Catherine Stephens (International Union of Sex Workers): Yesterday the Home Office announced new proposals intended to “protect the thousands of vulnerable women coerced, exploited or trafficked into prostitution in our country, and to bring those who take advantage of them to justice”. It’s a great story, with drama, heroism, anguish and a big white horse for Jacqui Smith to ride as she swoops in to rescue tearful hookers from foreign countries.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty much fact-free and bears no relationship to the reality of the sex industry: it will in actuality increase the vulnerability of all women who sell sex, even privileged, educated, white, British passport holding women like me. How come?
If you want to target trafficking, the first thing you need to do is increase reporting. You can’t rely on police raids to find the real victims – who do exist – in the sex industry. Pentameter 1, raiding 515 premises, found 88 victims of trafficking. This spectacularly fails to match the Turkish hotline for reporting anxieties about trafficking (in any field: hotel and catering, domestic service, agriculture…). Three quarters of the tip offs came from sex workers’ clients, and those calls resulted in the destruction of 10 trafficking networks and freedom of 100 women from coercion. And I bet that didn’t cost the £5 million reported cost of Pentameter 1.
And speaking of agriculture, to put trafficking for sexual exploitation in perspective, Pentameter’s 88 rescues over 7 months compares with 60 suspected trafficked labourers found in one day, on one farm in Lincolnshire.
Clients do not want to pay for sex with women who are not willing. Even the Poppy Project, who campaigns for their criminalisation (and considers “Kissing available for £20 "depending on what you look like." [my italics] to be an anecdotal indicator of trafficking (Big Brothel, p23)) receive 2% of their referral from clients, and a further 6% from unspecified “members of the public”. Further Poppy research shows that 2% of clients would stop paying for sex if it were criminalized – this is, by definition, the most law abiding, conscientious type of client, least likely to harm and most likely to report anxieties. If 98% will not stop, it is clear that the industry will be pushed further underground.
Yet will implicating yourself in a crime – that you are guilty of even if you didn’t know you were committing it at the time, according to some reports of how the Home Office plan to structure new laws – increase reporting? I don’t think so.
British law already endangers sex workers by making it illegal for us to work together; criminal gangs know this, and knowingly target sex workers for robbery and rape. Brothel keepers who have reported fears they’ve been offered trafficked women – that have been proven true, with victims rescued and traffickers imprisoned – have themselves been prosecuted, imprisoned, and their assets seized as a result of coming to the attention of the authorities.
In nearly ten years in the sex industry I have never met someone who believes they have the full protection of the law. Increasing the criminalization of our industry, and of our clients, will help no-one and harm many.
Only inclusion within the law of people in the sex industry will produce real, effective, long-lasting positive change. The government had a chance to create this, but has opted to perpetuate social exclusion, whilst bewailing its consequences.
About Catherine Stephens
After a string of jobs in the private sector, including estate agency, television and administration for an architectural practice, Catherine spent ten years with an environmental campaigning organisation and a further five working with community development organisations. For the past eight years she has worked in the sex industry, and has been involved in sex worker organising for most of that time. She is an activist with the International Union of Sex Workers and is a member of the GMB trades union's branch for people who work in the sex industry. She loves her job.
