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The Myth of The Happy Hooker
Next week delegates to Amnesty International’s (International) Council Meeting will be asked to endorse a policy aimed at protecting the human rights of sex workers.
Amnesty is a great and important organisation (declaration of interest: I am a past recipient of one of its press awards) and I fully support its demand for the safeguarding of those adult men and women who choose to work as prostitutes. As AI’s carefully worded draft policy makes clear, those who rent out their bodies for sex face risks – of disease, persecution and violence – and should have the same protection as any other worker.
But one part of the solution proposed by Amnesty is wrong – and dangerously so. It calls for the legalisation of (adult) prostitution.
I spent a year investigating modern slavery for an Al Jazeera documentary series: one programme examined sex slavery. The best estimates from the most rigorous campaigning organisation – “Free The Slaves” – suggests that there are approximately 1.4 million sex slaves in the world today.
This is not statistically the largest group of 21st century slaves – there is an estimated total of 27 million of these – but it is nonetheless a vast pool of people denied their unquestionable human right not to be forced into slavery.
But the research for that series – and for two books I have written on the subject – also showed clearly and unequivocally that one of the biggest causes of sex slavery is legalised prostitution.
Countries where legalisation has been introduced – most notably Holland and Germany – have done so precisely because they believed it would reduce the trade in sex slaves. The facts show that it has had the precise opposite effect.
Holland, for example, legalised prostitution in 2000. Any woman or man, over the age of 18 and holding a European Union passport, was given the right to set him or herself up as a sole trader selling sex. He or she could rent premises in which to work, could open a bank account for the business and would be required to pay taxes. Pimping, however, was not permitted: it was – and remains – a criminal offence.
Eleven years later, how had this worked out ? Badly.
There are at least 8,000 prostitutes working in Amsterdam alone. Not all work in the most visible sector of the city’s sex trade – the ‘tourist attraction’ of the Red Light District- but even that supposedly-policed shop window for legalised prostitution is shocking evidence of the failure of the Dutch policy.
For s start many of the women (and men and transgendered) on display in the windows come from outside the EU: Africa, South America, and states like Moldova – on the borders of the European Union and probably the nation most plundered by sex traffickers on the continent – are the home countries of a statistically large number of Amsterdam’s sex workers. No-one asks how they came here, nor how they are permitted to continue working: many don’t speak any European language. Amsterdam’s police force simply turns a blind eye.
They are similarly myopic about the gangs of organised criminals – major pimps and their enforcers – who control the Red Light District. In fact, they are more than myopic: they openly admit that these notionally illegal gangs are in charge – the city warns television crews and journalists that violent thugs prevent anyone from filming the streets they control, for example – but do nothing to stop them.
So who are these human beings behind the neon-lit glass ? Did they choose – willingly and happily – to rent their bodies to an average of 15-20 customers every day ?
Solid, careful, non-partisan studies show that on average 800 – 1,000 women are trafficked into Holland’s legalised prostitution industry every year. Not willing, not free, not happy: trafficked and enslaved. Other research shows that more than half experience violence or the threat of violence as part of their daily working lives.
When I interviewed him in 2011, the head prosecutor in the Dutch Anti-Trafficking unit – a good and concerned lawyer called Werner Ten Kate – admitted the failure of the legalisation policy.
We thought in 2000 that the more liberal view to prostitution would stamp out trafficking, but that proved to be wrong. Everyone thought that, [it would prevent trafficking] but it worked out the other way round.
Werner Ten Kate is not alone in (now) accepting this. In 2012 a study by researchers at universities in Germany and Britain analysed data from 116 countries to discover the effect of the legalisation of prostitution on trafficking. It showed that countries with legalized prostitution suffer from higher levels of human trafficking than countries where prostitution is illegal.
Those researchers don’t support the criminalisation of prostitutes – for the very good reason that to do so puts the sex workers at risk and reduces the availability of the protections (health and legal) which Amnesty International seeks.
But there is a smarter alternative to prosecuting prostitutes: it is – as Sweden has shown – to criminalise the men (and it is almost exclusively men) who buy sex.
Prostitution is one of those ‘hot button’ topics which largely attracts fierce argument based on little more than opinion. And in turn those opinions are often the result of soley anecdotal ‘evidence” – the stories of (variously) sex trafficking victims or self-proclaimed happy hookers.
There’s nothing wrong with anecdotal evidence: my books and my films are packed with individual stories. But they are not a solid foundation for policy because they can’t be proven to represent the full picture.
The best and most carefully-researched evidence suggests that in western countries at least, the majority of sex workers have not made free or willing choices to sell their bodies. There are, to be sure, some women and men who are happy to sell their bodies – but they are not the majority.
Two hundred years ago, when the transatlantic slave trade was still a stain on the world, the social reformer and jurist Jeremy Bentham neatly summed up what should be the basis for laws based on morality:
It is the greatest good for the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.
On that admirably straightforward principle, Amnesty’s call for the legalisation of prostitution is wrong and dangerous.
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The Curious Case of The Mandarin’s Memory
At the conclusion of his career Sir Robert Armstrong was described as “the most public civil servant since Cardinal Wolsey”.
The same largely favourable profile reported the view from Whitehall insiders that “Robert produces so much affection that everyone works well for him. He’s a sympathetic figure”.
Sir Robert served Margaret Thatcher as her Cabinet Secretary from 1979 to 1987. For his troubles he was subsequently given a life peerage: for the past 27 years he has warmed the crossbenches in the House of Lords as Baron Armstrong of Ilminster. He is now 88 years old.
Cabinet Secretary is an enormously powerful and sensitive position. Not only is he (and it’s always a ‘he’) privy to the innermost secrets of government, he also sees reports prepared by the intelligence services and provided to the Cabinet via the Joint Intelligence Committee.
All of which explains why, in late 1986, Sir Robert received a letter from Sir Anthony Duff, Director-General of MI5 informing him of allegations that a Conservative MP, Peter (later Sir Peter) Morrison had “a penchant for small boys”. The spymaster reassured the mandarin that Morrison had denied the claims and that the security service accepted his word and there was no real danger to [national] security.
Nonetheless, Sir Anthony advised, the matter did pose a risk “of political embarrassment to the Government”.
Indeed it did. Morrison was no mere backbencher. He had been a Minister in the Department of Employment and in the same year as MI5 investigated his alleged predilection for children, he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. A year later he was appointed as a Minister in the Department of Energy, with responsibility for Britain’s oil policy. Four years later he would go on to run Margaret Thatcher’s campaign to keep hold of the leadership.
When the Duff letter emerged on Thursday last week, I e-mailed Lord Armstrong to ask five fairly straightforward questions. They were:-
- Whether you recall receiving this letter ?
- What you did with the information ?
- Whether you passed on the allegations concerning this MP in question to the Prime Minister and/or the Chief Whip ?
- Whether you made any attempt to speak with MP yourself about the allegations ?
- Whether, in more recent times, you informed the Home Office and/or its recent internal enquiries about the existence of this letter ?
He did not reply immediately, but was apparently willing to give some kind of statement to the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. He told the Telegraph:
My official business was the protection of national security. I have to stress that there was nothing like evidence in this case. There was just a shadow of a rumour. It’s impossible to take investigative action on shadows of rumours. . . If there is some reason to think a crime has been committed, then people like the cabinet secretary are not to start poking their noses into it. It’s for the police to do that.
And he told the Mail:
I thought MI5’s actions were correct at the time. I think they were right to report the rumour, they were right to make what inquiries they could and they were right to come to the conclusion they did. I think if there was evidence it would have been properly examined at the time. I don’t think this is a matter of important people being protected. You can’t pursue inquiries unless you have evidence on which you can base the enquiry. A shadow of a rumour is not enough.
This afternoon, Lord Armstrong finally sent a response (from his House of Lords email account) to my five questions. It appeared that in the three days since he had spoken to the Telegraph and Mail, his memory had suffered a catastrophic failure. He wrote:-
I am afraid that I do not remember receiving Sir Antony Duff’s letter, or what I did when I received it. It is now a long time ago, and there were a lot of other things going on at the time.
Yours sincerely,
Armstrong of Ilminster
Sir Robert famously brought into public usage the concept of being (as he put it during the 1986 Spycatcher trial) “economical with the truth”. But the question of what actions the second most powerful civil servant in the country took about allegations that one of the most senior Tory politicians was a paedophile is too important to be left to this sort of evasive nonsense.
Lord Armstrong thus joins the lengthening list of the great and good who must be summonsed to testify at Lord Justice Goddard’s Public Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. A little robust cross-examination might do wonders to help the noble Lord recover his powers of recollection.
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The Age of Stupid
We live in The Age Of Stupid.
We live in the age of 24-hour rolling noise, masquerading as “news”; a world of sideshow sensation and ersatz outrage. Global media conglomerates bring us “the world in one minute” – events and incidents, instantly bitesized and pre-digested for easy consumption.
We are presented with the “what” – but rarely, if ever, enough facts to understand the “why”. To borrow a quote from a fine and angry song:
“Everywhere I go, I hear what’s going on
And the more I hear, the less I know”
(“Everywhere I Go”: Oysterband, 1995)
This is a blog about the practice of journalism and why it matters. I have been engaged in this trade for almost four decades. I began in 1978, a year before the Thatcher government began dismantling the post-war consensus which honoured the ideal of public service and recognised the importance of strong journalism to the public interest.
I have worked in newspapers, radio and television, in addition to writing a succession of non-fiction books. And now this. Why a blog ? Why now ?
Because, more than any other factor, it is my trade which is turning the world stupid.
The years since 1978 have witnessed a media revolution. Back then there were only three television channels, the Independent had yet to emerge on Fleet Street, and the world wide web was the stuff of science fiction. Pictures – still and moving – were recorded on film and sometimes took days to get back to base. A toxic combination of poor management and cynical print unions held the newspaper industry in a corrupt and choking grip.
Advances in technology have steadily made our trade easier, quicker and cheaper to pursue. First video, then digital imaging replaced expensive film; ancient hot metal presses were chased out by clean, quick and less expensive methods; the internet and smart phones have now made instant publication possible (and sometimes mandatory). All of this should – logically – have led to a new golden age of serious journalism in which enabled the Fourth Estate to fulfil its traditional – and vital – role as a public-interest watchdog, exposing corruption, injustice and oppression the world over.
Instead, a strange thing happened. The amount of good, serious public interest journalism declined in almost exact correlation to the advances in technology which should have freed it. Which is how (note: ‘how’, not ‘why’) we live today in an age where we know almost instantly whether a Z-list celebrity has engaged in a Twitter spat with another equally vacuous nonentity, or that a fading model has flashed a ‘side boob’ at a red carpet premiere.
It is also the reason that we are endlessly blasted with ‘factoids’ about the vast size of Greek debt and the plight of its impoverished population, while learning nothing about how this debt arose in the first place. Or why we see horrific images of ISIL atrocities without being given the facts which would enable us to understand how – and with whose backing – it emerged in the first place.
Instead we pick over the sterile bones of a synthetic argument about whether broadcasters should use the term “Islamic State”. If, as Lord Reith once envisioned, the value of the BBC was that “nation should speak unto nation” today it – and the rest of the media – delivers little more meaningful than a shallow parade of grotesques and lip-flap: newspapers and television infantilise their audiences and readerships. To the point of stupidity.
And here’s the “why”.
There has been one constant in this age of media revolution: one unending and unchallenged thread running through all the changes. We have stopped regulating my trade.
If anything is guaranteed to unite most journalists (a process usually akin to herding cats) it’s the idea that journalism and journalists should be regulated. The very idea of any state control of the media is anathema to British hackdom. Our constant demand is for red tape to be resisted (or, better still, cut) and for regulation to be rejected.
And here’s the truth my colleagues in this trade don’t want you to know. We were always regulated – at least until recently. And it was entirely A Good Thing.
In television it led to – and guaranteed – the serious journalism of World In Action, Panorama and Dispatches in their trouble-making heydays. In print it ensured that non-dom newspaper moguls could not control an over-sized slice of the market. The only people to lose out from media regulation were those in power, be that government or corporate: a free – but regulated press – snapped at their heels and shone unwelcome light on their sins.
Which may well explain why, since Thatcher, successive governments have first weakened, then abolished almost all media regulation. Turkeys, after all, would prefer Christmas to be a vegetarian event.
We live in The Age of Stupid. And it will become ever more so until we understand the paradox that strong, free and revelatory journalism needs the safe harbour of rigorous regulation to protect both it and the public whose interests it should serve.
Journalism – muscular, serious, difficult journalism – maters: it is vital in keeping a free society free. Hence this blog. Hence this attempt to tell at least some truth.
It may not make you free: it should make you fret.
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