate. He’s an IT worker. I also know someone who works in a call centre. They are also an IT worker. Big difference. Same with sex workers. This month’s outburst of concern by the middle classes relates to the lowest and most grim end of sex-work, picking up strangers for sex.
This is not being paid for ‘love-making’ like you, dear reader, may experience with your partner on a friday night. This is having anybody who rolls up with a few quid stick their cock in your mouth, up your cunt, or up your arse, over and over again, night in, night out. It isn’t quick and it isn’t painless. If they have had a bad day you’ll know about it. For most punters, the ‘sex worker’ is a piece of meat. It’s a one-way experience.
Condom use doesn’t make sex safe. From the moment you get in the car, or open the door, to the moment the door slams, you are only a split second away from being sliced up like a sunday joint.
This is not someone you know and not someone who is looking to share a moment of intimacy, but despite the smell, the favoured technique, the idiosyncracies, the disturbing kinks, the pain, the weight, the slobbering, they are going to want a performance for their money. Perform enough times and that’s all there is. You can forget the real thing. How many men tell their friends their partner is a ‘sex worker’. You really think decriminalisation is going to make that change? Bump the ‘career choice’ a few notches up the ladder of social status?
Sex-workers have their pimps. They vary. Many sex-workers have ‘dependency issues’. Aside from the drugs, the pimp is the guardian, as well as the tax collector and the dealer. Its a poisonous relationship, but then everything about this is poisonous.
Consider the nuts and bolts of decriminalisation. For a start, how does the pimp and the smack and the beneift fit into it? Illegal occupations aren’t declarable, but to be a legal sex-worker, you’d lose your benefit, have to pay taxes, national insurance, and declare your income. And you’d still have to buy the drugs and pay your pimp, because the Inland Revenue don’t protect your bruised arse on a cold night on the streets, and maybe your pimp might.
So decriminalise it, your overheads go through the roof, and thats more cocks you have to take in your mouth, up your cunt, and up your arse. More sperm you have to swallow, more bruises, and more fear. Oh brilliant. The sort of solution only the middle-classes could come up with.
You see the average sex-worker thinks that decriminalisation just means the police don’t nick you, but it doesn’t. You make sex-work legal, and stick it on a par with office work, then the tax, benefit, and other issues come too.
And that’s if you can legalise it, because a lot of the girls out there are locked into a system that can only operate underground-working for pimps who are not going to go legal, buying drugs that society really doesn’t want to decriminalise, or controlled by organised gangs that are not going to incorporate as a legal business and go for a Queen’s Award for Industry. These are gangs that would stand to lose millions of pounds a year in revenue from an important part of their portfolio.
Now let’s consider the risks.
Every single sexual act places both sex-worker and punter at risk, and of course, the partner of every punter. The idea that a condom is going to magically make a sexual act safe is fantasy. It might stop pregnancies if used carefully by loving couples, but when a punter is taking out a bad day on a piece of fuckmeat, no, it ain’t gonna make much difference. Most sex-workers get used to the bodily fluids, seeing the blood and sperm, and swallowing plenty of it. In a world of drug addiction, pimps, gang-run brothels, beatings, and fear, the most a sex-worker is going to manage is a price-list that rapidly switches from the cheap and safe, to the slightly less cheap, and highly unsafe. And every drug hit is another chance to catch something nasty.
Given the amount of punters needed to cover your overheads, decriminalisation would actually demand more punters for the same income, and so more risk.
And HIV is for life, not for Christmas.
In a legalised system, health and safety can hardly ask for drug-free girls, there aren’t enough, unless you are recruiting from school through the careers lessons, or from the Job Centres! Well, you say its just another job, after all, so why would you have a problem if your daughter picked it as a career instead of going to college? Remember women would lose their benefit if they refused a legitimate job, presumably including the newly decriminalised prostitution. Surely you thought that one through-or isn’t it quite like any other job?
Health and safety would of course cast out those with communicable diseases, although whether they would actually brand or tattoo girls, who knows. Any ID card system would be faked. If pushed out of the legalised system, would girls simply pop down to Argos instead and get a job on the till? No. Course not. They’d just go illegal, which would be cheaper for the punters, and more anonymous, both being the way they prefer it. Ah yes, the anonymity. I doubt the first legal brothel would be too anonymous, even after the TV cameras left, and the local protestors were forced to step back a few yards. Oddly, punters might still want anonymity on the joint account debit card receipt when they pay, even if it was legal.
If you legalise prostitution, you create a new level in the sex-worker hierarchy, and you soothe your consciences. You don’t take away the bottom rungs, and you don’t make it a respectable career. Its still a load of strangers cocks banging up your cunt, hammering up your arse, and coming down your throat until the drugs make it all go away for a bit.
Sound like ‘just another job’? Want to try it, ladies? And gents, and boys and girls, because there are a lot of underage prostitutes out there, the most vulnerable of all, and I can’t see that being legalised.
There is no easy solution. Prostitution is not a way of life, even if some sex-workers try to make it seem like that. It’s a way of death-a downward spiral of drugs and punters. If the punter doesn’t get you, the drugs will, and if the drugs don’t, the disease will, and if that doesn’t, well, after enough cocks, you’ll probably just do yourself off a bridge or in front of a lorry.
It’s not a career, it is a symptom of a society that has gone bad, and needs a way of letting off steam, taking it out on someone, and stepping outside for a few moments. The prostitute: friend, counsellor, agony aunt, punchbag, piece of meat. So fix society from one side, and pull the sex-workers out of it from the other. Spare no expense it getting the sex-workers off the streets, out of the brothels, and off the drugs. Get them clean, get them therapy, get them some self-belief, and some self-respect. Take away the gangs and the pimps, who are little more than slave owners (hey, didn’t we abolish that). Make the sex-workers feel that their bodies are their own again, and make them feel clean again. Don’t just tax them and pretend you did them a favour. Give them a new life, and unwind the whole of their descent into a life that will only end one way-badly.
Nobody has the right to suggest that sex-work be treated as a legitimate industry unless they’d be willing to do it themselves, and proud to see their children do it, because a parent can be proud of their child doing their first job, whatever it is, and however little status it has. Would you be proud of your daughter opening her legs for her first punter, and giving that cheap blowjob her best shot?
So, if the Greens want to legalise prostitution, and heroin, lets see them try it, every one of them shooting up, parting those legs, taking it up the arse, and learning to like the taste when they swallow. And if they still think its a jolly fine career after a month, they can hold on to their feel-good, ‘let’s do the poor unfortunates a favour’ policy.
I doubt they would.
Prostitution strips the most fundamental humanity from anyone who trips and falls into it, and drugs slam the door behind them. Legalising it just locks that door and tells the euphemistically named sex-worker, whom everyone else will still call a whore to her face, that society is completely OK with her doing her socially-valuable ‘job’, as long as they don’t have to think about it. After all, its cheaper than ending prostitution, wiping away the pimps and the drugs, and gangs that run it with a bit of competent police work, and spending the public money required to give a ‘sex-worker’ her life back. Think of the political fall-out from spending public money on people that the right-wing papers would view as ‘only having themselves to blame’, and being entirely ‘undeserving’.
Human beings are amazing-they can adapt themselves to almost anything, they can make the best of a bad job, come to terms with the worst circumstances, even becoming institutionalised within an abusive regime. But some things it is wrong to force people to do, and worse to allow them to do.
We do not allow children to be used as chimney sweeps. We do not permit the sale of human organs, even if the donors wish to sell them. We should not allow any human being to become a piece of fuckable meat, even if they tell you they want to.
It is scandalous that it takes a serial killer for society to consider this issue, and worse that we may come out of the other side, when the killer is caught, the issue forgotten, and ITV making a drama out of it, without taking the opportunity to set in place a system that will pull every single man, woman, and child out of prostitution, so no human being has to take cock after cock after cock, fearing for their safety, and dull it all with drugs until they all the humanity and life has been fucked and doped out of them.
Legalisation won’t make the sperm taste like honey, it won’t make the drugs work like caffeine, it won’t give the sex-workers immunity from disease, but I’m sure it would make the middle-classes feel like they did their bit to relieve the burden.
Prostitutes need self-respect, self-belief, care, support, and a new life. They do not need a seal of approval from the middle classes.
Some things you just eradicate. Polio. Slavery. Prostitution. Drugs. Crime. And if its hard, you don’t stop, or find a plan B, you try a little harder.
You are describing prostitution as it is now – which is udoubtedly horrid. But centuries of attempted prohibition have done nothing to end it. Legalisation, health and safety conditions etc might not make it the best job in the world, but I would argue that it would enormously reduce the risks and the dangers – and the deaths.
And I would argue that removing the moral stigma would also increase the safety margin, by making sex workers less of a target for the religiously/personally demented.
We may have to agree to differ on this subject. You are talking about sex work under the current set of conditions; I am imagining it under a different set of conditions in which the workers genuinely have power over their own work.
The articles on these sites should be of interest:
http://www.salli.org/muistio/self.html
http://www.sans.nu/engelska/consequences.htm
http://sensuellqkonsult.wordpress.com/2007/05/26/lies-about-sexwork-in-sweden/