Haringey Council - Sex Establishment consultation

WillM

Wow.

See, I wouldn't want a lap dancing club on my street. But it's got nothing to do with the folk who work there, it's because of the clients - i.e. typically drunk, loud, and late to leave. Not sure we need to get into generalisations on either side about the effects of the sex industry on empowering or disempowering women (which imho is overwhelmingly a function of price) or the highly disputed question of whether it introduces crime...

andy

*Something like 10% of men under 30 have admitted to paying for sex.* That strikes me as a high number, rather than a low one.

miss annie

This is old research, the figure stuckin my head as we were debating/arguing about legalising prostitution in the pub quite recently. Interestingly the women discussing it thought that it would be higher - perhaps we have low opinions of our chaps! <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/dec/02/gender.uk>; I'm sure that trawling online will bring up more recent surveys.

Jenowl

This is interesting, particularly Section 10 on the social/gender consequences of prostitution.

http://www.ewlcentreonviolence.org/IMG/pdf/handbook-EN.pdf

ADGS

That section is founded on tired old 1970s stereotypes of gender politics. I know socially several women who've worked in the sex trade. None of them were trapped, none of them seem to have felt exploited, and all of them now do other stuff instead, with no problems. The general sentiment, though, was that as temp jobs go, (direct quote from one of them) "at least you only have to put up with any given arsehole for an hour". Yes, undoubtedly at the bottom end of the trade there are lots of trafficked victims working in terrible conditions. But the same is true of the restaurant business, or agriculture, and in neither case does anybody use that as an argument for banning the entire sector.

Emma

This is a bit like the conversation about gangs - people not really wanting to believe that the worst aspects (the most common aspects) of that culture actually happen and so dismiss the idea as if it's either a joke or a gross overreaction.

ADGS

Do the worst aspects happen? Unquestionably. Are they the most common? Well, that's a whole other question. Charities looking to rescue women who've been forced into that lifestyle are, understandably, going to be upset by what they find. They're unlikely to come into contact with people in better conditions for whom it's no big deal, and they have better uses for their scant resources than seeking them out. However, this does mean that any stats or policy recommendations they supply will be deeply questionable. And you're unlikely to get any decent answers from a wider section of women (and indeed, men) until the law and the social stigma stop getting in the way, which unfortunately makes for a bit of a vicious circle.

Arkady

You're right Emma, we'd best ban gangs.

Alex

Emma, the issue both here and with gangs is a lack of evidence supplied by those who assert terrible problems to back up the existence and frequency of those problems. Anecdotes, hearsay and assumptions are not sufficient. To the contrary, what we do have is hard evidence that the scale of any forced prostitution problem is exaggerated in Britain by those with a moral agenda to ban prostitution. To quote [the Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails): *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.* *The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.*

Siolae

The kind of unilateral legislation proposed will do nothing except push any issue into neighbouring boroughs ( as evidenced by previous attempts to "clean up" areas). It does not tackle the issues of exploitation, as the exploitation of women of the kind described is already illegal and therefore not affected by the proposed legislation. The kinds of licenced establishments discussed are already heavily regulated: we are not talking about brothels here! This is pointless Daily Mail style headline grabbing on Haringey's part and frankly there are more important things for the council to be spending money on right now.

Siolae

@Alex As the person refered to as "those who assert terrible problems" re gangs I feel the need to respond (despite having responded on the previous thread). I was not offering you " Anecdotes, hearsay and assumptions". I have worked professionally in the field of child protection for 20 years with a primarily adolescent and local client base. I didn't write anything on that thread that I haven't directly dealt with. No I don't have the stats for you, but that does not negate my professional experience, nor the fact that this aspect of my work has increased in volume over the last 10 years. Equally we know that the girls who come into contact with professional services are, frankly, the minority of those affected.

Alex

@Siolae, I didn't mean to dismiss your experience which is clearly valid in terms of the types of serious cases that do occur. All kinds of terrible things go on, and I wouldn't want to be blind to that, but context and quantification are also important, and require hard evidence rather than individual cases. Not least to reduce needless fear of crime which has become a greater problem even as actual crime has fallen.