Briefing from the Safety First Coalition
 

CRIMINAL JUSTICE & IMMIGRATION BILL 2008
Aspects relating to prostitution
 

We urge you to
 

Support the AMENDMENT to CLAUSE 123 to delete “persistent soliciting” subsection (3)

Lord Faulkner, Baronesses Howe, Miller and Stern, Line 135  

Clause 123 abolishes the term ‘common prostitute’ and introduces “persistent soliciting” so that “soliciting for the purposes of offering services as a prostitute“ is considered “persistent if it takes place on two or more occasions in any period of three months”. 

Support the AMENDMENT to delete Clauses 124 and 125

Lord Faulkner, Baronesses Howe, Miller and Stern, Line 135

Clauses 124 and 125 introduce compulsory rehabilitation for prostitute women, requiring anyone arrested for loitering or soliciting to attend a series of three meetings with a supervisor approved by the court. Failure to comply will result in a summons back to court and a possible 72-hours imprisonment.

Support NEW CLAUSE on the definition of a brothel

Lord Faulkner, Baronesses Howe, Miller and Stern, Line 136

ARGUMENTS

persistent soliciting – CLAUSE 123

1.  A catch all offence which criminalises even the occasional sex worker. 

The definition of soliciting as “persistent” if it takes place twice over a period of three months makes a mockery of the abolition of the term common prostitute as it will bring no reduction in the number of women arrested.  Soliciting twice in three months would more appropriately be described as occasional, to describe it as persistent shows an intention to criminalise. 

Criminal records have disastrous consequences for women and their families, including that of preventing them from getting other jobs.  It is through this kind of criminalisation that women end up institutionalised in prostitution.

Compulsory Rehabilitation – CLAUSES 124 & 125

1.  Clauses 124 and 125 are promoted as an alternative to a fine.  They are not.  Fines have not been abolished and can still be used. “If the court is satisfied that the order has been breached without reasonable excuse, it must revoke the order and has power to deal with the offender in any way that it could have dealt with them on conviction.”[1]  Women will continue to be criminalised and fined, and imprisoned if they don’t pay their fines.

2.  A criminal record institutionalises women in prostitution, preventing those who want to get out from getting other jobs.  We know of dedicated mothers who supported their disabled children by working as prostitutes who had to turn down caring jobs they were eminently suitable for because their previous occupation was used against them.  If the rehabilitation order is breached the police have the power to detain a woman for up to 72 hours from the time of arrest to when she is brought to court.  Lord Hunt claims that “the power of detention is not a penalty for loitering or soliciting.”  Yet Minister Vernon Coaker describes it as a “sanction”.[2]

3.  Women could end up on a treadmill of broken supervision meetings, court orders and imprisonment. 

The Joint Committee on Human Rights Report[3] expressed concern at the lack of justification for the power to detain for 72 hours: “these measures may in fact lead up to the detention of women for up to 72 hours for failing to attend a meeting and in fact may eventually lead to their imprisonment for failure to comply with the terms of the court orders.” Even the Magistrates Association has expressed concern.

4.  Imprisoning women for non-violent offences goes against recent recommendations in the widely respected Corston report (March 2007).  The number of women in prison has nearly doubled in the past 10 years from 2,629 to 4,530 (Home Office 23.11.07).  Yet there is no equivalent increase in the number of women committing offences or in seriousness of the offences.  As women are society’s primary carers, imprisoning them destroys families, starting with the thousands of children separated from their mothers’ love, guidance and concern.

Lord Hunt reports that “the numbers of cautions and prosecutions for loitering and soliciting has been in steady decline for the last 15 years”.[4]  He claims this is evidence that ”rehabilitation” will not lead to further criminalisation of women selling sex.  Loitering and soliciting charges are being used less primarily because ASBOs have become the favoured penalty.  Many of the women who are in prison for breaching their ASBOs are sex workers, but we have not been able to get a breakdown.  If the government doesn’t have this information, how can they claim that the numbers have gone down? 

5.  Clauses 124 and 125 claim to help women “by assisting the offender to address the causes of their involvement in prostitution and to find ways of ending that involvement.”  Most sex workers are mothers and/or young people struggling to survive.  But there is no provision for resources to address the poverty, debt, rape and domestic violence, homelessness, drug use or a combination of these, which drive many women and young people into prostitution.  And the government has announced that drug services are being cut. 

6.  Evidence shows that compulsory “rehabilitation” schemes do not help. Where they exist, people complain of abusive and judgmental treatment and avoid using them.  The Royal College of Nursing and many doctors and drug reformers oppose criminalisation because it prevents sex workers from accessing health services.  What women need are services independent of the criminal justice system.

If the intention is to help, why is there a sanction attached?  If the government needs sanctions to get women out of prostitution it is because they are offering no viable economic options, no viable drug programmes.  Compulsion will not to solve this.  It will only force women further underground.

7.  The very concept of “rehabilitation” is degrading and humiliating.  Every woman is entitled to be treated not as an immoral criminal or ignorant victim, but as a human being who deserves respect and support – respect for her rights and her choices, including her choice to work in the sex industry, and support when she needs it. 

Despite Lord Hunt’s claims that the orders will be “flexible” and “not overly prescriptive”, women will be asked to demean themselves by revealing their most intimate circumstances when there is in fact no concrete help available.  

Enormous discretionary power is being given to the “supervisors” which may lead to abuse.

Trafficking – the JUSTIFICATION for a moralistic crusade against prostitution WHICH HAS LED TO CLAUSES 123, 124 &125

 

1.  The public’s understandable concern for victims of trafficking is being exploited to promote a moralistic and dangerous crusade against prostitution.  “ . . . anti-trafficking measures are still being used to justify a raft of measures which are aimed at suppressing sex work in general.”[5]  It has lead to Clauses 123, 124 and 125, and to proposals to criminalise men who buy sex, along the lines of Swedish law.  All these measures would push prostitution further underground thus making sex workers more vulnerable to violence.  We feel it is necessary, therefore, to expose some common misconceptions.

2.  Prostitution is the consensual exchange of sexual services for money.  It is not illegal.  Those who advocate the criminalisation of clients claim that it is “uniquely degrading” and equal to rape.  Sex workers, like any other human being, have always distinguished between the sex they consent to (for money or not), and that which violates their bodies and their will.  While many would prefer another job, they also point to the fact that sex work is often better paid than most of the low-waged jobs women do.

3.  Trafficking is not about prostitution but about poverty, immigration and asylum.

Many women from poorer countries come to work in the UK in the hope of improving their and their children’s lives.  Others are asylum seekers fleeing war or persecution who have been left without support yet prevented from working legally.  How can they survive except by begging or working illegally, including in prostitution?  The debt immigrants incur in order to get here and the destitution asylum seekers face, combined with the fear of deportation, lays them open to exploitation.  Whether in the sex industry, agricultural, domestic or other service work, exploitation is rife.  EDM 633 reflects a growing acknowledgement of this situation: “women working in [prostitution] establishments are more likely to be made vulnerable by debts incurred during migration, or by poverty that drives them into sex work.”  

4.  Trafficking is forced or bonded labour, abduction, kidnapping, false imprisonment, rape, grievous bodily harm, extortion. 

Existing laws cover all these offences and could be used to prosecute the assailants of women and children, whatever work they are being forced into.

5.  Unlike offences of trafficking for non sexual exploitation, [6] legislation on trafficking for prostitution does not require “force, threats or deception” to be proved to convict someone for trafficking.  This is contrary to the UN definition of trafficking which is used by most countries.

This exceptional treatment reserved for the sex industry has allowed unfounded claims about the size of the problem to go unchallenged.  A person who “intentionally arranges or facilitates the arrival in the United Kingdom of another person” is considered to be a trafficker.  Anyone who has helped someone who works in the sex industry to come into the UK, leave the UK or travel within the UK can be arrested, convicted and imprisoned.  One Brazilian mother in our network was convicted of trafficking and imprisoned for three years for running a working flat where other immigrant worked.  Yet the judge agreed that “none of these women was, in fact, coerced by you into acting as a prostitute . . . you treated them in a kindly and hospitable way”.  All her possessions, built up over many years of hard work, have been confiscated and she faces losing custody of her seven year old child.  Her British citizenship has been withdrawn despite living in the UK for 25 years and she now faces deportation.  Her partner was convicted of “trafficking within the UK” for picking her and another woman up at the airport. 

6.  The statistics on the number of trafficked women in the UK are false. 

The commonly cited figure that 85% of women working in the sex industry are victims of trafficking (used by Solicitor General Vera Baird on Woman’s Hour), derives from a report 'Sex in the City' (2004) by the Poppy Project.  On the basis of a phone survey by a male researcher posing as a client, the report concluded that 80% of women working in “brothels, saunas and massage parlours” were “non British nationals”.  This research was condemned as having “serious methodological limitations”[7], yet it is widely quoted as “proof” that most sex workers have been trafficked. 

Such a claim has no base in fact and should be exposed.  Many industries have seen an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the past few years – agriculture, building, catering, etc.  But when it comes to the sex industry no distinction is being made between immigrant women who are working to support themselves and their families, and women who are being held against their will.  Why?  Why are assumptions being made and figures being misused?

The Poppy Project receives £4.5m from the Ministry of Justice to “assist victims of trafficking”.  It is based on the false assumption that prostitution and violence are one and the same.  The Poppy Project has a vested interest in promoting “sex trafficking” as a huge and growing problem.  So do the police whose trafficking budgets have gone up enormously.  While there is much coverage of raids on premises aimed at “liberating” victims of trafficking, the results are rarely covered.  Yet most raids have not yielded victims of trafficking but immigrants or asylum seekers who are here of their own free will and are then deported.  Concern has been expressed at the “abuses committed in the course of raids .“[8]

The police have refused to say what happened to the 84 women arrested under Pentameter I, but the evidence we have gathered suggests that most have been deported.  Of the 60 plus women arrested in the 2001 Soho raids all but a handful were deported.  The press hailed the rescue of 19 victims of trafficking in the 2005 raid on the Birmingham massage parlour Cuddles, but the Home Office later admitted “at no point did any of the women indicate that they were trafficked into the UK.”[9]  At least seven were deported.  

The “Fagin’s urchins” raids in Slough are a recent example of grossly inaccurate police claims and media hype.  Within a day they were exposed as a sham, and the only charges brought against anyone involved were for theft and immigration offences, triggering an official complaint by the Romanian embassy. 

Whatever the true numbers of trafficked women may be, they are nowhere near the number of rape victims whose rapists have not been convicted.  But despite women pressing for justice and protection from rape, we are not aware of any comparable increase in budgets to improve the police and CPS response to rape or sexual assault, including the rape of sex workers.  (On the contrary, funding to anti-rape organisations and services has practically disappeared.)  Why?  Is it because trafficking has become a smokescreen for immigration raids and deportation?

7.  Genuine victims don’t get help.

Most women who are victims of trafficking won’t go to the Poppy Project because they work in partnership with the Home Office, the immigration authorities and the police.[10]  Others are ineligible for help because of restrictive entrance criteria which specifies that the woman must be “willing to co-operate with the authorities” or must have been forced to make money for others in prostitution in the UK in the previous 30 days.  Women Against Rape (a member of the Safety First Coalition) has been contacted by a number of women who wanted to report their traffickers but the police either refused to take a report or dismissed the report without any investigation on the grounds that it contained insufficient detail.

It was only a determined campaign by Black Women’s Rape Action Project that won the release of a 17-year-old victim of trafficking from an adult prison after she was charged with travelling on false documents.  The Joint Committee on Human Rights report on Human Trafficking confirms that “victims may often find themselves treated as immigration offenders and face enforcement actions such as detention and removals.”[11]  It called for a review of immigration laws and policies “in the context of their impact on the victims of trafficking.”  2007 research found that “The current system does not guarantee them [trafficked persons] protection, access to services, let alone justice” and that “policy in the UK interprets trafficking primarily as an immigration offence.”[12]  Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s refusal to guarantee that those rescued from forced prostitution would not face deportation[13] confirms that the protection of victims is not prioritised.

In addition, the government is accused of legalising trafficking by removing the right of migrant domestic workers to change employer.  “This will make it virtually impossible to challenge any maltreatment or abuse, and indeed will encourage it.  32% of domestic workers who registered at Kalayaan during 06-07 had their passports withheld by their employer, 24% had been physically abused and 9% had been sexually abused.”[14]

Allowing victims of trafficking residence permits and other protection has been dismissed by government as raising “large questions of the evasion of immigration control . . .”  If women’s safety and welfare were really the priority why shouldn’t a woman who has escaped from a situation where she faced threats, violence and/or rape and fears reprisals have the right to be stay in the UK?

8.  Criminalising men who buy sex is a diversion from dealing with violence.

The government has launched a six month review of the demand for prostitution, and government ministers have been quoted saying that “the pull factor [in trafficking] is the demand for prostituted women.”[15]  While the 1999 Swedish law which criminalised men who buy sex is being used as an example, there has been no investigation of its consequences for women’s safety.  Police in Sweden recently commented that the law has driven women into the hands of pimps and made it harder for the police to prosecute violent men, including traffickers.

When Women Against Rape met with rape policy heads at the CPS last year, they said that police often decide not to collect evidence such as mobile phone records or forensic blood tests because it was “too expensive”.  Research commissioned by the police and council in Ipswich following the tragic murders of five young women, also found that police don’t go after pimps because, again, “it’s too expensive.”  (“In Pieces, A review of prostitution, community safety issues and good practice,” August 2007) 

Targeting sex workers and clients indiscriminately is cheaper, easier and better for crime figures.  But it will do nothing to increase women’s safety, on the contrary.

9.  Crackdowns make it harder for women to report violence and exploitation. 

Violent men know that fear of arrest or deportation discourages sex workers from reporting, and that those who do report are often dismissed because of their occupation, leaving their assailant free to attack again.  Given that at least 60 women who worked in prostitution have been murdered in the last 10 years and that unreported and unconvicted rape are all too common, safety must surely be the priority. 

Safety First

A coalition of bereaved families, Ipswich residents, church people, nurses, doctors, probation officers, anti-rape and anti-poverty campaigners, trade unionists, prison and drug reformers, sex worker projects co-ordinated by the

English Collective of Prostitutes
 

Tel: 020 7482 2496, 07811 964 171

   ecp@allwomencount.net    www.prostitutescollective.net