Captioned by CSG: ‘THE FANTASY: New in Town! Sexy Oriental Star! All Services! 24/7.’ Source: CSG Facebook. Fair Use.
In 2014, Community Safety Glasgow (CSG), a charitable body owned jointly by Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Police Authority, joined the pledge for Glasgow to become a ‘White Ribbon City’. This declaration, which seeks to address and reduce incidences of violence against women in all its forms, interacts with Scotland’s zero tolerance policy on prostitution, Scotland’s Human Trafficking and Exploitation Bill (to be implemented this year), and the Violence Against Women strategy (‘Making Scotland Equally Safe’) in a combined effort to eradicate prostitution.
In addition to these current measures, the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee is exploring the creation of a single human trafficking offence for all forms of exploitation. Many submissions to the committee have asked for the bill’s central tenet to follow the so-called ‘Swedish model’. This criminalises the clients of sex workers, despite ample evidence from Sweden itself that the criminalisation of buyers leads to disastrous results. MSP Rhoda Grant, whose previous attempt to change legislation was the ‘Criminalisation of the Purchase of Sex (Scotland)’ bill in 2012, is the prime figure behind this drive. It is therefore of no surprise to those who have been following Grant’s lobby trail that the MSP has been urging feminist value organisations and Police Scotland to submit their views, making sure that ‘demand’ is a hot subject of discussion in both the analysis and conclusions.
