New Employment Niche in Britain:
Brothel Receptionist
Yesterday the British government announced plans to legalize small home-based brothels. It’s already legal for a single prostitute to work from home as long as she doesn’t openly solicit. The new plan will allow up to three women to work together, including one receptionist. The goal here is to improve women’s safety, since one prostitute working alone is at great risk. There’s also a plan to enforce zero tolerance of streetwalkers.
Since I’m a dedicated commie pinko anarchist America-hater, of course I read the Guardian every day. It’s my favorite British newspaper. Today I was fascinated to read two opposing opinion pieces on the new plan, both from women who want to make the lives of prostitutes better. Both agree that prostitution is dangerous, and both agree that the women themselves should not be treated as criminals. But they seem to differ on everything else. One woman wants the government to go further in outlawing prostitution altogether. The other wants the government to go further in legalizing prostitution. Both back up their arguments with data.
I’ve made a handy dandy little table to compare their arguments side by side. Which makes more sense to you?
| “Eradicate the oldest oppression” — By Julie Bendel, a founder of Justice for Women. She advised the Home Office as part of its review on prostitution. | “The deadly effect of zero tolerance” — By Diane Taylor, magazine editor for Mainliners, a charity that works with drug users and sex workers. |
| Prostitution is eradicable: “Why do we have to accept prostitution? Yes, it has been with us for a long time, but so have poverty and racism. We do not hear governments declaring that “racism is here to stay”, and suggesting that the best policy is damage limitation and making it more bearable for people who are racially abused, or that we should not make life difficult for the perpetrator, but just accept that some people need to be racist.” | Prostitution is here forever: “In a world with no poverty, no inequality, no violence and universal sexual contentment within relationships, prostitution would wither. Until that utopian day arrives, sex for sale will remain with us. It thrives in imperfect, liberal societies such as ours, it existed during the time of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and it flourishes in plenty of political systems in between.” |
| It’s not just a job, it’s a nightmare: “Few of the many women who have escaped the sex industry describe it as a profession – more paid abuse. The long-awaited Home Office review of prostitution concludes that it is not a desirable phenomenon; that the women and children caught up in it are abused, not ‘making a free choice’; and that it is not a victimless crime.” | Prostitution is a valid career choice: “Between the two extremes [drug addicts and high-priced call girls] are a million shades of grey: women who work in flats or saunas a couple of days a week, as they prefer it to 40 hours in a call centre; women who work on the streets intermittently for the same reason. These women have chosen to do this work, often out of economic desperation but sometimes because they like the flexible hours, their regular punters and the sex.” |
| Prostitution in Sweden is down: “Because Sweden does not hold up a welcome sign for pimps and customers, the trafficking of women into the country has been significantly reduced, compared with countries where prostitution is legalised or decriminalised.” | Prostitution in Sweden is up: “Research in Sweden, where the purchase of sex was criminalised in 1999, has shown that hidden prostitution has increased, as has sex for sale on the internet. The most socially marginalised women working on the streets have suffered most, as will their UK sisters when the new zero-tolerance laws start to bite.” |
| Prostitution is always dangerous: “It is argued that it is safer for the women to work in a legal or decriminalised regime. Prostitution can never be safe. If a buyer decides he wants to hurt a woman, he will simply take her away from the CCTV cameras. ” | Legal prostitution is less dangerous: “Allowing women to work openly reduces the scope for attacks. A more transparent environment would also help trafficked women.” |
| Legalization doesn’t reduce exploitation: “Women in prostitution are stigmatised whether it is legal or not. In Amsterdam, where women are told they must register as prostitutes before they can work, less than 10% of the 25,000 have done so. No one wants to labelled a “prostitute” - what they need is to be assisted out of this daily abuse.” | Legalization does reduce exploitation: “The more prostitution is hidden, the greater the scope for exploitation. The proposal to allow up to three women to work together indoors rather than the current limit of one is welcome, but what of those who work in bigger establishments? Police and immigration raids are already frequent and likely to intensify.” |
| Tolerance zones would increase prostitution: “Those hoping to see the government support decriminalisation of brothels will be disappointed by the Home Office review, as will those advocating tolerance zones. Where such zones have been tried they have failed. One zone in Melbourne resulted in street prostitution increasing fourfold. In Amsterdam drug dealing, trafficking and violence towards the women and customers in the zone led to it being closed in 2003.” | Prostitution is booming anyway: “Kerb crawling has been an arrestable offence since 2001, yet business is booming. A West Yorkshire police pilot scheme in 1998 and 1999 to arrest and ‘re-educate’ kerb crawlers was shelved. An internal police report stated: ‘There does not appear to have been any noticeable reduction in the number of kerb crawlers since the scheme was introduced.’” |
| Johns should be re-educated: “What additional resources will be made available to prevent children being abused in the sex industry, help women out of prostitution and re-educate the customers, we have yet to see. Certainly it would be impossible to elicit change without giving money to projects that work with prostitutes, or running a public-education campaign dispelling the myths of prostitution.” | Johns can’t be re-educated: “Sex workers reported that clients who attended “kerb-crawler rehab” continued to seek them out, but the fallout for the women was worrying. Instead of working in groups in reasonably well-lit areas and taking their punters within earshot of the other sex workers, they had to work alone in more remote areas where they were at greater risk of attack. They also had to work longer to earn the same money so, chilled and weary, they were more likely to get into a car with a man they hadn’t checked out properly.” |
| Prostitutes need to be helped out of their drug addict environments: “But why should we take away the livelihoods of women in prostitution? I hear this time and again from those who hand out condoms and clean needles to women on the street and put little effort into helping them escape. Many women support the Swedish law, because it has given them an incentive to ask for support to get out of the sex industry. If the UK, like Sweden, provided readily available drug and alcohol rehabilitation, safe housing and protection from pimps then most women would leave prostitution.” | Prostitutes should be left in their drug addict environments: “Asbos [Anti-Social Behavior Orders, designed to keep illegal activity out of a given area] issued to street-based women have had a similar effect. To avoid breaching their Asbos, many have moved to unfamiliar street beats. Women who use drugs may become more chaotic away from their families and trusted drugs projects. Emma Merry was murdered after moving from her regular patch in Wolverhampton to Stoke-on-Trent because of an intense policing operation in 1994. Stoke sex workers had refused to do business with her killer as they knew he was violent, but as an outsider she did not know that and it cost her her life.” |
I honestly have no clue here. I think I used up all my brain cells making the table.
19 Responses to “New Employment Niche in Britain:
Brothel Receptionist”
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Dr Marco says:
This was a great post. I think that prostitution should be legal not for ideological reasons, but for public health concerns. The benefits of registering, educating and screening legal prostitutes assures the safety of them and of the clients. The debate that you showed, demonstrates how ill-informed can a conservative person be.
I am going to add a link to your blog in my own one. Visit me at Multae Sententiae
January 18th, 2006 at 7:42 am EST -
Violet Socks says:
I don’t think Julie Bendel is conservative, and I doubt she’s ill-informed. Justice for Women is a feminist organization in the U.K.
It seems to me that they’re both sincere and they both make sense. The legalization argument strikes me as more realistic, but I’m sympathetic to the other side as well.
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Dr Marco says:
They can both be well-intentioned, but it takes someone to knows better the human nature to give the most realistic opinions.
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Spicy says:
I don’t think Julie Bendel is conservative, and I doubt she’s ill-informed.
Julie Bindel happens to be someone I know very well. She is absolutely NOT a conservative (the very suggestion would make her hoot!) - she identifies as a radical lesbian feminist.
She is indeed well-informed having been active in work on violence against women for well over two decades. Some of her research can be seen here: http://www.cwasu.org/displayAu.....hor_key=16 - that list provides a mere snapshot of her overall knowledge and experience.
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Violet Socks says:
Thanks, Spicy. Your description of Julie Bindel matches what I thought was probably the case.
I read her piece in the Guardian first, and it all made so much sense. Then I read the Diane Taylor piece and, well, that made sense too, in a hard-boiled, coldly realistic sort of way.
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nina says:
We do not hear governments declaring that “racism is here to stay”, and suggesting that the best policy is damage limitation and making it more bearable for people who are racially abused, or that we should not make life difficult for the perpetrator, but just accept that some people need to be racist.
That’s what clinched it for me. I pick Julie Bendel’s side.
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Violet Socks says:
I want to get more information about what’s going on in Sweden. Has prostitution really gone down? Or has it just gone underground?
If we didn’t live in a patriarchy, would there still be prostitution? Is it a function of women’s oppression, or is it just a byproduct of the human sex drive?
People who bring up the “temple prostitutes in antiquity” argument usually say that prostitution doesn’t have to be furtive or degrading. What they don’t seem to realize is that most temple prostitutes were slaves — and had in fact been delivered into sexual slavery as orphaned children.
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Spicy says:
I want to get more information about what’s going on in Sweden. Has prostitution really gone down? Or has it just gone underground?
This article has a good overview which shows that the Swedish model *is* working or there’s this more detailed report ( A Critical Examination of Responses to Prostitution in Four Countries: Victoria, Australia; Ireland; the Netherlands; and Sweden)
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Violet Socks says:
Spicy, thank you so much for these links. I’ve been poring through the long paper and it’s just brilliant. I’m going to try to find time to write a post summarizing it.
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Glimmer says:
They also had to work longer to earn the same money so, chilled and weary, they were more likely to get into a car with a man they hadn’t checked out properly.
Someone please tell me she didn’t just say it’s a sex working women’s responsibility to determine which men are rapists and which men aren’t. It sure looks like she’s not putting the responsibility for the rape and abuse of sex workers on the men where it belongs.
These two comments from the pro-legalization side kinda contradict each other regarding the effectiveness of police, don’t they?
“Police and immigration raids are already frequent and likely to intensify.”
“Kerb crawling has been an arrestable offence since 2001, yet business is booming.”
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Spicy says:
Here’s another link you might be interested in:
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katie says:
it is fabulous! thank you!
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Emma says:
Diane Taylor’s point - to me - seems analogous to suggesting that slavery should have remained legal because otherwise those currently enslaved would have problems finding jobs/houses/money.
“Allowing women to work openly reduces the scope for attacks. A more transparent environment would also help trafficked women.”
In all the talk of “reducing the scope” and maintaining “transparency” I can’t help but wonder if the same arguments would fly when talking about (for argument’s sake) immigrant workers on unlawfully dangerous construction sites. A not insignificant number of prostituting women are beaten, raped, tortured, and murdered. How can this be seen as collateral damage occasioned by a chosen profession?
And how can we think of structuring our interventions into the lives of abused women on the basis of more male violence? Isn’t that basically what Taylor is saying? That men are *really* going to fuck up prostituting women if they can get them away from each other and so-called tolerance zones and that we should therefore accede to their demands not to be called on their bullshit treatment of women?
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Violet says:
We got into a discussion of those issues on another thread, Hot New Blog Celebrates Police Abuse of Prostitutes, which sort of degenerated into a discussion of (and disagreement over) basic concepts.
I’m actually thinking of doing another post on prostitution, specifically to address the debate within feminism.
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Emma says:
Sorry for dredging up such an old post!
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Violet says:
Oh no — that’s fine. One reason I leave up such a long list of previous posts in the sidebar is so people can see them and comment if they choose. Sometimes a good conversation will get started that way, weeks after the original post.
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John Smith says:
Actually there isn’t anything wrong with Prostitution. After all, it is the oldest profession in the world, and should be treated with the respect it deserves. Unfortunately, however, it does not by some gov’ts, such as our own here in the US. With the exception of a certain area in the state of Nevada. There’s the Cathouse, the Bunny House, and the famous Mustang ranch.
Now, if the States could use what the rest of the countries has seen, maybe we could be a little bit better with our relations and open eyes. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. -
richard cherry says:
yes, ‘John’ - you’re wrong - nice name though in the context of this debate.
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John Smith says:
# Dr Marco says:
This was a great post. I think that prostitution should be legal not for ideological reasons, but for public health concerns. The benefits of registering, educating and screening legal prostitutes assures the safety of them and of the clients. The debate that you showed, demonstrates how ill-informed can a conservative person be.
I have to agree on the public health issues also. There has been many a concern on singular prostitutes vs plural prostitutes which give better safety in numbers, and even better group rates on insurance costs too. Should limit the number of plural women working together though, the more clients they’re with, the higher the insurance rate will be. (Speaking hypothetically, of course)
