After months of head-scratching, endless policy committee meetings and (no doubt) lots of expensive conferences and retreats at the taxpayers expense, Jacqui Smith our latest “Home Office Hero” has presented plans to further criminalise men who pay for sex.

And no surprise that after all the hoo-hah we find that the half-baked proposals, presented to the public are pretty much exactly like Smith herself; well-intentioned…but entirely unfit for purpose.

After all, this is the Home Secretary who just last week made the gobsmacking not-from-this-planet claim that people ‘can’t wait for ID cards‘. The cards will start to be really pushed on us all from 2012 but Smith said: “I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don’t want to wait that long.” Who exactly? Ed.

So when Smith outlined new legislation to oblige the clients of the sex industry to ensure that the sex worker has not and is not been trafficked, my first thought was: How exactly can this be achieved? I mean seriously, how exactly would a punter go about this? Is simply asking the question: “Are you being trafficked?” enough? Is a written Affidavit required? And how exactly will this be policed? or prosecuted?

Unfortunately, Smith seems to think that the demand created by the punters can be destroyed by a few signatures on a parliamentary bill. If you criminalise the punters she claims, you destroy the demand and solve the problem.

But in true fence-sitting style, Smith and her Home Office “Ho’s” have backed away from the Swedish solution (on which they have based their doomed bill), which was to make it illegal to pay for sex…full stop. This has apparently worked in Sweden and at least there is no ambiguity. But Smith has refused to go this far, ostensibly on the basis that the Swedish sex industry is considerably smaller than the UK’s and it would be more difficult to police.

But how much more difficult is it going to be to obtain a successful prosecution on the basis of the wishy-washy legislation she is proposing?

I don’t think any sane person would argue that human trafficking of any description is a horrific thing and as a (somewhat) civilised society, we are obliged to do our best to eliminate this terrible practice and help protect and support the victims of the trade.

But if history has taught us anything, it should have taught us that you cannot legislate morality. Every time we try to do this, not only do we fail to solve the problem, but we end up making the problem much worse!

Not only is Smith’s legislation in it’s current form unlikely to help the victims of sex trafficking, it is more likely to harm them further, as tighter legislation forces the trafficking rings further underground, making it’s victims less visible and forced by economic imperatives to service the much more sociopathic end of the punter scale. So says the English Collective of Prostitutes, in a BBC article published over a year ago when Jacqui started climbing her political beanstalk.

Frankly, it’s no surprise to me that countries with a more liberal approach to the sex industry seem to have a proportionally lower rate of serious sex crime and instances of trafficking. The Netherlands for example has long had a policy of tolerance towards it’s sex workers. They can legally operate from brothels, under the watchful eye of the authorities. The workers are required to register, undergo regular health checks and pay taxes. This makes it much more difficult for pimps and traffickers to operate, because the sex workers band together and protect each other. It also offers an equal measure of protection for the punters from blackmail and extortion.

And because the sex industry is more socially permissible in Holland, sex workers and punters alike are not regarded as pariahs within Dutch society and are taken seriously by the police when reporting genuine criminal offenses. This of course encourages victims to come forward, provides a framework to properly protect victims and witnesses, increases trust and helps maintain workable community relations in an atmosphere of goodwill.

So if we seriously want to curtail human trafficking in the sex industry (and we can’t avoid the over-riding urge to create yet more legislation), why aren’t we looking to restructure our current legislation along the lines of the Netherlands?

One last point to mull over: Jacqui Smith claims that almost 70% of sex workers operating in the UK are being trafficked (a statistic disputed by the English Collective of Prostitutes who claim the figure is much lower). But let’s give the old bat the benefit of the doubt for the moment…

How is it that the Home Office is capable of obtaining such allegedly accurate statistics and yet has been unable to use this intelligence to smash the trafficking rings themselves?

Answers on a postcard to:-

Ms J Smith
c/-
New Labour (Detached-from-Reality dept.)
Bullshit-and-Pointless-Spin Division
Houses of Parliament
London

(the first 3 correct entries win a free trip to Hollyrood) )

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