TUC women’s conference delegates are to vote on whether to support decriminalisation of prostitution.
Motions before the conference argue that criminalising the sex industry leaves “sex workers” at “greater risk of exploitation, abuse, and other violence.”
Terminology is important. Some argue for use of the term “sex worker” as “prostitute” is believed to have negative connotations such as association with moral disapproval.
But this is to generalise a term adopted by a minority of women in the sex trade, as noted in 2023 by the European Parliament.
Its resolution calling for work to abolish the sale of sex, successfully moved by German Social Democrat MEP Maria Noichl, recognises that those who “regard it as professional employment… represent a minority of people in prostitution.” It points out that “the large majority of people in prostitution… do not consider it to be a normal job or a career opportunity… would leave the sex industry if they could and… consider prostitution to be a form of violence.”
It’s significant that Noichl is a German MEP. Prostitution in Germany has been legal for more than 20 years.
The case for decriminalisation rests on the argument that it is the criminal nature of the industry which makes it so dangerous: remove that, and it will be easier to prevent the abuse of prostitutes and to sever the sex industry’s reliance on human trafficking and sexual slavery.
Yet that is not the experience of countries which have decriminalised it. In Germany and the Netherlands, legalising the sale of sex has reduced the stigma around buying sex, increasing demand.
Contrary to expectations legalisation has not ended the sex industry’s criminal character. Two decades after legalisation 90 per cent of women in prostitution in Germany are still victims of human trafficking. In the Netherlands, where it is also legal, authorities estimate 70 per cent of prostitutes have either been coerced into prostitution by violence or “lured into it by a loverboy” (a pimp who seduces vulnerable people in order to exploit them).
Analyst Dr Melissa Farley found that the legalised industry increased demand which has been met by increased trafficking; illegal prostitution increased alongside its legal counterpart. A 2012 study published in the World Development journal found legalising prostitution increased human trafficking inflows, especially in high-income countries.
So the evidence does not suggest decriminalisation makes the industry safer (indeed, trafficked women in the Netherlands have reported that the legal trade made it easier for police to ignore their plight). It merely makes it bigger.
By contrast, the Nordic Model — adopted by an increasing number of countries, most recently France — which criminalises the buying but not the selling of sex has reduced prostitution, halving street prostitution in a decade in Sweden.
It ends the criminalisation of prostitutes, but unlike decriminalisation, recognises the industry as inherently exploitative — thus prioritising support for women to exit prostitution.
This is the direction of travel not just in Europe, but in Britain, with Labour moving toward defining prostitution as “adult sexual exploitation.” It is impossible to detach the sex industry from coercion and violence.
Nor are the social consequences of legitimising men’s right to purchase sex trivial: they affect male attitudes to women, one reason an experimental red-light district in the Holbeck area of Leeds resulted in increased sexual harassment of schoolgirls in the area.
Rising poverty and an increasingly punitive social security system, in which jobseekers face severe penalties for refusing work, form a context in which normalising prostitution as an occupation carries still greater risks for women and girls.
The labour movement should not support the commodification of women, something turbocharged by internet pornography which itself is associated with rising sexual harassment and abuse.
The Labour government has declared the scale of violence against women and girls a national emergency: our movement should prioritise the struggle against patriarchy, misogyny and a sex industry fuelled by both.
