Daily Mail, 9 June 2004

The oldest profession looks set to become our newest regulated industry. Plans by the government to overhaul the vice laws and confine prostitution to ‘zones of tolerance’ are quickening pace. Ministers think that prohibiting prostitution outside such zones would protect women and help them get off the game, as well as moving a public nuisance to less populated areas.

But any idea that this would diminish prostitution is wide of the mark. For bestowing state approval upon an activity regarded universally as deviant will only encourage it to grow.

Anyone who has been to the sexually tolerant Netherlands and seen the open displays of women advertise their wares in front windows surely cannot fail to be disturbed by the endorsement of female degradation that such official approval entails. Dutch tolerance of prostitution has not ended female slavery but made it worse, with a huge traffic in both women and girls.

Any ‘zones of tolerance’ in Britain would become magnets for sex tourism and trafficking, creating seedy centres for drug-taking and other associated crimes.

For the greatest mistake is to think that the only reason deviant behaviour is damaging is because society doesn’t tolerate it. It is damaging because trading in human flesh brutalises the way people look upon each other, thus opening the way to every other form of exploitation. More tolerance means more exploitation.

But then, selling the body for sex no longer shocks in a society where the very idea of sexual taboos is now taboo. Sex has become thoroughly degraded and commercialised, to the extent that concerns about self-respect, continence or spiritual meaning are regarded as ludicrously prudish.

Instead, prostitutes are now designated as ‘sex workers’, with a ‘human right’ to ply their trade no less than if they chose to be a bank clerk or a nurse.

Across the board of irregular behaviour — drugs, gambling, drinking — the government’s attitude has been to abandon attempts to reduce it and instead to make it easier to indulge, on the basis that it is not the behaviour itself but the attempt to stop it which is harmful. Hence the impulse to go with the flow, to legitimise and regulate.

Our culture is now a thoroughly utilitarian one, in which the only concern is not that any behaviour is inherently wrong and should be stopped but merely to minimise demonstrably harmful effects such as disease.

This is assumed to be a modern, progressive approach to prostitution. But in fact, this country has been down the regulation road before. In the 1860s, the government decided to follow the example of the French ‘morals police’ and regulate prostitution which was regarded as a major public health issue because of the spread of VD.

Accordingly it introduced checks on prostitutes, a development which caused uproar. For while these women were subjected to incarceration, internal examination and heavy-handed policing, the men who bought their services were regarded indulgently as merely satisfying their natural urges.

This double standard in treatment between the sexes radicalised thousands of women and led directly to the upsurge in feminism which eventually fuelled the suffragette movement. There was widespread outrage that the state was on the one hand legitimising sexual licence, and on the other that, although it was men who were responsible for the enslavement of women, it was women alone who were being punished.

It is ironic, therefore, that the new proposals reverse that Victorian double standard to embody a heavy feminist slant against men. For it is men who will be prosecuted if they are caught paying for sex outside the tolerance zones, while no such punishment seems to be on the cards for the prostitutes themselves.

Instead, they are to be treated as if they were merely workers deserving more enlightened health and safety conditions, to be offered treatment for sexual diseases and drug addiction as well as careers counselling and financial advice. The whole thing seems geared to make the lives of prostitutes less dangerous. But this is to become an accomplice to the debasement of women, which affects all of us by the way it coarsens our society.

These proposals reflect the defeatist view that any attempt to diminish street vice is pointless. But experience tells us that this simply isn’t true. It was knocked firmly on the head a few years ago in Balsall Heath, Birmimgham, which was then a red light district. Local Muslims took the robust view that they were no longer prepared to tolerate the harassment of their women by the area’s multitudinous kerb-crawlers, or seeing their children wade through the trade’s detritus of used condoms and syringes on the pavement.

So in an admirable display of civic engagement which put others to shame, these Muslim citizens spearheaded a cross-cultural alliance which set up a daily ‘kerb-crawler watch’, in which the registration numbers of cars cruising for sex were chalked up prominently on blackboards on the street.

The effect was dramatic. The shamed kerb-crawlers vanished. Onto the streets instead poured the pimps, protesting menacingly at the disappearance of their trade. Despite no small physical risk, the watch committee nevertheless saw them off, by simply continuing to chalk up those registration numbers every single day. The relief and gratitude of residents who were no longer kept awake by screaming, fights and the revving of car engines from the vice trade outside their windows was palpable.

The reaction of those in authority to this heroic undertaking was an object lesson in moral and cultural confusion. Local churches preached against it on the grounds that to deprive ‘working women’ of their livelihood in this way was un-Christian. Various worthies attacked ‘authoritarian’ and ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim attitudes to sex. And the police were initially much alarmed at the possible risk of ‘vigilante’ justice getting out of control.

Then the police noticed something remarkable. Street prostitution largely vanished from Balsall Heath — and it was not displaced to other areas. And then they noticed something even more remarkable. Crime — all crime —had fallen in the area by about a quarter. So in a 180 degree turn, the police actually got involved in this initiative, helping train the watch committee and providing expertise and advice.

Since then, the naming and shaming of kerb-crawlers has been adopted elsewhere, notably in Greater Manchester where crime was similarly reduced and the prostitutes moaned that they lost half their clients.

The lesson from all this is that something can [ital ‘can’] be done to reduce the blight of prostitution. But it has to be seen as [ital ‘as’]a blight. If it is made respectable, then as we have done with drugs, alcohol or gambling we start to tolerate the intolerable and fuel its inexorable rise.

Tolerance zones and regulation reflect the view that since nothing can control vice, the best thing to do is to manage it. But this is to turn the state itself into a giant pimp. Of course prostitution can never be eradicated. But if there is the will to enforce social disapproval, it can be reduced.

Unfortunately, this government does not believe in enforcing the law against antisocial behaviour. It abolishes the law instead.

Posted by melanie at June 9, 2004