The introduction and promotion of the “sex work” and “sex worker” terminology was part of a deliberate attempt by international lobbyists for the prostitution industry to change its image from seedy and exploitative to something apparently wholesome and healthy.

The success of that project is only too evident as this terminology now dominates not only the media, but also many UN bodies and agencies (e.g. WHO, UNAIDS, ILO, UNFPA, and more) and almost all the key institutions in England and Wales, including the police, universities, and the Home Office (see for example their Typologies of Modern Slavery, which uses the “sex work” terminology even when referring to child victims of sex trafficking).

This is a catastrophe because the term “sex work” implicitly positions prostitution as a normal job, which suggests that it is ethical and harmless. As a result, many marginalised girls and young women consider prostitution a viable option, typically with disastrous results, and men see buying sex as not fundamentally different from paying for a haircut. It is no surprise therefore that there has been a rapid increase in the size of the prostitution industry in recent years.

Another problem is that the “sex work” term is used to refer to a wide variety of activities, ranging from in-person prostitution (now often referred to as “full-service sex work”), through “sugar dating”, lap dancing, stripping, and webcamming, to selling nude photos and used underwear via the internet, and everything in between.

Similarly, the “sex worker” term is used not just to refer to those doing “full service” prostitution, but also to those involved in the whole range of activities now included in the “sex work” term, many of which do not involve physical contact. The “sex worker” term is even used for those who facilitate and profit from these activities – i.e. pimps, brothel keepers and other profiteers. This obfuscates both the reality and the power dynamics involved in the industry.

Promoters of the sex industry insist that everyone must listen to “sex workers” but many of the loudest voices claiming to be “sex workers” are not representative of the vast majority of prostituted women, may not have experienced in-person prostitution themselves, and may even be profiting from the prostitution of others.

Obscene profits

The prostitution industry is a vast ruthless capitalist enterprise in which the raw material is (mostly) young women and the customers are almost entirely men. Profits are typically huge for the large corporate pimps, the organised crime and human trafficking networks, and the one-man-band pimps, alike. In most capitalist endeavours, something is sold once, but in prostitution, pimps sell women and girls over and over and over again, meaning that the profits can be eye-watering.

However, the women, the raw materials, rarely escape poverty: most of them enter prostitution poor and end up even poorer but with a host of additional problems caused by the physical, emotional and psychic trauma.

A few years ago, a British man who was convicted of sex trafficking was reported as making £1.6 million a year from the exploitation of the prostitution of women in his brothels.

Evidence suggests that pimps and traffickers in the UK can gain around £20,000 revenue per month for each woman they pimp. This is more than many people earn in a year. It is little wonder then that pimping and sex trafficking are rife in the UK, especially considering they are rarely prosecuted and the country’s severe economic inequality and entrenched poverty.

The large corporate pimps include the prostitution advertising websites, where men can trawl catalogues of women to rent for sexual use. Two of the biggest examples in the UK are Vivastreet and Adultwork, whose annual revenues at the time or writing, according to Zoominfo, are US $36.6M and $5.3M, respectively.

OnlyFans, an online platform for paywalled (mostly sexually explicit) content registered in the UK, made an annual profit of $525 million in 2022.

By feeding men’s sense of entitlement and understanding of women as sexual commodities whose main role is serving men’s needs for validation and sexual satisfaction, OnlyFans and other webcamming platforms, along with the prostitution advertising and pornography sites, play a major role in increasing the demand for prostitution that leads to trafficking.

While OnlyFans’ rules forbid using the site to arrange “full service” prostitution, the ease of setting up an account and the way it has been glamorised, normalised and misrepresented in the media as an easy way of making loads of money, have all worked to lower the bar to entry into prostitution.

While a minority of “content creators” do make considerable sums of money, the vast majority make very little. Having invested large amounts of time, emotional and physical energy, and money in using the platform, many women find that they make practically nothing. It is hardly surprising that many of them then turn to “full service” prostitution – especially as many women report that male “fans” frequently hassle them to meet up in person for this purpose. OnlyFans and webcamming act as a gateway to prostitution for women and as a gateway to prostitution buying for men.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) calculates that (“full service”) prostitution contributed £6.1 billion to the British economy in the last year and that, with the exception of the Covid lockdown period, this has been growing steadily over the previous decade.

However, by the ONS’s own estimation, the income after costs to the people involved in prostitution is about 24.2% of gross – meaning that 75.8% of gross income goes on costs. Most of these so-called costs are effectively protection money to pimps, brothel owners, and commercial sex websites.

Vested interests and conflicts of interests

Given the profits that can be made through the exploitation of women’s prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation, it is no surprise that there are powerful voices arguing for prostitution’s purported benefits and calling for the full decriminalisation of the industry – just as the tobacco and asbestos industries promoted their dangerous and damaging products and argued for no restrictions on their sale for many years.

However, the vested interests in the prostitution industry do not end with third parties directly involved in profiting from women’s prostitution. There are also many businesses and individuals underpinning the sexual exploitation industry, such as the banking and IT industries that provide essential infrastructure, and individuals like taxi drivers and security guards, who provide other services.

There are also the NGOs who are funded to undertake HIV and “harm prevention” work – which are typically focused on the distribution of condoms and possibly tea and sympathy. Such NGOs have a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo rather than bringing about an end to the entire system of prostitution which would make their lucrative roles redundant.

Then there are the “Belle de Jour” types who have carved out a niche for themselves glamorising the reality, and academics and researchers who produce the studies that insist that prostitution is a normal job that simply requires the implementation of effective labour laws and it’s a woman’s right to choose it.

Many governments enjoy the tax revenues and increased GDP that the industry brings, and the way that prostitution’s role as last ditch option for destitute women absolves them of providing proper social security to women. The UK is no exception to this.

And, of course, there are men. We know that not all men are sex buyers. But all men know that prostitution is available to them any time they need their ego building up or someone to offload their frustration on. And at some level they know that prostitution shores up the inequality between men and women – from which they derive considerable benefit – just like the prevalence of rape and sexual harassment does.

And many women, having been trained since the womb to put men’s needs before their own, understand that the best way to assure their own interests is to keep the men around them sweet, even when that means acting against the best interests of women in general.

It is therefore likely that in many arenas, a majority of people have a conflict of interests that makes them susceptible to the message of ideologically extreme NGOs and lobby groups that insist (against the evidence) that prostitution is a normal job, that full decriminalisation of the industry (including pimping, brothel keeping and sex buying) is safer for the women involved, that the Nordic Model increases the dangers, and that “all sex worker-led groups” are calling for full decriminalisation. An excellent example of this phenomenon is the WHO’s change of stance.

Case study: How the WHO and UNAIDS changed their stance

In 2007, UNAIDS published a Guidance Note on best practice responses to prostitution in the light of the HIV crisis. This advised that tackling HIV required tackling the demand for prostitution and recommended measures to reduce that demand, change men’s behaviour, and to bring about social change.

This did not go down well among the sex industry lobbyists and there was an immediate outcry. The Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) quickly convened a working group, which sent a letter objecting to the guidance.

The NSWP, a registered company based in the UK, describes itself as a “sex worker-led global network with 262 member organisations across 77 countries […] representing tens of thousands of sex workers.” It claims to have “a fundamental right to be involved in consultations around international and national policies that impact on sex workers’ lives and work.” [Our emphasis.]

This may sound reasonable. However, all NSWP member organisations must endorse the following “core values:”

• Acceptance of sex work as work.
• Opposition to all forms of criminalisation and other legal oppression of sex work (including sex workers, clients, third parties, families, partners, and friends).
• Supporting self-organisation and self-determination of sex workers.

They define third parties as “managers, brothel keepers, receptionists, maids, drivers, landlords, hotels who rent rooms to sex workers and anyone else who is seen as facilitating sex work”, which clearly includes pimps and profiteers. They also state that “sex workers can be employees, employers, or independent workers and participate in a range of other work-related relationships with third parties.” [Our emphasis].

So while the NSWP claims to represent “sex workers”, it also represents pimps and profiteers whose interests are significantly different from the women and others who are prostituted. In addition, NSWP only represents organisations that support full decriminalisation (decrim). But many women involved in prostitution – perhaps the majority – vehemently oppose this approach. For example, a British woman contacted us on social media to say:

“I have experience within the sex industry – both ‘choice’ and forced. There are many of us. I have friends I used to ‘work’ with on the streets and in brothels who are still stuck and none of them want decrim. It would mean the end of exit opportunities.”

There are many reasons why most women and girls who have a history of involvement in prostitution are not free to speak out publicly.

So while the NSWP does indeed have an impressively long list of member organisations from around the world, it is important to understand the inequality of arms between organisations that promote full decriminalisation and those that promote alternatives like the Nordic Model.

Most of the large funding bodies that fund women’s organisations (such as the Open Society Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mama Cash, and many of the UN bodies) have been captured by sex industry lobbyists and do not generally provide funding to organisations working in this arena that do not support full decriminalisation. This means that women’s organisations that do not support full decriminalisation are typically starved of funding and those in the global South in particular often do not have the resources for a website and are therefore more or less unknown internationally.

Indeed, NSWP had an income of nearly £2 million in 2022. We are not aware of any equivalent organisation in Europe whose main activity is lobbying for the Nordic Model that has anywhere near this amount of funding.

In spite of all of this, UNAIDS responded to the NSWP working group’s letter by appointing NSWP as co-chairs of its new advisory group on HIV and “sex work”. At that time, Alejandra Gil was vice president of NSWP. As the feminist author and campaigner, Kat Banyard, wrote in 2015:

“A revised version of UNAIDS’ Guidance Note was duly published, this time carrying an annex prepared by the Advisory Group. It recommends: “States should move away from criminalising sex work or activities associated with it. Decriminalisation of sex work should include removing criminal laws and penalties for purchase and sale of sex, management of sex workers and brothels, and other activities related to sex work.” That report is now a go-to reference for groups lobbying governments to make pimping and brothel keeping legal.” [Our emphasis]

In March 2015, Alejandra Gil was convicted in Mexico City of sex trafficking and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. This means that UNAIDS was advised by an active sex trafficker and pimp whilst developing guidance that recommends the full decriminalisation of pimps (euphemistically referred to as “managers” or “facilitators”).

You would think that when this came to light, UNAIDS and the WHO would have withdrawn the new guidance and returned to the drawing board. But they did not. They continued with their policy of promoting full decriminalisation. In UNAIDS’ latest 5-year plan, one of its key targets is to get decriminalisation adopted in 90% of nations globally (page 138). The impact of this, particularly on women and girls in the global south, is of extreme concern.

The WHO justifies this policy by modelling studies that were predicated on a considerable number of assumptions that are demonstrably false. For example, they failed to consider that full decriminalisation invariably leads to an increase in the size of the sex trade, that those in prostitution may not necessarily have access to medical and psychosocial support services when it is fully decriminalised, and that there is no evidence of an immediate decrease in violence after full decriminalisation. For more on this, please see our critique.

Anyone making policy on prostitution and VAWG should be banned from paying for sex

Perhaps it is not surprising that UNAIDS and the WHO are so firmly wedded to full decriminalisation, given that they are both based in Geneva, which has a fully legalised prostitution system.

When feminist author, Julie Bindel, was researching Switzerland’s legalised prostitution system, a woman working in a Geneva-based human rights organisation told Bindel how her work colleagues are prolific prostitution users:

“Friday night is known as ‘ho’ night. The men in my team literally brag about going to prostitutes. One of the roles in the team is to raise awareness about trafficking and irregular migration, but these guys go out and abuse them without any thought.”

Can you imagine how difficult it must be for the women working with these men? How it would implicitly silence and disempower them? How they are likely to experience such behaviour as a form of sexual harassment? Such behaviour creates an unequal and hostile environment for women workers and inevitably reduces women’s power to influence the agenda.

Making policy on prostitution whilst being an active sex buyer is a clear conflict of interests. Of course an approach that legitimises prostitution is going to be preferred by sex buyers over the Nordic Model approach, which makes sex buying and all forms of pimping a criminal offence.

Our understanding is that UN staff are already prohibited from buying sex by the UN Staff Regulations and Rules, as clarified by the Secretary-General’s bulletin ST/SGB/2003/13:

“Exchange of money, employment, goods or services for sex, including sexual favours or other forms of humiliating, degrading or exploitative behaviour, is prohibited.”

However, it appears that these rules and regulations are not enforced, particularly in some of the UN bodies and subsidiaries based in Geneva, and that this has contributed to biased policy making.

We urge the UN to address this and ensure that these rules and regulations are pro-actively enforced without exception.

Conflicts of interests in the UK

The use and abuse of women involved in prostitution by men in positions of power is a real problem in the UK. We frequently hear from survivors of prostitution that many of their “clients” were well paid male professionals often working in high-level positions in the medical and legal systems, police, judiciary, local and national government, thinktanks, NGOs and corporations.

The Home Affairs Select Committee in the Westminster parliament undertook an inquiry into prostitution in 2016. The final report was unquestionably biased and recommended a move towards the decriminalisation of brothels. Shortly after the report was published, the chair of the committee, the key person behind the report, was unveiled as a sex buyer.

We argued at the time that this confirmed our concerns about the bias of the report and our impression that it had been written by a sex buyer and that the report should therefore be scrapped. While a government minister agreed with us in private, in fact the government accepted the report and responded to it in the normal way. Consequently the report sits in the House of Commons Library as if it were an authoritative resource and is frequently cited as evidence for decriminalising brothels in the UK.

Although there have been some recent positive developments – including that British police are now banned from buying sex, and so are British armed forces when station abroad – there is widespread acceptance of men’s sex buying in the UK. As sex buying is known to reduce men’s empathy and respect for women and increase their likelihood to engage in sexual misconduct, this is a significant problem given that men continue to dominate almost all the key institutions. This needs to be recognised and systematically addressed – particularly anywhere that policy and legislation around prostitution, pornography and violence against women and girls, are under discussion.

How the UK government changed its approach

In November 2000, the United Nations adopted the Palermo Protocol, which was the first legally binding human rights instrument that includes an internationally recognised definition of human trafficking. The definition is based on a feminist understanding of human trafficking and its adoption was a triumph of decades of feminist activism.

In the UK, the Labour Government under Tony Blair ratified the Palermo Protocol in 2006 and for a while there was a genuine attempt to implement its measures.

Shortly before this, the Home Office conducted a consultation on prostitution and produced the excellent “Paying The Price” report, which recognised prostitution as harmful both to the individuals concerned and to the community.

The Policing and Crime Act 2009 introduced a new offence of “Paying for sexual services of a prostitute subjected to force etc.” in response to Article 9 of the Palermo Protocol that requires states to take measures “to discourage the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation of persons, especially women and children, that leads to trafficking”.

This Act made some other changes to the legislation on prostitution, including making loitering or soliciting to sell prostitution on the street an offence only if it is done persistently but removing the requirement that soliciting to buy prostitution on the street (aka kerb crawling) must be done persistently to become a crime. In addition, the Act gave courts the option of mandating women convicted of soliciting to attend three meetings with an organisation that can provide help to exit prostitution, rather than a fine as was the rule previously.

However, after the 2010 election, a Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition formed a government and the previous enlightened approach to prostitution quickly changed. Theresa May became Home Secretary and Lynne Featherstone was appointed as a Home Office minister.

The Liberal Democrats favoured the “sex work is work” view and have a policy of supporting the full decriminalisation of prostitution. Lynne Featherstone, as a Liberal Democrat, brought this approach with her and in 2011 introduced a pilot scheme that claimed to “help protect sex workers from violent and abusive individuals” through introducing a national “ugly mugs” scheme that those involved in prostitution could use to report violent punters so others could be warned about them. This scheme led to the National Ugly Mugs (NUM) becoming a permanent fixture.

NUM is a member of the NSWP. As well as supporting the acceptance of “sex work as work” and the full decriminalisation of the industry, on its page on the NSWP website, NUM says that one of its priorities is challenging the “myth that sex work is inherently gender-based violence.” This is an extreme position, that contradicts the 1949 Convention and the understanding implicit in CEDAW Article 6. And yet, they work closely with the police.

The introduction of this scheme marked the ending of the Home Office position that prostitution is harmful per se and a move towards the “sex work is real work” position. Any harm was now seen as caused by isolated individuals (the “ugly mugs”) rather than being intrinsic – and there was a move towards “harm reduction” rather than attempting to discourage men from buying sex and helping women to exit the industry and find alternatives. In other words, it was the beginning of an abandonment of attempts to implement the Palermo Protocol and Article 6 of CEDAW.

At the same time, the government began a brutal austerity programme that disproportionately impacted women and led to the loss of large swathes of women’s jobs and the closure of many services that women relied on. This resulted in an increase in the numbers of women in desperate poverty and an increase in women turning to prostitution as a last resort against destitution.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, expressed great concern about human trafficking and under her leadership, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was passed. This is now THE human trafficking legislation for England and Wales. Unfortunately it does not use the internationally agreed definition of human trafficking and instead centres the definition on travel. If travel cannot be proved, according to the Act, human trafficking did not take place.

The forms of human trafficking to which males are more likely to fall victim are framed as ‘modern slavery’ without the need for travel to be proved. The Act is therefore profoundly sexist and implicitly normalises and trivialises prostitution, and positions prostitution as a form of work and trafficking as an immigration offence. It fails to send out a clear, easy-to-understand message to society and by obfuscating the true nature of sex trafficking, it obscures the measures that are required to prevent it.

It is our understanding that sex industry lobbyists pushed hard to ensure the Palermo Protocol definition was not used in the Modern Slavery Act, in order to obscure the reality that prostitution and human trafficking are inextricably linked. It would seem that Theresa May fell under their spell and they were successful.

Child sexual exploitation

In 2015 all references to child prostitution were removed from the English criminal law and replaced with the term ‘child sexual exploitation’ (CSE). Those who pushed for this change in terminology were reacting to the shameful history of blaming girls who were being pimped, and writing them off as child prostitutes – which was seen as a ‘lifestyle choice.’ To counter this, campaigners used the catch phrase ‘no such thing as a child prostitute’ and the law change was the result. While we appreciate the intentions of those who pushed for this, it has had unintended consequences.

Using different terminology for prostitution when it relates to children implies that adult prostitution is acceptable, even though we know that many women in prostitution started before their 18^th birthday, often through the involvement of one or more third parties, grooming by individuals or the culture, or under the coercion of extreme poverty.

The word ‘prostitution’ is well understood to mean that a person (almost always a man) pays for sexual access to another person (usually a woman or a child) and that all or much of the payment often goes into the pocket of a third party (the pimp/trafficker). All of this is conveyed in the word ‘prostitution.’ ‘Sexual exploitation’ on the other hand, is not clearly understood by the general public or even professionals.

Dr Jessica Taylor has written about the confusion between CSE and ‘child sexual abuse’ (CSA) among practitioners in social work and children’s services. Now the term ‘prostitution’ has been removed, the difference in the legislation hinges on giving money or gifts as payment for the child’s ‘sexual services.’ But the grooming of children for sexual abuse invariably includes some form of emotional or material bribe or ‘reward,’ so the difference is confused and the practical effect is that child victims are often subtly blamed for accepting the ‘payment.’

The framing of the offences as CSE also obscures the financial motivation driving the pimps/traffickers and makes the men who pay to sexually abuse children invisible.

Another issue is that if the child is older than 12 years, the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove the accused did not reasonably believe the child to be 18 or over. This more or less gives impunity for men to pimp/traffic 13 to 17 year olds and to buy sexual access to them. We believe that this urgently needs to change. If a man is not clear that a girl is 18 or over, he should keep well away and the law should provide no excuses.

Child sexual exploitation as defined in English law generally conforms to the international definition of human trafficking for the purpose of the exploitation of the victim’s prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation. We therefore argue that the Modern Slavery Act 2015 should be revised to frame the exploitation of the prostitution (and other forms of sexual exploitation) of children as sex trafficking in line with the Palermo Protocol definition. This would make the child sexual exploitation offences redundant and would clearly position responsibility and culpability on the exploiters and buyers, while making it clear that any third-party involvement in the prostitution of a child falls under the definition of human trafficking and is a very serious human rights abuse.

Policing of prostitution

In 2010, the first year of operation of the Policing and Crime Act 2009, the police were quite enthusiastic about enforcing the new offence of “Paying for sexual services of a prostitute subjected to force etc.” which was implemented as Section 53A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. In that first year, they prosecuted 49 men under it, of whom 43 were convicted. However, that rapidly tailed off and by 2013, there were zero prosecutions under it – and this has continued. There have been absolutely no prosecutions under this law in the last five years.

This obviously does not reflect a change in men’s behaviour, because, as we have shown, the prostitution industry has been steadily growing during these years. Rather it is a reflection of a change in policing policy and priorities during this time – moving steadily towards a policy that sees prostitution as “sex work” and pimping and sex buying as unproblematic.

This change in approach is reflected in the latest national police guidance that exclusively uses the “sex work” terminology and unequivocally states that “sex working [sic] is not a violence against women and girls (VAWG) issue”. This reflects the change in national government and the Home Office leadership and suggests that the police have been influenced by NUM, with whom we understand they work closely.

The guidance generally advises against enforcing laws against pimping, brothel keeping, kerb crawling and paying for sex and explains that commercial sex websites (which themselves are arguably in breach of the law against pimping) are considered partners and part of the solution to any problems. This is an extraordinary betrayal of the police’s obligation to impartiality and their responsibility to protect women and girls from serious crime.

Academics at the University of Leicester who appear to hold extreme ideological beliefs that nothing should interfere with “consensual sex work” are key advisors to the police. This was the team that promoted a “student sex worker toolkit” that normalised prostitution and presented it as a viable option for cash-strapped students and attempted to get it adopted at universities all around the UK, although the university has now withdrawn that project.

So it not surprising that in the last five years there have also been no prosecutions in England and Wales for kerb crawling and only about 10 a year on average for both pimping and brothel keeping. This in a population of around 60 million, with thousands of brothels and tens of thousands of pimps.

The capture of the British establishment by sex industry lobbyists is complete.

Response to “child sexual exploitation”

There have been numerous documented “scandals” of mass sexual exploitation of children in England over the last decades – for example, in Telford, Rotherham, Rochdale, Oldham, and Oxford. The media tend to portray this as a problem of “Pakistani” men against white working class girls – although research by the Home Office suggests that white offenders are more common and research by the Muslim Women’s Network found that Asian girls are also victimised.

The mainstream media typically describe the Asian and Muslim offenders as “grooming gangs”, while calling white offenders “paedophiles”. This suggests that Asian offenders are a unique type of threat and their crimes are a product of their culture, whereas the white men are mentally ill and not representative of society at large. This is not only appalling racism but it also serves to confuse people about the awful truth.

While it is important to look at specific communities to learn how the abusive dynamic manifests, unduly highlighting one community allows men from other groups to fly under the radar. Consequently, as a society we fail to even attempt to understand what factors in the mainstream culture make these crimes so widespread, and why the majority remain undetected and the victims unsupported or even blamed.

There have been a number inquiries into the terrible failures of police and other authorities to respond appropriately to these cases – failing to prosecute the perpetrators and provide appropriate protection, support and restitution to the victims – most recently in Rochdale and Telford. The reports of these inquiries are often thorough and explain in distressing and harrowing detail the failures of almost every institution involved to respond appropriately to the most heinous crimes against countless girls, sometimes spanning decades.

However, invariably there appears to be an utter lack of awareness of the connections between this dreadful trend (not only in the towns or cities in question but all over the country) and the proliferation and normalisation of the sex industry – and that we are unlikely to make serious inroads in reducing it, let alone eliminating it, while prostitution is seen as a normal job and there is little or no political will to clamp down on pimping/trafficking.

Of course, anything that normalises prostitution, that positions it as normal work, is going to endorse the behaviour of men paying for sexual access to others, including to children – and it is going to make it easier for the pimps and traffickers to groom children and marginalised adults into accepting it.

And anything that normalises prostitution positions women and girls as commodities, as second class, as deserving little more than to be bought and sold for men’s gratification. Individual police officers and social workers are impacted by the culture like everyone else. So while prostitution is normalised in our culture they are likely to struggle to see girls as victims rather than as slappers who deserve everything that comes to them,. That national police guidance succumbs to this culture is therefore a matter of huge concern.

The Telford report made it clear that it is much easier to change the vocabulary used (e.g. from child prostitution to child sexual exploitation) than to change the underlying attitudes and victim blaming.

Services for prostituted and sex trafficked women

Prior to the election of the coalition government in 2010, Eaves, a feminist organisation specialising in supporting women who have suffered male violence and providing services to help women exit prostitution, was contracted by the Labour government to provide services to sex trafficked women, through the Poppy Project. Eaves was central to the campaign for laws to reduce men’s demand for prostitution that led to the changes in the Policing and Crime Act 2009.

Unfortunately in 2011, the coalition government removed the contract from Eaves and gave it to the evangelical Christian organisation, the Salvation Army, instead. The Salvation Army outsources some services to other organisations, including Hestia, which does not have a feminist understanding of prostitution. At least some of the services they provide to women escaping sex trafficking are mixed sex. A male Hestia worker speaking at a conference in around 2017 expressed surprise that sex trafficked women do not leave their rooms at the mixed sex “safe house” at which he was employed as a support worker. As if women who had been brutally raped by multiple men a day for considerable periods might not find it easy to relax and feel safe in the presence of men.

Most Government spending on services for women in prostitution is now focused on ‘harm reduction’ rather than providing women with genuine routes out. Many of the organisations that receive public funding and provide the services are ideologically committed to the full decriminalisation of the sex trade and see prostitution as a legitimate form of work. Services that are underpinned by these attitudes usually serve to prolong women’s involvement in prostitution and to maintain a thriving sex trade.

Because of the lack of services that provide material help to enable women to exit, and the increase in women’s poverty, the inadequacy of the welfare system, and the scarcity of decent employment opportunities for low skilled women, large numbers of women are trapped in prostitution.

There are a few excellent organisations that strive to provide trauma-informed exiting services. However, they constantly struggle for funding and are likely to be turned down if they reveal a feminist abolitionist perspective.

Ideologically driven “research”

Universities and research bodies in the UK are now dominated by the “sex work is real work” ideology and students and academics report difficulty in getting approval and/or funding for research that takes a neutral or opposite approach. We suspect that this is also true in many other countries. The number of highly publicised research studies that conclude that the Nordic Model approach is a failure and full decriminalisation a success would tend to back this up.

Many of these studies are of very poor quality and often the study data does not back up the headline claims – but they are used repeatedly to justify fully decriminalising the industry.

Here are some examples:

1. Rape. A study, published in the Journal of Law and Economics, claimed that liberal prostitution laws reduce the incidence of rape. This was reported widely in the media and in response loud voices demanded the decriminalisation of prostitution. Esther, a prostitution survivor, wrote a response showing that the study was based on a multitude of flawed assumptions and misleading analysis of the data.

A data scientist who wishes to remain anonymous subsequently investigated the statistical analysis of the study and found many serious issues that call its validity into further doubt. After trying, but failing, to get the editor to investigate the concerns, they approached Retraction Watch, which has now published a report. Unfortunately this has had much less publicity than the original flawed study.

2. France. A study by the French NGO, Medecins du Monde, into the results of the introduction of the Nordic Model in France in 2016, claimed that it led to “sex workers” being exposed to more violence, worse relationships with the police, and that they are less likely to use condoms. This study is widely cited to back the assertion that the Nordic Model “does not work” – even though it was completed before the end of February 2018, less than two years after the Nordic Model law was passed, which for the introduction of an approach that is so different from what went before, is hardly any time at all.

The French NGO, Amicale du Nid, wrote a response to this study, showing that it makes many alarmist claims that are in fact contradicted by the data.

France is a large country with a population of 66 million and 18 administrative regions, each divided into numerous departments. Much of the implementation is devolved to the local and regional administrations and there has been considerable variation in how thoroughly they have undertaken this, if at all.

This was confirmed by the 2019 assessment by the French government, which found that implementation was less successful where there was a lack of support for the approach from key high-level officials, including prosecutors and préfets.

3. Northern Ireland. In September 2019, researchers at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) published a review of the operation of the offence of purchasing sexual services that was introduced in Northern Ireland (NI) in 2015. The review was commissioned by the NI Department of Justice (DOJ) in response to a legal requirement to assess the working of the new law after three years.

This review is widely cited as “proof” that the Nordic Model in Northern Ireland “is a total failure” and led to a “dramatic rise in attacks on sex workers”. However, the data does not back these assertions up. In addition the review found that there had been a lack of official commitment to the funding and prioritisation of prosecuting sex buyers and providing specialist services to help people exit prostitution.

J Smith, a data scientist, has recently re-evaluated the review and found that in fact the data showed that the number of people engaging in street prostitution halved after the ban and there was no identified increase in trafficking. Alongside this, by 2017 there was a 28.5% reduction in the rate of commercial sex advertisements and a 10.3% decrease in unique people advertised for sex on the most popular commercial sex website compared to 2014. The claimed “dramatic rise in attacks on sex workers” were in fact mostly relatively minor incidents, including things like no shows – at a time when there was a significant rise in such incidents in the general population. Smith also discovered a disturbing number of anomalies in the data and the way it was analysed and interpreted.

In other words, widespread claims that the DOJ-commissioned report “proves” the Nordic Model doesn’t work and is responsible for increased violence against women involved in prostitution simply do not stand up to scrutiny. And yet, these claims are made all over the world based on the review – as justification for full decriminalisation.

4. New Zealand. Sex industry lobbyists all over the world claim that New Zealand’s fully decriminalised prostitution system is safer for “sex workers” and strengthens their human rights, using the NZ government’s official reports and assessments to back this up. However, J Smith has carefully examined the hundreds of pages of those official reports and assessments and has found that in fact that the data shows that decriminalising prostitution has been an utter failure. You can read Smith’s analysis here. Also, see our infographics that summarise Smith’s findings.

5. Norway. A 2016 study by Amnesty International into the operation of the Nordic Model in Norway is still frequently cited to prove that the Nordic Model is a failure. Our review of this study shows that the research was biased and of poor quality, and that there is no justification for using it to claim that the “Nordic Model doesn’t work” or that the “Nordic Model endangers women in prostitution.”

Astroturfed lobby groups

Wikipedia defines astroturfing as “the practice of hiding the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious, or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from, and is supported by, grassroots participants.” It is well documented, for example, that the big pharmaceutical companies fund apparently independent patient groups to lobby for NHS approval of expensive new drugs and treatments.

Nordic Model Now! is frequently accused on social media of being an astroturfed organisation. However, we are registered as a not-for-profit company and publish annual financial statements, which show that we run on a shoestring, and are only able to achieve what we do through the unpaid work of survivors and activists.

In contrast, there are a number of vocal organisations in England that campaign for full decriminalisation of the sex industry – for example, the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), SWARM and Decrim Now.

To our knowledge none of these organisations are registered as charities, community interest organisations, or companies, and none publish financial information on their websites. This makes it hard to find hard evidence of their income and funding sources. However, we have anecdotal evidence that they have significant funding and the so-called activists are paid for their time. We understand that they were able to distribute hundreds of thousands of pounds to impoverished “sex workers” during the COVID lockdown period. We suspect that much of this funding comes from those with vested interests in the success of the sex industry.

Survivors and activists who have contacted these organisations tell us that they are led by women who are not representative of the majority of women involved in prostitution. Some are accomplished public speakers and have considerable influence in the media and among politicians, who may not realise that they do not in fact represent the views of the majority of women involved in prostitution – who generally say that what they need most of all is routes out of the industry and viable alternative income streams, which are the exact things that full decriminalisation fails to provide. For example, in New Zealand no public money is spent on services to help women exit the industry.

Conclusion

Taking all of the above into account, it would seem that the “sex work is real work” ideology is now institutionalised in the UK and this is the culture in which civil servants, think tanks and NGOs have been existing for more than a decade. Furthermore, universities are churning out graduates versed in this culture.

Queer theory which considers “sex work” to be “transgressive” and thus a positive thing has influenced the LGBTQ movement to join in lobbying for full decriminalisation (“decrim”) – which means that for many young people the idea of any other approach is akin to blasphemy.

All of this, plus the aging out of some of the women MPs who grew up in the second wave of the women’s liberation movement with its powerful critique of porn and prostitution, means that a change of government to, for example, Labour, is unlikely to signal a quick return to an understanding of prostitution as a form of gender-based violence and a cornerstone of the patriarchal system.

However, the accelerating rates of male violence against women and girls, the disturbing phenomenon of large numbers of school children (predominantly boys) sexually abusing girls and younger children, and the increasing alienation of large swathes of young men, cannot be ignored for ever. And as attention is turned to these trends, their connections with the dominance of the sexploitation industry will inevitably become clearer.

We must harness this moment and argue for humane solutions – such as the Nordic Model approach to prostitution, strong age verification on online porn, the banning of all pornography that involve sexist and racist violence that is outside the law, and the full implementation of Article 6 of CEDAW, which calls for the banning of all profiteering from women’s prostitution – which must include the closing down of pimping websites.