An Anthology of English Pros

LATER THIS YEAR, a new law is due to come into effect which will criminalise those who arrange a liaison with a sex worker subsequently discovered to have been coerced.

The offence will be New Labour‘s 3,601st since 1997, contributing the latest instalment of what Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne (right) has described as an attack of “legislative diarrhoea.” 

Other clauses in the Policing and Crime Bill, now in the Lords, will:

• remove the right to a warning for kerb crawlers

• enable buildings housing brothels to be closed for up to three months, and

• introduce three compulsory sessions of rehabilitation for street sex workers caught persistently soliciting (as an alternative to a fine), with persistently defined as just twice in three months (it is now a week).

But it is the new client offence which has caused most jubilation among some feminists, and vehement opposition from others. Cheerleaders for the new moves are, predictably, Eaves Housing and Object. Their new campaign, Demand Change, is in the vanguard of the movement to use the new law as a thin end of a wedge towards their ultimate goal of criminalising all who hire sex workers, or, as the prohibitionists would put it, buy prostituted women. 

But just before we rush headlong to sign the petitions, dust off the banners and jump aboard this moral crusade’s bandwagon, let us pause and mourn the fallen from previous conflicts. Soldiers die in crusades, but the casualties in this war are unlikely to include many representatives of the socioeconomic groups A, B and C1, who throng launches and campaign meetings in the salubrious surroundings of Portcullis House.

Among those women who will be unable to join, for example, is one Amanda Walker (pictured).

Amanda, 21, was a Leeds street prostitute who left her two year old son at home with his father in the Rawcliffe area of the city to seek work in London as a result of income lost through a local ‘kerb crawling’ drive by West Yorkshire Police ten years ago.

The police initiative was held in Read the rest of this entry »

A NEW STUDY of street sex workers confirms higher levels of violence against them during police interventions such as kerb crawling clampdowns and arrests for soliciting.

The study, published by the British Medical Journal, is believed to be the first to quantify the greater violence levels in the outdoor sex market caused by the enforcement of anti-sex industry laws.

Homelessness and an inability to access drug intervention programmes – street workers are often class A or B drug users – were also linked to higher levels of violence, says Read the rest of this entry »

IN THE WEE hours of the morning here in the UK at present, Channel ITV3  hosts a programme known as ‘Nightwatch with Steve Scott.’ On at least two occasions recently, this has featured the strange shenanigans of the Nottingham vice squad, as they chase around after street prostitutes and punters for loitering and so-called ‘kerb crawling’ in the city’s red light district.

As an example of unctuousness, Scott leaves little to be desired, the whole series being an unquestioning, uncritical endorsement of the fine actions of our boys and girls in blue.

Two police officers – Andy Coles and his partner Dav Singh – steal the limelight in Nottingham, lying in wait in plain clothes in their cars waiting for punters to strike up liaisons with the ladies of the night, then following the couples to catch them in flagrante in parks or down back alleys and render their coitus well and truly interruptus.

“That’s outraging public decency!” they cry, above the sounds of hasty rezippings and background traffic, before blinding their embarrassed captives with references to sections this and that of whatever Act.

This, then, is how Nottingham’s police officers spend their time. And it may go some way to suggesting why this city, once renowned for its lace, is now regarded by many as the crime capital of Britain, recently ranked No 1 in England for murders, burglaries and car crimes by action group Reform.

It has twice the violence of the English average, four times the burglaries, and some three times the sexual offences and car thefts, a position that has predictably left the authorities there in a state of denial.

So let’s ask a few questions that need asking – (as Steve Scott would be the last person on earth to think of them). Read the rest of this entry »