by NMN

Keith Vaz & the HASC inquiry into prostitution

This article (written in late 2016) by Alice Glass gives an insightful analysis of the 2016 Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) inquiry into prostitution and how it shamefully privileged pro-sex industry voices. She calls for higher standards of honesty and integrity among our politicians. Her arguments are as relevant to the current debate as they were to the specific situation she describes. Alice was herself in prostitution for a decade. Read More

by NMN

How important are punters in informing the prostitution culture and ergo, the culture at large?

Alice Glass, survivor of ten years in the sex trade, reflects on punters (prostitution-buyers), why there is no organised punter movement, and their apparent absence from the prostitution debates. She goes on to ask why many women in prostitution support a cause that does not further their own interests (or women’s generally) and attack the Nordic Model approach that would decriminalise them and provide much needed services. Read More

by NMN

Alice Glass challenges three common myths in the prostitution debate

In this article, Alice Glass brilliantly challenges three common myths in the prostitution debate: that “once the industry is fully decriminalized, prostitutes will form unions in order to fight for their workers’ rights”; that “if we don’t decriminalize prostitution it will be pushed further underground”; and that “only contemporary prostitutes should have a say in the debate, former prostitutes should not, it is no longer their business.” Read More

by NMN

Lies, Damn Lies and Ignoring Statistics: How the Decriminalisation of Prostitution is No Answer

This guest post responds to Juno Mac’s 2016 “The Laws that Sex Workers Really Want” TED Talk, showing that her insistence that ALL “sex workers” want the blanket decriminalisation of the entire sex industry is only believable if you are irritatingly shallow in your analysis. It shows how such blanket decriminalisation leads to an upsurge in the sex trade and sex trafficking, and takes us on a whirlwind tour of the economic disaster that engulfed the former Warsaw Pact countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and shows how this disproportionately hit women. In their efforts to escape the direst poverty, many women and girls fall victims to traffickers and become ensnared in the sex industry – particularly in the decriminalised brothels of Western Europe. The result is tragedy on a vast scale. Read More

by NMN

Smoke and mirrors at TUC Congress fringe meeting on decriminalising “sex work”

We report from the ASLEF fringe meeting on Motion 39 to decriminalise “sex work” at the TUC Congress 2017. Fortunately the motion was defeated later in the week. In this article we deconstruct some of the arguments put forward at the fringe meeting, showing that, like the motion itself, they do not stand up to scrutiny and are in fact misleading and sometimes downright dishonest. Read More

by NMN

Controversy over Prostitution at the Amnesty UK AGM

In January, we posted about a motion being brought to the Amnesty UK AGM in April 2017. The motion called for Amnesty’s current policy of lobbying for the full decriminalisation of the sex trade (including pimps and brothel owners) to be reviewed. This article explains what happened at the AGM and afterwards. Read More

by NMN

Self-congratulatory love-fest masquerades as policy seminar

Janice Williams reports from the 29 September 2016 event on prostitution policy organised by the Public Policy Exchange. “We were overwhelmingly outnumbered by those working in the so-called Harm Reduction sector which perpetuates prostitution while purporting to ameliorate some of its worst harms (a bit).” Read More