vast majority of those delivering frontline healthcare and support to sex workers.
Failures of criminalisation
The advocates of criminalisation, including Grant and Morrow, have made the claim that their intentions are to improve the safety of sex workers and save them from what they repeatedly called“ exploitation”- by which they meant being paid for sex. Their proposals are built not on a solid evidence-based foundation, as all legislation should be, but on the narrow ideological belief that consenting sex between two adults is wrong if an exchange of money is involved and that all sex work is in and of itself an act of violence against women. In seeing sex work through this narrow, gender-stereotyped prism such proposals lack any understanding of the gender complexities of prostitution and the male and trans sex work sectors.
Advocates of criminalisation fail to( or refuse to) acknowledge any distinction between consensual acts between sex workers and their clients and genuine violence or sexual assault committed by a range of perpetrators against sex workers. This seriously undermines and diverts attention away from the very real incidents of harassment and violence reported every day to the National Ugly Mugs( NUM) Scheme, a third-party reporting system for sex workers, funded by the Home Office and managed by the UK Network of Sex Work Projects( UKNSWP). The reality is that those who target sex workers do so because sex work is so stigmatised that perpetrators perceive them as easy targets and know that they are far less likely to be arrested and convicted than if they had offended against a non-sex worker. Crimes against sex workers often go unreported for a number of reasons, including a lack of trust in the police and the genuine fear that they won’ t be taken seriously. Of all the incidents reported to NUM, many of which are violent sexual assaults, only 28 % of the victims are willing to engage formally with the police and share their personal details.
' Only 28 % of sex workers who are victims of violent sexual assaults are willing to engage formally with the police and share their personal details '
It is also clear that increased enforcement of existing legislation merely displaces sex workers, increasing levels of risk and violence as well as reducing levels of reporting of incidents to police. In Liverpool, where the police recognise crimes against sex workers as hate crimes and enforcement of existing laws around prostitution is limited and strategically enforced, there has been significant progress in increasing the number of incidents reported to the police. This has resulted in the apprehension of some dangerous, often repeat, offenders and highlighted the escalation in to aid the identification of these offenders.
There is a huge amount of trepidation amongst those who provide support and services for sex workers in Scotland and Northern Ireland and with good reason: these proposed changes will further stigmatise sex workers and create a framework within which it would be even harder to provide accessible health, safety and social care support. Sex workers will inevitably want to make themselves and their work less visible and will therefore be less likely to engage with support services or police.
The Swedish Model
Whenever the issue of criminalisation is promoted, the Swedish model- where the purchase of sex is criminalised – is always lauded as an ideal but those doing so consistently seem to misrepresent or misunderstand the impact the legislation has had since it was introduced in 1999. Classic displacement occurred with consistent reports of sex workers using their own cars to collect clients, doing business in taxis, advertising online( often on Danish websites) and dispersing to
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