The rights and wrongs of the sex industry

Rent-boys I have interviewed chose sex work because "it's far better than working in a call-centre"

The attempts by most governments across the world to suppress the sex industry are ludicrous. Even the Taliban could not eradicate the fact that some men wanted to pay for sex and some women were prepared to sell it. Shakespeare was mocking the folly of banning "vice" and criminalising prostitutes in Measure for Measure four centuries ago. So the Home Office's announcement this week that it will, for the first time in 50 years, throw wide open the hodge-podge of regulations and jail sentences slapped down on sex workers - and consider "all the options", no matter how radical - is excellent news for the 30,000 prostitutes working in Britain.

Nobody suffers more from the partial criminalisation of the sex trade than prostitutes themselves. The very word "prostitution" triggers in most people's minds a world of pimping, obscenely high rates of violence, and - worst of all - the epidemic of human trafficking (in effect, sex slavery) that has beset the developed world in the last decade. Yet it would be possible to have a legal sex industry that was largely free of these problems.

Look, for example, at pimps. These are the men who take a share of a prostitute's earnings in exchange for protecting her from attack. (In practice, they are often drug dealers feeding the sex worker's habit.) Ana Lopez of the International Union of Sex Workers, a woman who represents thousands of prostitutes, has explained that "Pimps may be necessary [at the moment] for protection, since most of the police fail to do this for sex workers." Stripped of legal rights and driven underground, sex workers are turned into outlaws who cannot seek or expect protection from the police. In these circumstances, they get trapped in often abusive relationships with pimps because they have nobody else to turn to. Provide them with recourse to the law - in licensed brothels equipped with panic buttons, where working prostitutes can look out for each other and identify offenders - and the need for pimps disappears.

Or how about violent attacks? The English Collective of Prostitutes explains: "Because of criminalisation, street-working women take clients to dark, out-of-the-way places, to avoid the attention of police. It is at this point that most attacks take place."

The violent men who target prostitutes are helped by criminalisation. Complete safety can never be guaranteed. Sex work will always be risky and repulsive, a fact which should be (and, when prostitutes receive the money directly, is) matched by fairly high wages. But the best way to minimise violence is to allow prostitutes to work openly in licensed brothels and to make it as easy as possible for them to turn abusers in to the police. Legalisation makes police into the allies of prostitutes against violent men, rather than pitting them against each other as we do now.

The trickiest issue is human trafficking. The sex industry was globalised throughout the nineties with unusual rapidity. Sex tourists began to frequent places like Thailand, often to commit sex acts such as child abuse which can never be tolerated. Simultaneously, sex workers came here in incredibly high numbers. Usually, they are tricked into coming here with promises of jobs as nannies or secretaries, and then trapped into lives of unspeakable degradation. All sex workers suffered in turn: prices fell, as did standards of abuse.

Yet, as with the other problems, criminalisation only exacerbates the situation. By rendering all soliciting equally illegal, the law squanders resources harrassing the more legitimate prostitutes and makes it harder to do anything about the women who are effectively slaves.

At the moment, we declare that all prostitution is equally bad before the law, from the rent-boys I have interviewed who chose sex work because "it's far better than working in a call-centre" to the Albanian woman forced to have sex with 20 man a day by mafia gangs. If we license and regulate prostitution, we would, most sex workers estimate, bring about half of all existing British sex workers into the legal domain. We could then dedicate serious police resources to going after the remaining 15,000, who are working in vastly different circumstances to the "higher end" of the market - and we would have the tax money from the legitimate sex trade to do it.

Sadly, it is very unlikely that the Government will adopt a radical approach like this. A real danger is that David Blunkett will choose the same mealy-mouthed route he adopted with cannabis: semi-decriminalisation. This leaves the trade illegal, but effectively asks the police not to prosecute it if it is not too blatant. All the huge structural problems of leaving the trade in the black market remain, but the energy drains away from the legalisation lobby because something seems to have been done.

Mr Blunkett may well even establish "tolerance zones" where soliciting is permitted. This worked fairly well in Edinburgh and Leeds at dealing with some of the more day-to-day problems faced by sex workers, and no doubt it would push the problem down the agenda for another decade or so. Yet properly licensed brothels - accompanied by a full crack-down on trafficking - would establish a radical model for dealing with the sex trade that could endure for another 50 years.

j.hari@independent.co.uk