Written evidence submitted by Parentpower

SUBMISSION TO HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE INQUIRY INTO PROSTITUTION

FROM JANICE WILLIAMS, CAMPAIGNER

I have investigated and campaigned on prostitution and its sister issue pornography since the 1980s and am a former director of Campaign Against Pornography and Object. I am a Family Coach and Parenting Trainer and have worked extensively with single parents. My company Parentpower seeks to inculcate loving, respectful, achieving and boundaried relationships within families. I specialise in managing anger. 

I want us to adopt the Nordic Model with greater exit provision for women as the only way we can reduce demand and put responsibility for the disastrous consequences of prostitution where it belongs, with the user. I am sure you will look at the evidence for this from a wide range of women’s organisations, researchers, survivors etc, particularly now that Ireland and France have adopted it.

I want to focus specifically on what may seem peripheral issues (compared with the high personal cost of working in prostitution): the negative health, housing and social service consequences of going down the route of legalisation or similar as adopted in Germany. I believe these have not been seriously considered, quantified or put into context, and they are important in the context of our reducing spend on these areas as a country.

1. Demand goes up, more women come into the country (some trafficked) to work as prostitutes, bringing their physical health needs with them: day-to-day normal needs, abortions, condoms, regular antibiotics whenever an STD is caught, additional STD treatments, etc. Women in prostitution are likely to need more trenchant and expensive treatments because they will be taking antibiotics routinely against STDs. So presumably will their clients and their clients’ other sexual partners. We already have dangerously high levels of STDs in the general population which legalisation would exacerbate. In the context of worldwide resistance to antibiotics the concomitant rise in antibiotic consumption would be disastrous.
2. Melissa Farley (prostitutionresearch.com) and other researchers have looked at the mental health of women working in prostitution and found it to be very poor. Depression is endemic and levels of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are comparable with those found in Vietnam veterans. Our mental health services are already overstretched and cannot cope with demand. They will be well past breaking point if we legalise prostitution?
3. Parenting: Many women in prostitution are parents, often single parents. Their physical and mental health problems will impact on their ability to look after themselves and parent their children. In turn, poorly-parented children are likely to need extra help from education and social services and to underachieve, and the cycle goes on from generation to generation. This needs to stop.
4. Substance abuse: again, many women in prostitution take a lot of drugs, creating physical, mental and emotional health needs which cannot be met and affecting self-care and parenting capacity.
5. Mortality: Melissa Farley found the mortality rate for prostituted women to be 40 times the national average. 75% in her research have attempted suicide. Apart from being tragic, this will put many children into the care of social services, with the poor expectations and high costs that have been shown to accompany this.
6. Sexual Violence is endemic in prostitution, even when legalised, as shown in the recent Leeds ‘toleration’ zone which could not ensure women’s safety. The costs to the health service in treating physical injuries (external and internal) and mental and emotional damage from such abuse are considerable, and, again, such violence affects women’s ability to self-care and to parent.
7. Child Sexual Abuse: Melissa Farley has shown that the average age of entering prostitution is 13 years, 85% of prostitutes surveyed reported a history of sexual abuse in childhood and 70% reported a history of incest. To legalise prostitution would be to practically legitimise underage sexual abuse and grooming for rape and prostitution, an issue we are already struggling with, especially in the northern cities in recent reported cases.
8. Serial Killers – although rare, the crimes of such criminals often involve sexualised violence and stem from childhood neglect and sexual abuse from an early age eg Rose West. Legalising prostitution will tend to normalise such behaviours as visiting a prostitute becomes part of life for men.
9. Economic factors– under legalised prostitution, numbers of women working as prostitutes rise, exacerbating all the problems above. This leads to increased competition among women, which in turn leads to lower incomes from prostitution. This can lead to women being destitute, needing state support and taking more risks than usual, eg routinely not using a condom, allowing anal sex, allowing violent sex, all of which bring demand on the health service.
10. Homelessness: according to Melissa Farley, homelessness is a major issue in prostitution, either as a ‘push’ factor inducing women to work in the sex trade, as part of the job where women work to earn their rent or live in a brothel or with a pimp, or as a result of working, substance abuse, illness, injury and an irregular income perhaps making it difficult to pay rent on time.
11. Long term issues: many prostitutes spend years in this work and emerge with nothing: no pension, no permanent home, no family and no savings. Sickness, addiction and broken relationships are the norm. This is no way to look after our citizens and again creates massive needs which our public services have to try to address.

SUMMARY

In both personal and economic terms we cannot afford to do anything except adopt the Nordic Model. Anything else is too costly.

Janice Williams

www.parentpower.eu