Nordic Model Now! has shown that the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) prostitution inquiry presided over by Keith Vaz was flawed and biased.

We are now demanding that:

1. The interim report must be scrapped.
2. All members of the inquiry must make a declaration of their sex buying history or step down.
3. At least 50% of the members of the inquiry must be female.
4. The chair must be female and should have experience in the field of male violence against women and girls.
5. All evidence must be weighed against our obligations under the Palermo Protocol and CEDAW.

Please ask your MP today to support our demands

1. Go to: http://www.writetothem.com/.
2. Enter your postcode into the box and click Go.
3. Click on your MP’s name.
4. Copy the template letter (below) into the Write your message box.
5. Edit the letter if you wish.
6. Enter your name and address in the boxes below.
7. Click Preview and send.
8. When you are ready, click I’m happy, send it.

Alternatively, if you want to send the letter using your normal email programme or by post, you can get your MP’s contact details at http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/mps/. Remember to include your full  name and postal address.

Please also consider writing to:

• Prime Minister: mayt@parliament.uk
• Home Secretary: amber.rudd.mp@parliament.uk
• Leader of the Opposition: leader@labour.org.uk
• The HASC: homeaffcom@parliament.uk

Template letter

Download template letter as a Word .doc or copy and paste the text below.

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Dear [MP’s name]

I am writing to express my serious concerns about the Home Affairs Select Committee’s interim report on its prostitution inquiry.

When the interim report was released in early July, campaign group, Nordic Model Now! published a response setting out its bias, including:

• It failed to recognise the serious harms of prostitution both to those who are in it and to the wider society and that nothing can make prostitution safe.
• It failed to mention the UK’s binding obligations under the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (known as the Palermo Protocol) to tackle both the demand for prostitution and the poverty and inequality that together drive sex trafficking.
• It failed to consider the impact of prostitution on equality between the sexes in contravention of the UK’s binding obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
• It ignored important recommendations about how to improve protection of children.
• It wrote off the evidence from a large number of women’s organisations, survivors of prostitution, and other individuals who argued for the Nordic Model, incorrectly labelling them “emotive” and based on “moral” judgements.
• It insisted – against all the evidence and common sense – that prostitution and sex trafficking are completely separate issues.
• It did not accept the internationally agreed definition of sex trafficking and the implications of this definition.
• It ignored evidence that sex buyers are more likely to be sexually aggressive than other men and so any increase in the numbers of men buying sex is likely to lead to higher rates of rape and sexual violence generally.
• It dismissed evidence of the success of the Nordic Model (also known as the Sex Buyer Law).
• When discussing the Nordic Model, the report quoted more than five times as many individuals and organisations that opposed the approach as favoured it, even though some had clear vested interests in the sex trade and some of the quotations were based on conjecture and not evidence, and at least one was based on entirely fabricated information.
• It uncritically accepted the purported success of the New Zealand approach (which fully decriminalises all aspects of the sex trade, including pimping and brothel keeping) and ignored evidence that it has not in fact made the lives of women in prostitution safer or better and has led to an increase in child prostitution and sex trafficking.

For more about what was wrong with the interim report, please see Nordic Model Now’s full response at http://nordicmodelnow.org/2016/07/17/response-to-the-home-affairs-select-committees-interim-report-on-prostitution/.

Eight out of the eleven committee members were male and prostitution has a very different impact on men than on women. Men make up 99% or more of the buyers. Women and girls on the other hand make up the vast majority (80% or more) of those who are bought and sold. And when the buying and selling of one woman is legitimised, it implies that any woman, anywhere, can be bought and sold, reducing her to a commodity.

We now know that the inquiry chair, Keith Vaz, is someone who buys sexual access to vulnerable young people. The Times reported on Saturday 10 September that he said about one of them that “Someone will need to break him tonight.” Vaz’s conflict of interests goes some way to explain the extreme bias of the interim report. It does not, however, explain why all of the other members signed it off.

I am therefore writing to call on you to back the Nordic Model Now! demands:

1. The interim report must be scrapped.
2. All members of the inquiry must make a declaration of their sex buying history or step down.
3. At least 50% of the members of the inquiry must be female.
4. The chair must be female and should have experience in the field of male violence against women and girls.
5. All evidence must be weighed against our obligations under the Palermo Protocol and CEDAW.

I also call on you to back the Nordic Model as the only human rights-based approach to prostitution. This decriminalises those who are prostituted, provides services to help them exit, and makes buying human beings for sex a criminal offence, in order to reduce the demand that drives sex trafficking.

Please write to the Home Secretary on my behalf to ask her to address the demands laid out above and to call for the implementation of the Nordic Model in England and Wales.

Yours sincerely

[Your name]

[Your full address]

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