Posts Tagged ‘Object’
STREETS BEHIND: how police kerb crawling drives kill street sex workers
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:
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remove the right to a warning for kerb crawlers
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enable buildings housing brothels to be closed for up to three months, and
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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 »
Home Office unites feminists in condemnation of itself
IT WAS a collection of people one would not normally put together unless one aimed to start World War III.
In the one corner were representatives of the English Collective of Prostitutes and the UK Network of Sex Projects, in the other the Poppy Project (which rescues London’s ’sex slaves’) and ‘Object’ - the Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells etc’s campaign against lap dancing clubs. All of them females, I imagine all feminists, together epitomising the division in feminism over something the rest of the world knows as prostitution, but which, even with UN help, they could not possibly get as far as even agreeing the terminology for.
That was the scene for the first session of the parliamentary committee inquiring into the Home Office’s latest perpetration, known as the Policing and Crime Bill. Read the rest of this entry »
