UK: prostitution: a red light to this idea

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, egged on, it is said, by Harriet Harman, is bringing forward legislation aimed (eventually) at outlawing prostitution. The plan is that the punter would have to show that the girl is not trafficked, or being run or coerced by a pimp. The proposals have had a mixed reception in the press.

How is it that people who say we cannot ban abortion because it will simply ‘go underground’ to the detriment of women cannot see that the same holds true for prostitution. We will never eliminate prostitution; all we can do is stop the trafficking and the worse aspects of the pimping.

Melanie McDonagh, in the Telegraph, has a particularly harebrained piece. Welcoming the proposals as ‘freeing women from sexual slavery’, she accepts ‘Even I can see that it might be difficult for a punter to find out from a prostitute whether she is indeed under a pimp's control.’ Indeed so, Melanie. Yet you support the idea of making him guilty unless he can prove himself innocent.

‘The truth is’ opines this Thinker, ‘that nobody knows the sheer extent of trafficked women. The Home Secretary thinks it may be as many as 70 per cent of them. The Home Office says that as many as 4,000 trafficked women are working as prostitutes at any one time.’. There are in fact more than 80,000 prostitutes in the UK. To suggest that 70% of them are trafficked (56,000) is clearly drivel. If it is the 4,000 figure that would be 5%. Serious, and it should be targeted by police, but not serious enough to start making people prove their innocence.


So, says Ms McDonagh, ‘It would be next to impossible to implement comprehensively, but if police are trying to crack down on prostitution in any area, it will help them do it.

The idea behind having laws is that they apply to everyone. Passing laws in the knowledge that they will only be implemented if the police want to is render the process arbitrary. And, incidentally, to put an unfair burden on police.


This is bad lawmaking, designed not for the benefit of women but to earmark a political stance for Smith and Harman. We must hope that parliament see through it, but it is not much of a hope.