UK P4P News

A Plymouth MP says he wants to see a change in the law to punish customers for seeking out prostitutes.

South West Devon MP Gary Streeter is one of 20 moralist and religious politicians who formed a cross-party parliamentary group pontificating on prostitution and the global sex trade. Their aim was to put an end to the sex trade. He is ludicrously claiming that the majority of sex workers are trafficked or forced:

I realise there are some women who have chosen this as a career, and what goes on between consenting adults I am not too bothered about, but with the majority we are talking about very young women who often very vulnerable because of drugs and other factors, they end up in this industry they never chose to be in.

The law at the moment is very confusing, it's sending out different messages. The burden of criminality falls currently upon the woman who is the prostitute, not upon the person seeking her services.

What we are saying is we need the right balance. We are looking at tweaking the law so seeking sexual services for for payment becomes a criminal offence, that's the conclusion we came to.

Aids: Don't Die of Prejudice Paperback by Norman Fowler

Promotional Material:

Eighteen million people around the world live with HIV but do not know they are infected. Endangering both themselves and countless others, they represent a public health challenge that affects not only Africa but every part of the world, including Europe and the United States.

We stand at a tipping point in the AIDS crisis - and unless we can increase the numbers tested and treated, we will not defeat it. In spite of the progress since the 1980s there are still over 1.5 million deaths and over 2 million new HIV infections a year.

Norman Fowler has travelled to nine cities around the globe to report on the position today. What he discovered was a shocking blend of ignorance, prejudice, bigotry and intolerance. In Africa and Eastern Europe, a rising tide of discrimination against gays and lesbians prevents many from coming forward for testing. In Russia, drug users are dying because an intolerant government refuses to introduce the policies that would save them.

Extraordinarily, Washington has followed suit and excluded financial help for proven policies on drugs, and has turned its back on sex workers. In this lucid yet powerful account, Norman Fowler reveals the steps that must be taken to prevent a global tragedy. Aids: Don't Die of Prejudice is both an in-depth investigation and an impassioned call to arms against the greatest public health threat in the world today.

Sex work should be decriminalised in the UK to slow the spread of HIV and combat prejudice, says Norman Fowler, the former health secretary who led the country's response to the emergence of Aids in the 1980s. Speaking at an AIDS conference he said:

The British system needs another look at. It's all over the place, he said. Australians have a system where prostitution is totally decriminalised; as long as you meet normal business requirements on health and safety you can act perfectly legally as a sex worker or run a brothel. [But] the whole input of British law has been to take them off the streets and keep them out of sight. That might have been OK in the 1950s and 1960s but today it is badly out of date.

Are we prepared to recognise sex work and cooperate with sex workers, bringing them in to the policy dialogue, or do we call them prostitutes and assume they have no input? It is slightly a matter of attitude and requires a revolution in attitude. We need to make up our mind.

Few countries have totally decriminalised sex work, but where it has been attempted, it has led to reductions in HIV infections, and greater confidence among sex workers that they can contact the police to protect them from violence, with no significant increase in the number of street-based sex workers.