Women living in fear

Despite the murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich last year, working women are still as vulnerable as they ever were. LOUISE NOUSRATPOUR investigates the government's failure to act on the world' oldest profession.

Wednesday February 21, 2007
The Morning Star

IT HAS been over a year since the government published its review of British prostitution laws, Paying the Price. But neither the recent murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich nor the growing concerns over sex trafficking has moved ministers to act.

According to conservative estimates, there are 80,000 active prostitutes in Britain today. Over 70 per cent are single women with children, the very people who tend to be hardest hit by poverty and gender pay gap.

So, what is the best way of fighting prostitution in this country?

Britain has three legislative options - to follow the Netherlands example and legalise prostitution through a licensing system, to go down the New Zealand route and decriminalise all aspects of the sex industry or to embrace the Swedish model, which criminalises the buying of sex and decriminalises prostitutes.

Of the 850 responses to the Home Office consultation paper, many were in favour of the Swedish model, where pimps and punters face imprisonment and hefty fines, while prostitutes are offered exit strategies through social and economic support. Scottish Socialist MSPs are pushing for this in Scotland.

However, other respondents, like the English Collective of Prostitutes, argue for decriminalisation. They believe that the sex industry should be subjected to the same laws as other businesses and that prostitutes should be treated as any other taxpaying employees, entitled to sick pay, pensions, child provision and other benefits.

These two opposing concepts have polarised the women's rights movement across the world. Socialists tend to lean towards the Swedish model as the best form of reform under capitalism, while those in favour of decriminalisation have a more libertarian approach.

What they all agree on is that legalisation has been a disaster.

New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) co-ordinator Catherine Healy argues that legalisation puts "loads of discriminatory" restrictions on prostitutes and monitors them like criminals. Under decriminalisation, prostitutes' anonymity is respected and they have full control over their work.

"A sex worker can walk outside her front door and ask for money in exchange for sex" explains Healy, who does not see the sex industry as a problem that needs fixing, but as a service which should be allowed to expand like any other.

"I have been a teacher and a sex worker and, given the choice, I'd rather go back to prostitution than put up with classroom stress," she laughs.

But veteran British women's rights activist and communist Mary Davis rejects Healy's rosy account of the most "soul-destroying" form of wage labour, which turns women' sexuality into a commodity and reinforces cultural stereotypes of women as sex objects.

"As socialists, we must support a law reform which recognises prostitution as a form of violence against women and seeks to eradicate it," Davis insists, adding that the decriminalisation approach is based on the assumption that prostitution and exploitation are inherent in all human societies.

'Thousands of desperate women still walk the streets every night, living in fear of meeting the same fate as the five women murdered in Ipswich.'

The Swedish law, which was introduced in 1999, describes prostitution as an aspect of "male violence against women and children" and warns that "gender equality will remain unattainable‚" as long as the sex industry is allowed to prosper. It seeks to address social stigmas through public re-education programmes.

This echoes what Soviet revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai proposed more than 80 years ago.

"Prostitution destroys the equality, solidarity and comradeship of the two halves of the working class. It thrives in the epoch dominated by capital and private property," she told a Soviet women's conference in 1921.

But Healy insists that prostitution is as voluntary as the next job. She even rejects concerns about sex trafficking as "exaggerated."

However, she acknowledges the dangers of coercion, which is illegal under New Zealand law.

"I think, in Europe, a lot of sex workers want to cross borders in search of work," she says. The law should accommodate "migrant sex workers," she adds, not treat them as victims or criminals.

But hers is an isolated view. Studies conducted by respected agencies such as the United Nations have established beyond doubt the brutal nature of the global sex trade. Millions of vulnerable women and children from poverty-stricken countries are trafficked every year and suffer rape, torture, starvation and other untold violence.

London's drop-in services for prostitutes report that the brothel market has become "saturated" with migrant women.

Around 85 per cent of women who work in London brothels are now foreign nationals.

Coalition Against Trafficking in Women founding board member Dorchen Leidholdt largely blames the "tragic" fall of the Soviet Union and the mass unemployment and social dislocation that ensued for the massive surge in the global trafficking of eastern European and Russian women over the last decade.

The English Collective of Prostitutes, unlike its counterpart in New Zealand, acknowledges the violent nature of sex trafficking and insists that decriminalisation is the best remedy against it. It claims that this approach will help undercut traffickers and redirect police resources into helping the victims and catching the real criminals, rather than harassing prostitutes.

But Leidholdt refutes this argument as an attempt to make a "false distinction" between two aspects of the same industry which feed off each other.

"Deploring trafficking while treating prostitution as a neutral enterprise results in an inherently contradictory legal, political and economic regime that fosters the illusion of fighting gross human rights abuses," she says.

"Decriminalisation will roll out the red carpet for all aspects of the sex industry and give governments enormous economic incentives to encourage its growth - in the Netherlands it's 5 per cent of the GDP. It will turn governments into pimps and pimps into "businesswomen/men‚"

By criminalising the clients and decriminalising the prostitutes, Sweden has struck a balance between suppressing sexual exploitation and protecting the women, Leidholdt says, adding: "Sweden is the only country which has seen a decline in trafficking, in contrast to massive growth in other countries."

Official figures show that the number of people trafficked in Sweden is now between 400-600 a year, compared to 4,000 in neighbouring Denmark and Norway. Also, prostitution numbers have dropped from 2,500 before the 1999 Reform Act to around 1,000 today.

But Swedish writer and feminist Petra Ostergren questions the figures, asserting that the law has driven prostitution underground and made the situation worse for women.

"Prostitutes are not really benefiting from the social support promised by law," she claims, adding that "more and more sex workers are calling for decriminalisation."

Swedish Social Democrat and trade unionist Ursula Berge, who helped draft the Bill, insists that the problem is not the law, but lack of government resources. She has been actively campaigning for more regular funding to enforce the law properly.

Despite its shortcomings, Berge argues, the measure is backed by 80 per cent of the population and around 68 per cent of prostitutes have taken advantage of the exit strategies.

"Police and social workers, who are in close contact with prostitutes, agree that the sex trade as a whole and street prostitution in particular has declined dramatically," she says.

"There are less and less new recruits and the number of buyers have decreased by 70 per cent. The law has been most effective in fighting sex trafficking as it makes prostitution unprofitable."

But Ostergren asserts that the decline in the number of clients has pushed prices down and forced prostitutes to take more risks with "dodgy" clients, engage in unsafe sex and to concede to "weird cravings."

Healy declares that anything less than full decriminalisation will fail to restore women's full rights and safety.

New Zealand's 2003 Reform Act protects its estimated 4,000-6,000 sex workers' rights. It allows them to work where and how they choose - on the street, at home or in brothels.

"The relationship between sex workers and police has improved," says Healy. "Sex workers feel more confident about reporting violence and coercion is illegal to protect anyone from being forced into the industry."

Leidholdt, on the other hand, argues that women's safety can only be guaranteed through laws that actively seek to eradicate the sex industry, which in itself is "saturated in violence and coercion."

She goes on to highlight UN reports that "many of the chronic symptoms of women in prostitution are similar to the long-term physical consequences of torture."

Leidholdt adds: "Allowing women to be bought and sold with impunity will make all women unsafe from violence experienced by prostitutes. It is not just confined to prostitutes, but how one treats women in society. To ensure women's safety, all forms of sexual exploitation must be dismantled through a multifaceted approach."

Davis points out that the Swedish model does just that. It cuts off the lifeblood of the industry, the buyers, at the same time as it restores the prostitutes' social and employment rights by decriminalising them.

"Whether the state benefit is enough to live on is another matter. We should be channelling our energy into pushing for increased social benefits, while fighting gender inequality in the workplace and in society at large," she stresses.

The government has rejected both decriminalisation and the Swedish model on the grounds that they are unsuitable for tackling the "magnitude and complexity" of prostitution in Britain. But ministers have failed to offer any alternative.

And the problem isn't going away. Thousands of desperate women still walk the streets every night, living in fear of meeting the same fate as the five women murdered in Ipswich.