By Alan Travis, home
affairs editor of
The Guardian
The first comprehensive overhaul of the laws on prostitution for 50
years is to be announced shortly by the home secretary, David
Blunkett. Home Office ministers promise that the review will
consider all the available options, no matter how radical.
The main focus is expected to concentrate on tackling the
involvement of organised crime in prostitution, its links with
heroin and crack cocaine abuse, and the public nuisance that it
causes. It is expected to lead to a new clampdown on pimps and kerb
crawlers as well as overhauling the laws on brothels and soliciting.
There is also expected to be a strong emphasis on finding new
ways of helping women who are trapped in the vice trade to escape
from the often-violent sex industry.
It will include new strategies to prevent young people being
drawn into prostitution, support for those who find themselves
involved in it, and measures to deal with its impact on communities.
A Home Office spokeswoman confirmed that work on defining the
scope of the cross-departmental review was nearly complete:
We
want to do a thorough job. It is the first time that these laws have
been looked at for 50 years. We hope to publish as early as
possible.
But ministers will also consider the growing pressure from senior
police officers and some local authorities, such as Birmingham, to
legalise "zones of toleration" where soliciting would be
decriminalised as long as there was no public nuisance. An
experiment in Edinburgh along these lines was recently abandoned.
Prostitution is not illegal in Britain but there are more than 35
offences, including some dating from the 1950s, such as soliciting
and "living off immoral earnings" which criminalise the trade.
The Magistrates' Association has repeatedly called for an
overhaul of the law, saying it is ineffective and unenforceable,
with women appearing in court time and again.
The Sexual Offences Act, which has just reached the statute book,
includes tougher penalties for those who engage in human trafficking
for prostitution and those who sexually exploit children and adults
for commercial purposes.
The Home Office has issued guidance stressing that those under 18
who are involved in prostitution should be treated as victims by the
police and criminal justice system.
Ministers have also funded projects to look at helping women
involved in prostitution to find an escape route from the vice
trade.
A Home Office green paper published in 2000 acknowledged that the
law on soliciting and loitering for women was archaic and the
official description of a "common prostitute" was demeaning. It also
recognised that there have been recent changes in the law around the
world with the Netherlands and Germany allowing regulated
prostitution, and Sweden changing the law to criminalise those who
buy sex, rather than those who sell it.
It is suggested that regulating prostitution enables more
effective action against trafficking and the exploitation of
children, greater safety and less stigma for those sex workers who
fully exercise their choice to do that work. Others argue such
regulation increases the use of men and women as commodities of
trade, that allowing a legal market merely increases the illegal
activity and that selling sex is unacceptable in a civilised
society. There was no consensus across a set of widely diverging
views, the Home Office paper concluded.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, is supporting
the moves to change the law, saying that his attitude to
prostitution changed after he befriended a young teenage prostitute
who is now a Church of England priest. She convinced him that the
present laws work against women breaking free of the culture of
violence that surrounds life on the game.
The last full-scale review of the law in this area was the 1954
Wolfenden committee on homosexual offences and prostitution. The
legislation that followed is now widely seen as contradictory.
