Tim Tate

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.

Posted on July 29, 2015July 29, 2015 by Tim Tate