‘More should be done to protect sex workers’

To coincide with a Bristol24/7 investigation into street sex working in the city, Bristol West MP Thangam Debbonaire explains why she is pushing for decriminalisation of prostitution

Bristol West is a place of contrasts. The constituency includes the whole of the city centre, including all the exciting shops, clubs, bars and venues which help to make our city such a great place to live in. But Bristol West is also home to massage parlours, street prostitution, and sexual entertainment venues, which send a somewhat different message. 

I have spoken out about the safety of women in prostitution many times, including in Parliament, as it is something I care deeply about. An estimated 80,000 people in this country, mostly women and girls, are involved in prostitution. Half of them have been raped or sexually assaulted. 95 percent of women in street prostitution have severe drug problems.

Half of off-street prostituted women are migrants, usually trafficked. Women in prostitution are 18 times more likely to be murdered than other women. They are also at risk from their partners, pimps, traffickers and clients. They are frequently in and out of a criminal justice system that penalises them, rather than the men who abuse them. They frequently suffer from mental health problems, often as a cause or consequence of being in prostitution. 

The law at the moment is that it’s illegal to pay for the sexual services of a person “subject to force”. It is also illegal for a person to “persistently loiter” or “solicit in a street or public place for the purposes of obtaining the sexual services of a prostitute”. But a recent cross-party Parliamentary enquiry found that the legal framework for prostitution:

• Is complicated and confusing – prostitution is legal but many associated activities are illegal.
• Fails to protect the vulnerable – women hold back reporting violence because of the fear they themselves will be charged and prosecuted for other offences.
• Does not go far enough in protecting those under the age of 18. Although it is criminal to purchase sex from a 13-year-old child, when the child is aged 14-17 the law allows perpetrators to use the defence of reasonable belief that the child was over 18.
• Does not protect women from horrendously high levels of violence. It also fails to target perpetrators and the level of prosecutions is low.

Unsurprisingly, pimps and others involved in controlling people in prostitution aren’t deterred by this patchy legal framework, making the UK a lucrative destination for trafficking with the purpose of sexual exploitation.

I believe the law needs to be radically changed to change this.

Sweden recently made it a criminal offence to buy sex but decriminalised selling sex – this has become known as the ‘Nordic model’, as Norway adopted it in 2008, and Iceland in 2009. France and Northern Ireland have recently taken a similar route. 

All of these countries made this decision in order to deal with the realities of prostitution: that it is profoundly unsafe, that there is no way of regulating it into safety and that the dangers are built into the fabric of the job. Ending prostitution is not a moral crusade as some suggest – it is part of tackling all forms of violence against women and girls and promoting gender equality.

Some make the argument that women in prostitution have chosen to be in that work and need or want to stay in it. This ignores the violence, abuse, drug dependency and mental illness that so many women in prostitution are affected by. Such women often have complex needs. They can be hard to help, and they may be difficult to engage, but that does not mean that they do not deserve our protection. 

And the reality is that prostitution is not a job like any other; if a woman involved in prostitution is told by her client or pimp to have sex or to do certain sexual acts that she does not want to do and is then forced to do them, she has been raped. This means that for many women in prostitution, rape and sexual and physical assault are a daily, constant and present threat. 

There are sometimes heated debates about what is the best way to keep women in prostitution safe. Those who want prostitution legalised entirely and those who, like me, want to criminalise johns, often argue fiercely – even though we all care deeply about the safety of women. 

I want to find common ground, so I’ve convened a roundtable for a small group of people involved in ending violence against women or supporting women in prostitution, to discuss safety for women in prostitution. I hope that this will help us in Bristol to work out what we need to do to end the violence against women in prostitution. Because how we treat the most vulnerable in our city is a marker of who we are.

Photo by Barbara Evripidou

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