The first item on the agenda at the annual Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Congress in Liverpool on 19 – 23 May 2019 is a motion calling for the “decriminalisation of prostitution.” We have written elsewhere about how confusing this motion is.
We believe that most people would expect “decriminalisation of prostitution” to mean the decriminalisation of the (mostly) women and girls who are engaged in prostitution and would not expect it to mean the decriminalisation of pimps and brothel keepers as well, nor that it would open the way for multi-story brothels that can serve hundreds of men simultaneously like they have in Germany.
We think that it’s important that nurses fully understand what the motion means in practice before they vote for it. We have therefore published flyers that spell this out and why the Nordic Model is a better approach, along with a comparison of the key features of the two approaches.
If you’d like some flyers to hand out to nurses in your RCN branch, or to distribute outside your local hospital, please contact us, explaining how many you want and where we should send them. We’re asking for a donation to cover postage and packing.
For references to studies that back up the assertions made on these flyers, see What does full decriminalisation of the sex trade mean in practice?