Feature: Prostitutes united

Prostitutes united

Saturday, 06, Sep 2008 12:00

Sex workers have heard the rumours of government moves to criminalise the profession. Now they put across their side of the story.

The Home Office has been looking into prostitution for quite some time now. In June Vernon Coaker, home office minister, was in Amsterdam to see if full (or nearly full) legalisation worked. That trip followed a similar one to Sweden, where the government has opted for the opposite course. It appears Sweden had more of an impact.

Rumours became something stronger than that this week when the Home Office went ahead and published a survey of public views on prostitution, in which 58 per cent of people said they would support a ban on prostitution, but only if they thought it would reduce people trafficking.

That was significant, because Mr Coaker is understood to be sympathetic to the idea of criminalisation as long as he believes there's national consensus on the issue. Fifty-eight per cent is not a consensus, but it's how consensuses begin. No-one has ever been in doubt of the views of Harriet Harman, equality minister, on the subject. A diehard women's rights activist, she wants it criminalised. And then yesterday, Mr Brown hinted at the same thing. Very quietly, momentum for something truly seismic in sex worker legislation is building in Westminster.

The one group people rarely ask about such things are prostitutes themselves. And prostitutes don't like the sound of what they're hearing.

"There are no sex worker organisations that support the criminalisation of clients [the Swedish method preferred by the government]," says Katherine Stephens of the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW).

"The government is worsening our exclusion by failing to consult with the people most affected. In Sweden sex workers were explicitly excluded by feminists in the debate. You have people calling themselves feminists saying a group of women conducting certain forms of sexual behaviour should be ignored."

You don't have to address the issue of the sex industry for very long before finding yourself immersed in the ins-and-outs of gender politics. Since Gladstone walked the streets of London trying save 'fallen women' before returning to Number 10 to beat himself with a whip, the tensions between the people who want to help sex workers and the sex workers themselves have hindered any fully fledged attempt at modernising prostitution laws.

"I go to conferences and I don't look like a blonde bombshell, I could pass for an academic," Katherine continues. "And some of these people look at me, like – 'In what way does a woman like this need rescuing?'

"Some of the women who come into contact with groups who combat trafficking talk to me and say - 'they're kidnapping me to help me.'

"The rescue industry will eventually end up with people being forcible rescued," she says.

"This so called feminist agenda is dangerous for all women because it says women don't have the right to their own bodies, and someone knows better than me what's happening in my vagina.

"One of the oldest feminist slogans is 'no means no', and yet now they're saying 'yes doesn't mean yes'. They say my consent to sex doesn't mean anything. Harriet Harman is saying I get raped every day at work. As far as they're concerned, I'm not in a position to make judgements about my own body."

But political debates in Britain rarely centre around abstractions. Movements in this country tend to succeed when they're centred on practicalities, and sex workers feel they're on the right side of that argument too. They stress every attempt to criminalise the profession and drive it further underground simply puts women in more danger.

That's the case with the law as it now stands. It's a bit of a grey area, but here's the gist of it: If you're a woman working alone in a flat as a sex worker, it's legal. If you're doing it with another woman selling sex, the flat is now a brothel and it's illegal. If you're upstairs neighbour is selling sex, completely unknown to you, it's still a brothel and it's still illegal. If you have a receptionist, she's liable to be prosecuted, especially if you're working for them rather than the other way around. Many sex workers feel that the safer the environment they establish, the more illegal it becomes. There's a very real feeling in the sex workers community that the law actively puts them in peril.

All of which is valid, but none of it answers the concerns of that 58 per cent of people who feel something needs to be done about human trafficking. If not criminalisation, then what?

The IUSW believes the government may be about to criminalise the very group whose help it most needs. "Clients are an asset," Katherine says. "They're the cheapest, easiest, most effective way of preventing abuse.

"Even Poppy Project, which campaigns for their criminalisation, gets two per cent of their referrals [about trafficked women] from clients. We need hotlines. One of the simplest, most effective things government could do is set up a hotline for clients."

So there you have it. The view from the other side. Unless all the signs are pointing the wrong way, sex worker legislation is creeping its way through the Home Office. The IUSW is certainly right about one thing – their voices will not dominate the consultations which follow. But the legislation which does eventually come may well be the worse for that.

Ian Dunt