Laws criminalising women working as prostitutes should be scrapped and replaced with tough new penalties targeting customers and pimps who fuel the multibillion-pound sex trade, a year-long parliamentary inquiry has concluded.
MPs and peers of all parties urge Britain to follow Scandinavian countries by aiming the full force of the law against punters, rather than women who might have been coerced into selling their bodies. The starting-point for legislation should be the premise that prostitution amounts to violence against women and is an affront to sexual equality, their report, published on Monday, claims. At the same time, soliciting offences that are currently used to prosecute prostitutes should be removed from the statute book.
The sale and purchase of sex is currently legal in Britain, but soliciting, pimping, running a brothel and kerb-crawling are illegal. It warns that legal loopholes enable men to evade prosecution for abusing girls as young as 13 and fail to protect women who have been trafficked into Britain against rape. The group also claims that a lack of political will to tackle the issue has helped turn this country into a lucrative destination for criminal gangs involved in the sex trade.
It sends no clear signals about what we consider prostitution to be, in effect prioritising the gratification of punters at the expense of often vulnerable women and girls. Sweden made the purchase of sex illegal in and has been followed by Norway and Iceland, while Denmark and France are also debating whether to follow suit. But critics of the move suggest it could drive prostitution further underground, making it more difficult to rescue women who wanted to escape the sex trade.
Instead it brought in an offence criminalising men who pay for sex with women forced into prostitution, a measure that has been criticised for being ineffectual. As long as the girl is aged 13 or over, the customer can currently escape a charge of child prostitution if he can argue he believed the girl was aged We will ensure that legislation surrounding prostitution remains effective and continue to work with law enforcement agencies to achieve this.
