Decriminalise prostitution, don't ghettoise it!
18 July 2004
Blair's government is to review the UK laws on prostitution. In a consultation document published last week, Paying the Price, the Home Office outlines a number of possible reforms to the law, all with the aim of tackling this "problem".
Home Secretary and social control fanatic, David Blunkett, doesn't like prostitution, and sees it as one of the many evils he is trying to eradicate or drive out of sight. Over recent years women who work on the streets have been targets of his Anti Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs - effectively ways of imposing curfews on poor people and youth without having to convict them of with any specific crime), forcing them to move away from established red-light areas and into often more isolated and dangerous places. More recently men who look to buy sex have been targeted with specific laws and threatened with ASBOs.
Paying the Price has been reported as the start of a new liberalisation of the law, with options including the creation of "toleration zones" (districts where street prostitution can operate), and legalised brothels. However, any such concession to the sex workers' union, the International Sex Workers Union (part of the GMB), is likely to be cloaked in further repression and stigmatisation of sex work outside these tightly controlled sectors.
There is clearly a need for reform - sex workers face high levels of exploitation and abuse from clients, managers or pimps, and the state. The state pimps off street workers by repeatedly arresting and fining them, in full knowledge that the only way women can pay the fines is through sex work.
Women who work in flats or for agencies face state harassment - for brothel keeping or other offences - and have to work in a hidden and isolated way, making them more vulnerable to violence and exploitation, particularly from the owners who rent them premises. Since agencies and other sex work businesses are effectively illegal, workers in them have no rights and cannot use even basic laws against exploitative employers.
The UK is looking at the experience in other countries for guidance. Sweden has recently made it a crime to pay for sex, based on a moral standpoint that sees all sex work as inevitably a form of violence against women. Sex worker organisations in Sweden and elsewhere have condemned this as a reactionary abuse of human rights that drives women underground and criminalises consenting sex between adults.
In the Netherlands, the government legalised brothels in an attempt to gain some control over, and some income from, the massive sex industry operating in its cities. While this has made it possible for some workers to gain basic rights and better working conditions, for thousands of others it has meant increased harassment by both the authorities and the bosses who are forced to check work permits.
Many of the people working in the European sex industry are migrants from poor countries; they come to the European Union seeking work and to escape appalling conditions at home. They are faced with a racist system where they cannot get benefits or work, and so many work in the black economy, including the sex industry. The new law in the Netherlands, and similar laws in Germany and now potentially in the UK, will exclude migrants and lead to further raids and deportations.
Capitalism creates a massive sex industry. It does this by creating a huge supply of poor women, and increasing numbers of men and children, who have to work to survive. "Legitimate" jobs on rock bottom wages come and go with the flow of capital. At the same time, capitalism continues to distort sexuality, forcing people to conform to the heterosexual monogamous norm or face stigma and repression.
Despite major changes in sexuality and gender politics in recent decades in the west, sex is still not really tolerated outside of relationships linked to homes and children. In a society where everything can be bought or sold, it is no surprise that men frequently turn to a commercial option: pay for sex rather than get embroiled in a long-term relationship. Women don't - they have neither the money nor probably the inclination. Men are expected to "need" sex. Women are not.
So having created a massive supply of people needing work, and demand for sex as a commodity, it is no surprise that capitalism has this large sex industry. But even the most pro-market neo-liberal governments find it difficult to embrace the industry fully. So they continue to regard it as essentially a moral question in which the participants are blamed for some inherent weakness.
Blunkett's consultation document presents sex workers as victims who need to be saved by Blair-ite social programmes that will get them a "worthy" job selling burgers or stacking shelves. Those who continue to sell sex are to be rounded up into zones where they are "allowed" to work under the watchful eye of the police and social workers - a form of apartheid that is unthinkable for any other group. There is of course no attempt to address the poverty wages, the inequalities and discrimination that denies women a decent living in the "legitimate" sector.
But while governments try to banish them from sight and rescue their souls (while siphoning off their money) sex workers organised in unions across the globe are calling for decriminalisation and an end to stigmatisation. They know better than anyone else that there is massive exploitation in the industry, but they also know that the answer to exploitation is to organise the workers to fight for their rights, including the right to other work if they want it.
Sex work cannot be "normalised" under capitalism, which will continue to stigmatise and abuse those who do not conform, but rather than join the calls for further controls by the Blunketts of this world, we call for decriminalisation, and campaign against discrimination, funds for health care and retraining for those who want it. But this will fail unless the industry is put under the control of those who work in it - that is the best way of getting rid of the pimps - from the individual gangsters right through to the big businesses and the state.
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