These groups look to Sweden as their model, or at least half of it. Arguing that all prostitution is violence of men against women, the Swedes in 1989 made it illegal to buy sex (even from men and transgenders, go figure). Arresting and fining punters was supposed to strike a blow against partriarchy, advance the feminist cause, and, of course, reduce violence against women. Here’s what has happened since the law was passed:

At a cost to the Swedish tax payer of over US$ 7 million a year, Sweden has, over the last four years, convicted an annual average of three people for trafficking and 18 for pimping, and has fined an average of 75 men a year for buying sex. Street-based sex work did nose-dive soon after the law was passed, then stabilised and remains constant. There’s no information about what’s happened to women selling sex in other venues, including apartments, clients’ homes, neighbouring Denmark… What we do know is that convictions for rape have increased by 28% since it became illegal to buy sex, and convictions for sexual crimes overall have increased by 68%. Some of this may be because the hoopla surrounding the law did effectively advance the Ice Queen agenda, and more women are successfully prosecuting men under the country’s incredibly vague “rape” laws. But it hardly fills one with confidence that “end demand” campaigns will reduce violence against women overall.

Chicago’s abolitionists are a strange miscegenation of paternalistic feminists (I’ll tell you when you can and can’t consent to sex, dear) and tub-thumping moralisers (extra-marital sex is bad, and convenient, no-strings, paid extramarital sex is much, much worse). They have both failed to grasp the logic that underlies the Swedish approach. If all sex workers are victims by definition, then it is hardly fair to bang them up in jail for the violence that is done to them. And indeed, in Sweden, people who sell sex can’t be prosecuted. In Chicago, on the other hand, we’re busy increasing the penalties for both the buyers and the sellers of sex. So we are:

1) depriving women (and men, and transgenders) of their right to consent to sex, if payment is involved

AND
2) depriving women (and ditto) of a living

AND
3) depriving women (and other prostitutes) of their liberty, if they get caught.

You’d think from the Chicago police department’s Rogues’ Gallery that the only people who get arrested for soliciting and prostitution are blokes and the odd trans. But that just reflects a policy decision only to put up photographs of people with Y chromosomes. If you delve into the stats a bit, you’ll find that women bear the brunt of prostitution-related arrests right now. Look at this:

It’s already illegal both to sell sex and to buy it in Chicago, and indeed all of Illinois. Making it MORE illegal on both sides, which is what HR6195 is proposing to do, is not going to change that. What it may change is the overall volume of arrests, since a felony is more likely to lead to a court case than a misdemeanour, which is what most prostitution charges currently qualify as. More court cases mean more police time in court. And since Illinois cops are paid time-and-a-half with a three hour minimum for showing their face in court, that rather increases the incentive to arrest. And as you can see from the graph above, it’s easier to arrest women than men. So my question to the good feminists of End Demand is this: How, exactly, do they think HR6195 helps women who choose to sell sex for a living?

The fact that raids on over 800 brothels didn’t net any traffickers doesn’t mean that there isn’t anyone in the UK selling sex against their will. But (I’ve said it before and in today’s Guardian I say it again) trying to wipe out the sex trade completely only makes things worse for the minority who are forced into it.

There is little one can do to change the minds of those who object, viscerally, to the commodification of sex. And the numbers will always be open to dispute, as they are with any illegal activity. But a lot of good researchers have spent a lot of time and effort trying to get a handle on trafficking in the sex trade — you can find excellent references here and here, and there’s a pretty good discussion thread over at Badscience. It’s like the massive, hidden HIV epidemic in the Middle East — if we haven’t found it after two decades of looking, maybe it really isn’t so massive after all.

For those who don’t have time to read the whole Guardian article, I’ll pull one key quote from a cop:

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 said he had commissioned fresh research from regional intelligence units 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.
“It’s not where you go down on every street corner in every street in Britain, and there’s a trafficked individual.
“There are more people trafficked for labour exploitation than there are for sexual exploitation. We need to redress the balance here. People just seem to grab figures from the air.”

**UPDATE** The Guardian has published more interesting contributions to the debate, including the opinions of people who sell sex for a living.

With Halloween coming up, and in contrast to the hysteria around migrant sex workers, I offer this seasonal celebration of migrant pumpkin pickers in Canada, courtesy of Ickaprick.

It’s like this. Ms Harman, who is Deputy Leader of the UK’s ruling Labour Party, wants whats best for working girls. Punternet does too. (For those who use the term “john”, a punter is a man who buys sex). Ms. Harman wants to reduce trafiicking of women into sex work. Punternet does too — that’s why it provides links to allow men using the site to report women that they suspect might be under age or working against their will. Is that why Ms Harman decided to give the site such good publicity, more than doubling its hits to an eye-watering 2.7 million a day according to the Financial Times? From the vote of thanks she’s had from sex workers working on both sides of the Atlantic. you might think so. But no, the good democrat was actually appealing to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to shut the site down (the server is, apparently situated in the land of free speech).

No surprise to regular readers of this site; it is all part of Nanny Labour’s ongoing campaign to wipe out consensual trade in sex which, the views of sex workers themselves notwithstanding (see comments), always amounts to exploitation. But it did bring the idiocy of this policy to the notice of mainstream commentators such as the FT’s Matthwe Engel, which can only be a good thing.

Other issues of cultural politics I had to try and explain: why I am addicted to a radio soap opera that has been running for nearly 60 years. That’s right, The Archers, originally billed as “the everyday story of country folk”, now rebranded appallingly as “contermporary drama in a rural setting”. I tried to explain that bracketed between the unchanging theme tune “Tum ti tum ti tum ti tum…” came all the burning issues of the day. My mate rolled his eyes and went back to blogging about really burning issues, like rectal gonnorhea. Then, on Friday, he apologised. He “just happened” to turn on the radio when The Archers was on (that’s how I started too — a slippery slope to a lifelong struggle with Archers addiciton). And bingo: Ian gets beaten up because he’s gay. You could argue that Ian gets beaten up because he tries politely to get a bunch of drunken football louts to shut up. But they called him a “bender”, which is surely enough to blow the homophobia flag up the pole. (You can listen to the episode until 16/10/09.) The question that is not exactly burning up the message boards is: why did Ian not want to report the assault to the police? Might he suspect that the cops in a rural setting might have rather uncontemporary views about anal sex between men? You’ll just have to tune in to find out…

I’ve been following this issue a bit recently — in fact I wrote a little a piece about it for this month’s Prospect — and I was keen to go to the meeting in Parliament which Cath mentions. Sadly, I’m unable to assess her contribution to the debate. I got through parliamentary security with a bottle of wine and a cheese knife (!) but couldn’t get past the feminist bouncers who were turning away anyone who is interested in actually debating the future of prostitution in this country. Also turned away: colleagues from the World Bank, staff from the offices of MPs supportive of rules that will make sex work safer, and (needless to say) anyone who actually chooses to sell sex for a living — the people the meeting organisers don’t believe exist.

“As everyone in the room agreed, it’s time to bring an end to the selling of women and girls: who could possibly disagree with that?” concludes Ms Elliot. The organisers didn’t need to police the crowd to get everyone to agree on that point. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t believe that selling people is wrong. Not anyone outside the Premier League, anyway. Selling sex, on the hand, is not wrong, in the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of women and men who choose it as a profession. Oh but wait, they don’t exist….

The truth is that they do exist, just as the ex-Nevada hooker who left the profession with debts because she hadn’t managed to save any of the $2000 + a week she earned while on the game exists. Some women who sell sex do it because they are forced to. They are trafficked, and we already have laws against that. Some do it for the same reason people work in McDonald’s — because it is the best job they can get for the skills they have (though you tend to earn more selling sex than burgers, and the hours are more flexible). Helping people who hate their jobs (in prostitution or McDonalds) to “exit” is surely a worthwhile thing to do. But some women (and men, of course) sell sex because they want to. Forcing them to stop by criminalising punters would be like promoting welfare in the restaurant industry by outlawing fast food. The distinction between the voluntary and involuntary sale of sex is an important one, and one that the draft policing and crime bill is inching its way towards recognising. Trying to keep willing sex workers out of the room is both undemocratic and unhelpful.

Taking the floor will be Laura Agustin, whose book, Sex at the Margins gives one of the most nuanced accounts of the whos and whys of professional sex, together with the always compelling Catherine Stephens. Catherine is a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth pre-Raphaelite dominatrix who moonlights as an arts critic when she’s neither doing her day job nor persuading the government that sex professionals have voices, too. John Birch of the Metropolitan Police’s Vice Squad will be giving the cop’s perspective, and Georgina Perry will describe how her clients, East End sex workers mostly, cope in an increasingly criminalised environment.

Conspicuously absent from the line up (though certainly not from the audience) are the front-line abolitionists, the Poppy Project et al. This does mean that the debate will probably be less of a “No I’m not, Yes you are” slagging match than usual. But their exclusion does make me a wee bit uncomfortable. I have no time for the “every sex worker is a victim” approach, and I know that those who are anti prostitution, full stop, often try to keep sex professionals from making themselves heard. But two wrongs don’t make a right. I know it is boring to hear people trot out their misery anecdotes as if it were science, to tout ideology as if it were fact. But if we believe (as I do) that the evidence is strongly stacked against criminalisation and abolition of commercial sex, and in favour of better support services and health and safety conditions for people who choose to work in the profession, then we have nothing to fear in allowing those who believe otherwise to have their little rants.

I’ve been shouted down on this front before (eg when I tried to invite the High Priestess of abolitionists Donna Hughes (aka Dumpy Donna) to defend her position at the Bangkok AIDS Conference in 2004). I know it is hard to fight ideology with fact. But I still feel we should have the courage of our convictions, and should be prepared to defend them in debate with just about anyone.

I think it will be a lively evening — I urge any readers in the London area to join the fun. It starts at 7.00, and there’s more info here

Here we go again. Prostitution, trafficking, the sexual exploitation of kids. All of a piece, all equally wicked, and all inextricably linked (and unpacked quite nicely over at Boinkology). It’s what we’ve come to expect from the zealots who put their own souls ahead of other people’s bodies and minds. The goody two-shoes rescue cowboys, the dumpy academics, shrill on their soapboxes.

Except the poster above doesn’t come from the usual suspects. It travels around Chicago on the back end of buses, and is produced by the Prostitution Alternatives Round Table. I happened upon PART when I went to a talk they organised during my only ever visit to Chicago. (I know, I know, three days in Chicago and I go to public meetings with HIV case-workers? All I can say in my defence is that it was the second week of February and the room was well heated.) I believe PART is trying hard to find practical solutions to a constellation of social problems, including homelessness, which are woven into an uncomfortable fabric of poverty in Chicago. But not all sex work is cut from that cloth.

It so happens that I’ve just finished Tracy Quan’s giggle-inducing Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl (she’s especially funny about zealotry within sex worker activism itself; I made a mental note to plan a major cull of my T-shirt collection). So today I’m perhaps thinking more about the top end of the industry. Obviously, sex workers who get flown across continents for champagne-fuelled working holidays in renovated villas do not represent all sex workers. But nor do under-age street walkers who are beaten iinto turning over four fifths of their earnings to their pimps. Sex is a complicated commodity, and its trade therefore makes for a kaleidescopically complicated industry. Over-simplifying the issue by re-painting it in black and white may suggest simple solutions, but it is unlikely to produce effective ones.

Tobias typifies the hypocrisy about prostitution which riddles the United States. He says he only paid Palfrey’s staff for massages, not for sex. And Palfrey says that to her knowledge her staff only provided massages. She said it in court. He didn’t have to. She was convicted of a number of crimes. He wasn’t. She is dead.

Tobias presided over a programme that aimed to end prostitution in the world. (I am not making that up. Check it out in the Box headed “Violence Against Women and HIV/AIDS”: “The Emergency Plan will also support interventions to eradicate prostitution”.) For a round-up of what people whose livelihoods is to be eradicated think of that, see the links to posts about Palfrey’s death on Bound, Not Gagged. The supporters of this policy argue that the willing buyer, willing seller principle which drives most of American life does not apply in the area of sex. They argue that prostitution is not a victimless crime.

This self-serving moralising, this craven hypocrisy about the trading of sex, is the real crime. It has just claimed it latest victim, in the form of Deborah Jeane Palfrey. May she now find peace.

A Crime So Monstrous, a new book by Benjamin Skinner, is adding to the buzz. In an interesting interview with Salon magazine, Skinner is careful to make a distinction between slavery, human trafficking, and the sex trade.

Salon: There are philosophical differences about how to combat slavery. Some people, such as Michael Horowitz (the neocon abolitionist), have focused exclusively on sex trafficking, hoping there will be a “ripple effect” with other forms of slavery such as debt bondage and forced domestic servitude.

Skinner: Nonsense.

I haven’t read Skinner’s book yet, but it looks promising. Of course compared to a lot of the bombast out there, anything which deals with the nuances and complexities of forced labour and human trafficking would look promising. If you’re interested in this and in the New York area, there’s an interesting-looking discussion on the legal rights of sex workers, trafficked and otherwise at the City University of New York on Tuesday.