Written evidence submitted by Steven P Moxon

Prostitution is neither violence against nor exploitation of women; it is exploitation of men by women for money, with abuse mainly towards clients

I have no interests to declare: no membership of any organisation in any way connected to the discussion. I'm a published researcher/writer re the science of the sexes and men/women.

[1] Parliament's recent record of heavily biased, non-evidenced and, moreover, counter-evidenced discussion and policy making re prostitution is embodied in the transparently prejudicial terms of reference for the Home Affairs Committee here; the worst yet. I take issue with all of these. * Sanction is not primarily against prostitutes but already against clients. * Prostitution is not exploitation of women, but of men BY women. * ‘Trafficking’ for prostitution is not a problem. * Prostitution is not “violence against women”. This last, core falsehood, is my main focus. Men ‘hold back’, despite often serious provocation by prostitutes: abuse is mostly by prostitutes against clients.

Even compared to the ideological nonsense a decade ago of ‘Paying the Price’, the terms of reference here are ideological insanity:

[2] (a) The bizarre notion that prostitution per se amounts to “violence against women” is a proposition so obviously and irredeemably ludicrous, and entirely at odds with every representation by prostitutes' organisations such as the English Collective of Prostitutes (part of the International Collective of Prostitutes), as to make the Committee a laughing stock in considering it. [I will progress to examining violence between the sexes in prostitution to show that violence likely is much more towards clients than towards prostitutes.]

[3] (b) Regarding “trafficking” [sic], concerted major operations nationwide by all 55 police forces over long periods in coordination with other services resulted in not even one woman being found who was 'trafficked' [sic] for sexual exploitation. [Operation Pentameter and Pentameter 2; report after a protracted 'freedom of information' fight by Nick Davies in The Guardian, October 20, 2009.] Any women discovered who were migrants were simply that; distinguished only as to whether or not they were legal or illegal, not whether voluntarily versus compelled/deceived into prostitution. The 'thinking' responsible for the fictitious prostitution 'trafficking' supposed explosion is the extreme-feminist position of simply to deem all prostitution as by definition 'forced'; a proposition wholly contradicted, again, by every organisation representing prostitutes.

[4] (c) It is a bald pretence that the sanction of law currently falls more heavily on the provider (prostitute) side when all too clearly it falls most heavily on the consumer (client) side. 'Kerb crawlers' [sic], who are responding to solicitation by street prostitutes, not initiating it,  are demonised, immediately criminalised, and subject to forced ineffective 'John' programmes for which they have to pay a fee, even in the absence of any charge; whereas street prostitutes, who are conspicuously and protractedly soliciting for sex, are assisted, and subject to only reluctant and light sanction, and even then not without repeated warnings. Clients in any context of prostitution are 'strictly liable' to conviction if, unbeknown to them, they have an encounter with a prostitute who is in any way subsequently deemed to be not making a free choice, notwithstanding deception by the prostitute, reasonable belief and even diligence by the client – whether under-age, 'trafficked' [sic] or drug addicted. This draconian change in the law is, again, through the afore-cited extreme-feminist demonstrably false notion that prostitution by definition is coerced, and that …..

[5] (d) Most egregiously of all, the term “exploiter” to apply to the client has it entirely backwards. It is the client who is the exploitEE: the exploitER is the prostitute. Prostitution is exploitation not by but OF men. In any other sphere, where money is obtained for what usually would be freely provided, the party obtaining the money would be considered obviously the exploiter; hardly the party imposed upon to make payment. Only in respect of prostitution is this common-sense bizarrely reversed. Women as prostitutes exploit the universal evolved deepest-seated desire of men for variety of sexual partner (irrespective of a pair-bonded loving partner). Women exploit this desire to obtain money. It's not the case that men exploit women through any sort of extreme lack of money: not only is there a substantial universal safety net in the welfare state, but women are better supported by the welfare state than are men, in that single mothers notably receive generous support, and the small proportion of the homeless that are women are deemed 'at risk' and thereby preferentially provided with accommodation.

[6] The male-demonising and anti-male hate-mongering remit is as a direct result of government here in the UK being completely taken-over by or capitulating to the most extreme ideological self-serving interests – what the respected researcher Belinda Brooks-Gordon refers to as “the separatist-feminist cabal within the Home Office” [The Myths and stereotypes that Surround Sex Work: presentation, November 21, 2011, Showroom, Sheffield], and other 'radical' [sic] feminist organisations, many of which are actually taxpayer funded QUANGOS or in effect as much, all motivated by hatred towards males -- together with a near 100% skew in representation away from the consumer side of prostitution, given that for all too obvious profound reasons, clients of prostitutes rarely make representations, and there are no organisations representing them. Even organisations representing prostitutes are sidelined, because they argue on the same lines as do their clients, and fervently counter the extreme-feminist bizarre false notion that no female willingly chooses prostitution. The very existence of prostitution collectives taking issue with feminist pressure groups shows the feminist claim to be wholly false.

[7] This dire state of affairs was comprehensively criticised by Belinda Brooks-Gordon in her excoriation of the absurd report, 'Paying the Price', a decade ago. [Government Strategy on Sex Work: A Comedy of Errors or attack on Civil Liberties? by Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon,  C.Psychol. Birkbeck, University of London. Paper presented at the British Psychological Society, March 31, 2006.] This is the most important directly relevant publication to which the Committee should be obliged to consult

[8] For the rest of this submission I will undermine the terms of reference re violence towards women, because prostitution is notable for the relative absence of violence towards women. What is never taken into consideration is violence towards clients. 'Rolling the client' (an epithet that in its existence – and that it requires no explanation as to meaning – demonstrates how common is the practice) or otherwise cheating through non-provision of agreed service is so rife that it would be expected to result in widespread violent response by clients – more than usually fired up by testosterone and then robbed of the money they have brought with which to pay for the relief of their sexual frustration -- yet there is little sign of this. Of course there are instances of violence towards prostitutes, and some is extreme; but this is almost all by vanishingly rare extreme psychopaths, who are not clients but serial murderers targeting prostitutes because no other women would willingly get into a stranger's car. Such individuals as Levi Bellfield often are responsible for further unsolved serious injurious attacks against or murders of prostitutes. They don’t represent some imagined extreme end of a continuum of violence towards women: they are violent to everybody; male and female; as, for example, Bellfield well illustrates. With all activity tied up in their minds with violence, and sex being a major activity for uninhibited psychopaths; then, for them, sex too is tied up with violence. This has no bearing on other men. There is no scientific basis whatsoever for the extreme-feminist concept of 'misogyny' [sic]. Inasmuch as the term occurs in 'social science' research, it's an untested construct used tautologically in ideologically inspired study. Subtracting the likes of Bellfield eliminates the great bulk of serious violence towards prostitutes, leaving nothing on the scale that would be predicted from the frequency and severity of provocation. Recent research explains why:

[9] It has long been felt, as it's currently intuited, that men (that is, 'normal men', who are not psychopathic) 'hold back' rather than physically assault women. There was no research on this until Felson, Ackerman & Yeon [Felson RB, Ackerman J & Yeon SJ (2003) 'The infrequency of family violence'. Journal of Marriage and the Family 65 622-634] discovered that men are self-inhibited from being violent to their sexual partners – and that there was no such self-inhibition in women. Subsequently, it has been found additionally that women are not merely by contrast uninhibited, but actively choose physical violence as their preferred mode of aggression in an intimate-partner context; whereas male self-inhibition applied in any situation where a woman would be the target [Cross CP, Tee W & Campbell A (2011) 'Gender symmetry in intimate aggression: an effect of intimacy or target sex?' Aggressive Behavior 37(3) 268–277; Cross C P & Campbell A (2012) 'The effect of intimacy and target sex on direct aggression: Further evidence'. Aggressive Behavior 38 272-280]. There is, then, a perfect contrast, with males being inhibited and females disinhibited when it comes to physical aggression within their sexual relationships. It was then further discovered that whereas men are far less violent to intimate partners than to other men, women are more violent to intimate-partners than to other women, with three times as many women as men perpetrating partner-volence in the absence of showing violence to same-sex non-intimates [Bates EA, Graham-Kevan N & Archer J (2014) 'Testing predictions from the male control theory of men's partner violence'. Aggressive Behavior 40(1) 42-55]. The great disparity here between the sexes shows up in the data regarding inter-sexual violence as a whole: although women generally do not physically aggress against men, and males in general are by far the more violent sex; nevertheless there is three times as much inter-sexual violence by women [Morse BJ (1995) 'Beyond the Conflict Tactics Scale: Assessing gender differences in partner violence'. Violence & Victims 4 251-271]. New research reveals a hormonal basis of female inter-sexual (female-to-male) aggression that has no counterpart in the male – the mechanism in the male is responsible for intra-sexual (male-to-male) aggression, not male-to-female. [Unger EK, Burke KJ, Yang CF, Bender KJ, Fuller PM & Shah NM (2015) 'Medial Amygdalar Aromatase Neurons Regulate Aggression in Both Sexes'. Cell Reports.]

[10] As myself a former long-term resident at the centre of a red light area – the conservation area within Highfields, Leicester – and at one time a client myself, my experience there, in just three streets, was of being on occasion myself subject to, but more importantly witnessing or receiving accounts of robbery and/or assault not of but BY prostitutes; including one murder. This was such a problem in the 1990s after an explosion in serious drug mis-use had transformed street prostitution from just local colour to a major nuisance for residents and a dangerous activity for clients, that I set up a community group to work with police to identify perpetrators and displace the street prostitution to nearby industrial areas. This was before 2000; but well before then, street prostitution already had become a tiny proportion of prostitution activity, having been marginalised by the explosion of, first, 'parlours', and then agencies and freelancing via, initially, such as 'contact mags' and telephone kiosk cards, and then through internet sites of agencies or whole directories of 'escorts' such as Adultwork, Vivastreet. This both brought down prices and increased the quality of provision – both dramatically so – to render street prostitution the worst of all prostitution worlds for clients, in being poor quality (in terms of both the appearance of and the service by prostitutes), dangerous, and not even cheap for other than 'basic service'. It became an uncompetitive anachronism. But the problem of assault and/or robbery or cheating very much extends to 'parlours' and independents.

[11] I have myself been subject to unprovoked attack by a prostitute on an 'outcall', and in a 'parlour' in Leicester, re which the police refused to record an incident. On another occasion, I worked with Manchester Police (Sale) to close down a 'parlour' ('Bliss'), because of payment taken without the provision of any subsequent service. The policewoman in charge at Sale backed me in obtaining financial redress, but even then the closure was not on the grounds of provocation of clients liable to cause a breach of the peace, but tax and benefit fraud. I've several times claimed money back from both 'parlours' and, in one case, an agency, because of cheating (fraud); and several times had to resort to giving warning of civil legal action against 'parlours'/agencies, backed up by indicating that I would involve local media. Very recently, I made a formal complaint to police about the fraud perpetrated by an Adultwork registered 'escort', under all parts of section 2 of the Fraud Act; yet South Yorkshire Police refused to record any crime or fraud having taken place, even when I complained and met with a very senior officer.

[12] My own catalogue of experience (that is, the offences against me, not my persistence in seeking redress) is fully the norm, judging by decades of perusing and participating in on-line message-boards for 'punters' [sic] – clients of prostitutes – to discuss prostitution in all aspects and specific providers. Most notably and currently, UKPunting is easily the largest of such sites. The very firm understanding by all men who by any definition are regular clients of prostitutes over a long period, is that several if not many instances of fraud or serious abuse of some kind or threatened or even actual assault is both their own experience and that of everyone else. On UKPunting, if any new subscriber claims otherwise, he’s not believed and challenged. It’s very clear that being subjected to a variety of modes of cheating is a not infrequent and sometimes regular experience for all clients. Yet despite the extreme provocation, very few lose their disinhibition to be violent when the target would be female – for the reasons outlined above. The key point is that with the volume of activity, all prostitutes would be expected to be able to recount at least some instance of abuse or violence, if not several; but with the far less volume of activity by all but few hyper-active clients, it's telling that the great bulk of clients can catalogue multiple incidents.

[13] It’s abundantly clear that almost 100% of offences perpetrated by prostitutes against their clients are not recorded by police in any way at all – not even as incident numbers. This is very largely because clients almost invariably do not make any report to police. Neither do they seek redress in the civil court. It hardly needs to be pointed out that virtually no men would be willing to be identified as plaintiffs, whether partnered or single. Furthermore, most men assume the law, if not against them, is not supportive, and that they would have no case in either criminal or civil law. Widespread is the belief that they are engaged in what are considered for legal purposes 'immoral acts', and therefore contracts are unenforcible. That this is not true is beside the point; it's the perception by men. [HMRC collects taxes from prostitutes, and therefore it cannot be claimed that paid sex is regarded as immoral in UK law; the concept is outdated.]

[14] If ideological severe distortion is removed from an examination of prostitution and the perspective of clients is factored in, then the approach government may take to prostitution would be dramatically different. Consideration would be given to backing away from government interference, given that paid sex is, simply, sex between consenting adults, just as sex is normally. Any interference would be in the direction of 'normalisation' in the interests of both client and prostitute safety. From the point of view of the client: if men know they can come forward to report crimes against them, then what level of violence there is against prostitutes would fall even further from what anyway is a relatively low level. From the point of view of the prostitute: if working together becomes legally allowable, then mutual monitoring will make them both feel and be safer, which in turn will make the client less wary and stressed, thereby cutting down any mis- and hurried communication that tends to the client not obtaining what he thinks he's paying for, which can be exploited for fraud. Note that in both examples, the interests served appear at first to be either those of the prostitute or client, but actually both clients' and prostitutes' interests are served. In 'normalising', things would improve all round. From a government perspective, it would then be much easier for taxation to be properly applied rather than easily evaded.

[15] Currently, we have a mis-placed revival of strident Victorian morality, by interest groups who claim to be 'progressive'; but the politics here are not at all what they seem. Extreme-feminism is the core of 'identity politics', which overwhelmingly is the politics of today. This arose as a major backlash against ordinary people en mass, as punishment for not responding as predicted and prescribed by Marxism. [See The Origin of Identity Politics' & 'Political Correctness': Not Consideration for Minorities but Hatred for the Mass of Ordinary People; Specifically 'the Workers' -- Tracing the Roots of Why and How it Arose and Developed Reveals the Greatest Political Fraud in History, by Steve Moxon. 2014. Published at stevemoxon.co.uk, in edited version in The Quarterly Review as 'Dworkin's Dangerous Idea: Steve Moxon Deconstructs Identity Politics' (http://www.quarterly-review.org/?p=2954), and more fully as part of Moxon SP (2014) 'Partner violence as female-specific in aetiology' in New Male Studies 3(3) 69-93.]

[16] For the UK government to consider and make decisions according to any ideology is fundamentally wrong. To do this through a totalitarian, hate-mongering, scientifically illiterate and in all ways wholly misguided most extreme ideology, as is now hegemonic, is a monumental disgrace and historic mistake.

S P Moxon

End