Prostitution IS a moral issue

The hoo-ha generated by Nick Davies’ Guardian article exposing the dodgy statistics deployed by the anti-prostitution feminists and their allies in the government which seems to have resulted in a huge waste of public money and police time spent scouring the country for ‘trafficked’ women, as detailed in my previous post, has at long last sparked off an overdue debate about the credibility of the government’s latest attempt to criminalise the clients of prostitutes who use the services of such women, even unknowingly.

Davies has another, even more powerful, Guardian piece demonstrating beyond a shadow of doubt that even if the government ministers, the Home Office, and the agencies involved touted these inflated figures around in good faith, they were irresponsible and reckless in the extreme in doing so. If, as seems increasingly likely, there has been a gross misuse of public funds prompted by a wild goose chase stoked up with phoney statistics plucked out of the air to fit an ideological agenda, it is a scandal which calls for an official enquiry and, if found proved, requires some resignations including ministerial ones.

Of course, where trafficking is concerned it is quite true that even one genuine case of a woman being forced into prostitution against her will is one case too many; and that the law and the police should do everything in their power to stamp out such abuse. But to use unsubstantiated allegations that there are many thousands of women working as ‘sex slaves’ in Britain as an excuse to toughen the laws against all prostitutes and their clients is an entirely different matter.

I appreciate the moral objections held by many people – not all of them religious – against prostitution, and also the sincere conviction of feminists that prostitution degrades women in a way which should not be permitted, even if the women themselves freely choose to be prostitutes. But I do not accept that in a democratic society anyone should be ‘forced to be free’ by doing something, or abstaining from doing something, which does not involve unwilling third parties.

That, to my mind, is the central moral issue over prostitution. It is about liberty; it is about choice; it is – however perverse this may seem to some – about human dignity.

To treat others with whose moral choices and personal behaviour you disagree as delinquents, unwilling clients, ‘victims’ requiring to be ‘rescued’, robs them of their dignity and is arrogantly presumptuous. In recent years there has been all too much of this condescending meddling in other peoples’ privacy, especially in matters of sexual behaviour. For a too short period in the 1960s and ‘70s it seemed as if over-rigid moralistic attitudes towards all sexual activity outside marriage, whether consenting or not, as sinful, disreputable, and sometimes illegal were becoming outmoded and that a new ethic of more tolerant understanding towards mutually desired relationships whether heterosexual or homosexual was evolving. Consenting sex, whether accompanied by love or not, was more frankly accepted as a fact of life. The author of the best-selling Joy of Sex, the respected biologist Dr Alex Comfort, viewed sex as one of the healthiest human sports, to be practised enthusiastically with a gourmet’s discrimination. The Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, Dr John Robinson, declared that the proper function of the law in society was not to prohibit but to protect, not to enforce morals but to safeguard persons, their privacies and freedoms.

While the aim of safeguarding the persons of prostitutes, and especially those who are unwillingly involved in the sex industry, is laudable, it should not be at the expense of their privacy and freedom. By all means let us put the maximum effort into tracing and rescuing women – and men – who have been compelled into sexual slavery; but it is not right to penalise those who have chosen to earn part or all of their living by providing sexual services, or those who avail themselves of those services on a mutually consenting basis.

Prostitution, like any other walk of life, covers a multitude of circumstances and personalities. The assumption that all prostitutes are sad, miserable, usually drug-ridden creatures is demonstrably false. Some are, no doubt. But there are also plenty of women – and men – who have freely chosen this life, and often not solely for its financial benefits. Some of them (horror of horrors!) actually enjoy sex, and are genuinely friendly with their clients. Not all prostitution even involves sexual activity: much of it is about alleviating loneliness. I have been told of one client who used to seek out the company of a sympathetic sex worker simply for an hour’s companionable chat and a cup of tea; no sex occurred, but when the client departed he left a £50 note on the mantelpiece and felt that he had received value for money. Admittedly this may not be typical or even frequent, but it does illustrate that the contention that all sex workers are being cruelly and cynically exploited doesn’t hold water. I agree with the Victorian bisexual literary critic John Addington Symonds who once wrote: “Good Lord! In what different orbits human souls can move. They talk of sex out of legal codes and blue books. I talk of it from human documents, myself, the people I have known, the adulterers and prostitutes of both sexes I have dealt with over bottles of wine and confidences.”

My approach to these issues is from the standpoint of humanity – of free choice, consent, privacy, and non-interference in personal lives by bossy social engineers. I suppose my philosophy would nowadays be labelled ‘Libertarian’, but that is a label which irks me because it marginalises what rightly used to be the mainstream attitude of a more tolerant, civilised society than today’s and relegates it to a fringe eccentricity. If that really is the 21^st century British ethos, so much the worse for our society and our country.

I do not know what Harriet Harman, Fiona McTaggart, Julie Bindel or Denis MacShane do in their boudoirs or other places of assignation, who they do it with, or how they do it. So long as it is mutually consenting, it is none of my business: they can do it solitarily, in duos, in threesomes or in larger groups, in the bath, or hanging from the ceiling by their toes for all I care - it is a private matter. And personal privacy is the chief casualty in this incessant prurient snooping into other peoples’ consenting sex lives. Pierre Trudeau, sometime prime minister of Canada, once said that the State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. I agree with him. Mutually consenting sexual activity – whether for love or for payment, for both or for neither - is the individual citizen’s personal choice and private affair, and a basic human right.

A load of Poppy cock

According to today’s Guardian, “the UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.”

This outcome, the paper unsurprisingly suggests, indicates that “the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media….Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.”

This huge and costly operation – known as ‘Pentameter Two – was hailed by former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith as “a great success”, and its head claimed that 528 arrests had been made. But an internal police analysis of Pentameter, obtained by the Guardian after a lengthy legal struggle, suggests there was a striking shortage of sex traffickers to be found, despite six months of effort by all 55 police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together with the UK Border Agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish government, the Crown Prosecution Service and various NGOs in what was trumpeted as "the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking".

Although police described the operation as "the culmination of months of planning and intelligence-gathering from all those stakeholders involved", the reality was that, during six months of national effort, they found only 96 people to arrest for trafficking, of whom 67 were charged. Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking. Seven of them were acquitted. The end result was that, after raiding 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours all over the UK, Pentameter finally convicted of trafficking a grand total of only 15 men and women.There were just five men who were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes. These genuinely were traffickers, but none of them was detected by Pentameter.

The head of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, Grahame Maxwell, who is chief constable of North Yorkshire, acknowledged the importance of the figures: "The facts speak for themselves. I'm not trying to argue with them in any shape or form," he said. He is commissioning fresh research to try to get a clearer picture of the scale of sex trafficking. "What we're trying to do is to get it gently back to some reality here," he said.

But a po-faced person from the Poppy Project – a Home Office funded agency set up in 2003 to combat the trafficking and abuse of women - sniffed defensively that “it is incredibly difficult to establish prevalence because of the undercover and potentially criminal nature of trafficking and also, we feel, because of the fear that many women have in coming forward."

‘Incredible’ is certainly the right word for the Home Office’s research estimate that there are 80,000 working prostitutes in the UK, and for Pentameter Two’s original claims that there are between 6,000 and 18,000 ‘sex slaves’ working in the UK – although their operation only led to 167 such persons being identified.

As a result of all the hullabaloo based upon these dodgy figures, Parliament is now in the final stages of passing the Policing and Crime Bill which contains a proposal penalise any man who has sex with a woman who is "controlled for gain", even if the man is genuinely ignorant of the control. Although the definition of "controlled" has been tightened, sex workers' groups complain that the clause will encourage women to prove that they are not being controlled by working alone on the streets or in a flat without a maid, thus making them more vulnerable to attack.

We have, of course, been here before. The Great Paedophile Panic originally stirred up by some hysterical paediatricians and a burgeoning ‘child protection industry’ which led to scandals such as the miscarriages of justice involved in some prosecutions of alleged offences – some dating back many years - at childrens’ homes, and the witch-hunts over what proved to be purely fantastic stories of ‘Satanic Child Abuse’, some of them resulting in years of agony and separation for blameless families, are still fresh in the memory.

One would think that the government would have learned some due caution from all of this, but there are evidently powerful elements who are still driven by a puritanical hatred of all sexual activity which doesn’t conform with their narrow notions of propriety, even if it is between consenting adults.

Of course no-one condones the sexual exploitation of unwilling women – or men, for that matter – by third parties for profit. But that is an entirely different matter from the persecution of prostitution willingly engaged in on a mutually consenting basis

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Half a century ago, the Wolfenden Committee in its famous report on homosexual offences and prostitution declared that

Unless a deliberate attempt is to be made by society, acting through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.

Amen to that. It’s high time that a civilised society – if we still are one - adhered to that common sense principle.

A potty proposal

ANTONY GREY writes:

Our first woman Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has come up with a mind-bogglingly bizarre plan to criminalise paying for sex with a woman who is 'controlled for another person's gain'. This new offence will, according to the Guardian's political editor, "carry a hefty fine and criminal record, which could prevent those caught from getting jobs in sensitive occupations". The legislation will cover not only trafficked women ['sex slaves'] - who are indeed in need of effective state protection but all too often don't get it despite the stringent laws against such trafficking - but also those who have pimps or who are drug addicts prostituting themselves in order to pay off their dealers.

Unsurprisingly, such a broad definition is expected to include "the great majority of Britain's 80,000 sex workers" [source of figure unstated]. Ignorance of the woman's circumstances will not be a defence. The egregious Ms Smith has stated: "It won't be enough to say 'I didn't know'. What I hope people will say is, 'I am not going to take the risk if there is any concern that the woman hasn't made a free choice.' It would be quite difficult for a man paying for sex in the majority of cases not to fall under this particular offence." [my italics] But she is graciously refraining from imposing a universal ban on paid sex because some women argued that they did it out of choice "and it's not my job to criminalise that".

There you have it! Ms Smith and her advisers don't have the bottle to make prostitution illegal and have done with it - so they concoct a new failsafe catch-all crime which, like so many new offences introduced by this civil liberty-trashing New Labour government, removes the burden of proving guilt from where it properly belongs - the prosecution - and dumps the burden of proving his innocence upon the accused. So much for traditional British justice.

I have spent a large part of my life publicly arguing for freedom of choice in sexual behaviour between consenting partners, because it seems to me that nothing less accords with the dignity of the individual, however immoral or depraved some folk think their freely made choices are. I heartily agree with one of Margaret Thatcher's more sensible pronouncements, when she said: "Free choice is ultimately what life is about, what ethics is about. The whole of the case for freedom is a moral case because it involves choice. Do away with choice and you do away with human dignity."

A guiding light of my political philosophy has been John Stuart Mill's seminal essay On Liberty [1859] - now sadly neglected - in which he lays down the principle that 'the only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way'; that 'each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily or mental or spiritual'; that 'mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest'; and that 'over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign'.

This was reinforced and brought up to date by the Wolfenden Committee's 1957 Report on Homosexuality and Prostitution which stressed the "decisive" importance of allowing individual freedom of choice and action in matters of private morality: "Unless a deliberate attempt is to be made by society, acting through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law's business." Now, it would appear, Ms Jacqui Smith and her New Labour cohorts are bent on making such an attempt.

In 1972 the then Chairman of the Sexual Law Reform Society, Bishop John A.T. Robinson, delivered a lecture on The Place of Law in the Field of Sex in which he affirmed that the true function of law in a democratic society was "not to prohibit but to protect, not to enforce morals but to safeguard persons, their privacies and freedoms". I remain convinced this is right: privacy, protection and consent are the key issues in this area of personal behaviour.

It is always difficult to defend as harmless private consenting activity which is deemed immoral, offensive, or anti-social by others. It is almost impossible to get a hearing for the - surely plausible - view that not all consenting relationships between those above and below the legal age of consent are exploitive or damaging. It is equally hard to get a hearing for the far from absurd contention that many - if not most - prostitutes, male as well as female, take up their profession freely and willingly and enjoy their work. Yet this is the finding of more than one research study, and I myself have known such prostitutes who do not operate at the seedy or criminal end of the business. Yet telling this to the likes of Jacqui Smith and ideologically anti-prostitution feminists is like shouting at a brick wall. Whether it is true or not, they simply do not want to know.

Civil liberties and personal freedom have taken worse knocks under this New Labour government than at any time I can remember. How long will the too patient public continue putting up with this constant erosion of freedoms we took for granted throughout the twentieth century? It will be interesting to see.

To conclude, let me recall the words of John Addington Symonds, celebrated Victorian literary critic and bisexual: "Good Lord! In what different orbits human souls can move. He talks of sex out of legal codes and blue books. I talk of it from human documents, myself, the people I have known, the adulterers and prostitutes of both sexes I have dealt with over bottles of wine and confidences."

Mrs Grundy rides again

According to today's Guardian, the Government is exploring the possibility of criminalising payment for sex, and a minister is to visit Sweden to examine how the system works there. It is thought that such a law would help to crack down on sex slavery and forced prostitution, but sex workers' spokespersons maintain that it would lead to increased violence and extortion, and that the proper way to proceed is to legalise and license brothels instead of driving prostitution still further underground and making prostitutes even more vulnerable then they now are.

Memories are very short, and the dire social consequences of Prohibition in the USA during the 1920s seem to have slipped from most people's minds. One salutary bi-product of outlawing payment for sex, though, might be to make London a less attractive venue for unsavoury visitors such as Saudi princes - though they would doubtless claim diplomatic immunity if caught in the act.