After I heard David Cameron promise to make policy that went with the grain of human nature, I suggested that Britain’s sex workers should vote Tory. I wasn’t joking, though I haven’t had that much luck convincing friends in the business. Now, though, George McCoy has given us a proper analysis of candidates’ position on sex work. Put in your post code for an at-a-glance view of who has voted which way, and who is promising what for (and against) people who sell sex.

As I said in my TED talk, we can use our votes to stop politicians doing stupid things that spread HIV. And violence against sex workers, for that matter.

Yesterday, I sat at the TED conference in California and watched David Cameron pledge to make policies that support prostitutes.

He didn’t say it in those words, exactly, but he did promise firmly to make policy that “goes with the grain of human nature”. That would be a massive change for the UK: Labour’s old fashioned feminists have allowed their best intentions to get the better of their common sense. That’s saddled us with laws that put prostitutes lives AND livelihoods in danger.

David Cameron is a politician on the stump, so everything he says should be taken with several grains of salt. But the the goody-two-shoes meddling of the likes of Harriet Harman and Jaqui Smith has become so tiresome that maybe we should take Cameron at his word, and hold him to it. Political bondage, in the best possible sense…

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.

The day before the UK release of Bruno, Sasha Baron Cohen’s swish along the catwalks of homophobia, the UK’s House of Lords voted to allow Brits to criticize homosexuality. Gay groups are painting this as a victory for homophobia. Christian groups say it is a victory for free speech. I say, on balance, that it is a victory for common sense.

The debate focused mostly on the difference between criticism and incitement to hatred. Is it wrong to teach schoolkids that it’s OK to thump anyone who they think is a sissy? Yes, just as it is wrong to encourage violence against anyone with the “wrong” skin colour. But should people face prosecution for open debate about the pros and cons of gay marriage, nuclear families with same-sex parents and the like? Surely not. We may not like people who are crtical of the things we hold most dear, but our society is built on their right to criticise our views, and ours to criticise theirs.

For my part, I would be more than happy to criticise (possibly even thump!) the self-righteous prig who told The Moral Maze that she didn’t think that gay people ought to be allowed to work as gardeners in Christian schools. (Replay of programme available until 18/07/09) I kept willing one of the panelists to ask her what she thinks Christ would have done (or indeed did do) if any of that tight little band of apostles was gay. I find her views pretty offensive, but I don’t think she should be locked up for expressing them.

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.

Inevitably, the goodie-two-shoes family values mob worries that if boys can get condoms easily, they’ll be more likely to have sex. “Josephine Quintavalle, founder of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, a pressure group, warned: “We are just facilitating and encouraging sexuality without any deeper understanding of the emotional side of relationships” The Times reports. (I don’t know what Josephine’s experience is but I carry condoms all the time and I haven’t noticed that it makes it significantly easier to get laid. The few teenagers I drink with say the same.)

More realistically, some doctors worry that the credit card scheme that goes with the free condoms will put some teenagers off. While condoms will be handed out at football grounds and other places where young guys hang out, they’ll have to show a “condom credit card” to get them. The card shows that they’ve sat dutifully through safe sex training sessions. If they sit through extra “what to do about drippy dicks” sessions, they get stamps on their cards, coffee shop style. The government’s notion that boys will want to collect the stamps as a status symbol seems devised by someone who has little memory of being a teenage boy, and doesn’t even drink with them. As NHS doctor John Crippen says, we shouldn’t be putting any barriers at all in the way of young guys being responsible about contraception and STI prevention if and when they get lucky.

If you’re a teen who’s hoping free condoms will help you pleasure women more often, Durex Play’s here to give you pointers on what you’re aiming for. But to keep in line with Nanny’s guidelines on appropriate viewing, please make sure you only watch this ad after 11 pm.

Thanks to Peter Barnett for pointing me to Dr. John.

Many of the people (OK, men) that rule this nation had nannies, matrons and ward sisters telling them what to do when they were young. But most of us didn’t. We can distinguish between being told what to do (don’t drive my car), and being given information that helps us decide what to do (if you drive my car and crash it, I’ll cut your pocket-money until its paid for). In other words, we can distinguish between legislation and public health campaigns. The first is Nannyish. The second is not.

Does the state have a duty to save us from ourselves? Not necessarily, though I do believe it has a duty to inform us how to stay out of trouble. If the government has dutifully told us that smoking will kill us, that we’d be really smart not to share needles when we’re shooting up, that an hour on the football field is better than an hour in front of Match of the Day, then their job is largely done. It follows that if we go ahead and do stupid things anyway, the state doesn’t have a responsibility to pick up the pieces. But as voters, we don’t buy that. We still want the NHS to treat lung cancer in smokers and make obesity drugs more easily available. The government knows it will end up picking up the tab for most human stupidity; you can hardly blame it for getting overzealous about trying to control the stupidity.

Perhaps we need to think about a regime of progressive intolerance, a sort of Three Strikes and You’re Out campaign. The idea is planted in me not by the US administration but by a little book of quotations called “Nanny says”. My all-time favourite: “Once is funny, twice is silly, and three times is to bed with a smack“.