Legislating P4P

National Ugly Mugs (NUM) is a pioneering, national organisation that provides greater access to justice and protection for sex workers. It has just released a report showing that the move to cashless payments is allowing financial institutions to ban sex workers from being able to make a living.

This report, lead by Tess Herrmann and supported by Dr. Scarlett Redman, explores the experiences of sex workers accessing financial services.

The stigma of sex work has a significant impact on the ability of sex workers to access basic financial services, which in turn impacts their ability to fully participate in society. It is vital that financial institutions end their practices of discriminating against sex workers for the sake of safety, inclusion and support.

Key findings:

• There is evidence of financial discrimination against sex workers from various UK-based banks and financial institutions. This includes
  the refusal of services, such as business accounts, overdrafts and loans, and other financial products. In some cases, even the personal bank accounts of sex workers were shut down or frozen.
• With increasing digitalisation of payment streams and the gradual move towards a cashless society, more sex workers rely on financial products that they are unable to access due to financial discrimination. As a result, many are forced to lie to financial institutions and state authorities about their business and prevented from filing their taxes correctly and even complying with UK regulations of the sex industry.
• Sex workers have developed different strategies to deal with financial discrimination which in most cases involve either hiding or lying about their engagement in the sex industry or avoiding certain banks and institutions altogether, resulting in an exclusion from large parts of the financial market, including many investment products, the housing market, and retiring funds.
• Experiencing financial discrimination has a significant negative impact on the mental health of sex workers with extreme anxiety, depression, and feeling excluded being reported most frequently.
• The anti-sex worker bias of many financial organisations has wider implications for the working conditions of sex workers as a small number of international financial institutions hold significant power in online markets, including various platforms that sex workers are using to distribute their content.

There is a steady stream of mostly Labour politicians who put forward law proposals to criminalise men for buying sex.

A private members bill from Labour MP Diana Johnson titled the Sexual Exploitation Bill sought to criminalise buying sex ran out of parliamentary time this year and has therefore been abandoned.

The latest attempt this week was by another miserable Labour MP, Sarah Champion. She sought add a clause criminalising men for buying sex to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

But the Conservative Government have bravely rejected the clause explaining that similar legislation in other countries has tended towards making sex workers lives more dangerous.

Victoria Atkins The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department explained in her speech:

I am grateful to the hon. Lady [Sarah Champion] for putting the case for new clauses 76 to 82 on behalf of the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North [Diana Johnson], who in the last Parliament had a ten-minute rule Bill on the issue.

The Government's long-standing policy towards sex work and prostitution has been focused on tackling the harm and exploitation that can be associated with prostitution, as well as ensuring that those wishing to exit sex work are appropriately supported. These six new clauses seek to make significant changes to the legislative regime governing prostitution and sex work. In summary, they would impose what is known as the sex buyer law, or Nordic model, which would criminalise the buying but not the selling of sexual services, the profiting by third parties from sexual services and the advertising of sexual services.

Under English and Welsh law currently, the buying and selling of sexual services are not necessarily unlawful in themselves. In other jurisdictions where the buying of sex has been criminalised, such as France, Northern Ireland and Sweden, there has been no conclusive evidence to show that the criminalisation of the demand for sex has either led to a significant decrease in the demand for sexual services or improved the conditions in which sex workers operate. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that criminalising the purchasing of sexual services worsens the conditions in which prostitutes and sex workers operate. It may change the profile of buyers of sexual services, distilling the demand down only to those willing to break the law to purchase such acts and forcing prostitutes and sex workers to engage in forms of prostitution associated with higher levels of harm. In the absence of unequivocal evidence, the Government have therefore maintained their line that we are focusing on trying to exit people and trying to reduce the harm and exploitation that they face.

Atkins then pointed out there are already laws against any sex work involving trafficking and Sarah Champion went on to withdraw her proposed clause.

Paying for sex could become a criminal offence in England and Wales if parliament approves a new private menbers bill which has been put forward by Diana Johnson, Labour MP for Kingston upon Hull North. Johnson has put the bill forward in a bid to protect women from potential sexual exploitation and trafficking, but the proposal could have the opposite effect.

The bill is opposed by sex workers and groups including the Royal College of Nursing, Amnesty International and many harm reduction and women's rights charities. It's argued that those calling for criminalisation are driven by ideology and not evidence, and sadly sex workers are often removed from the conversation in the hallowed halls of parliament.

Currently in the UK a lot of the work is already criminalised. You can sell sex, but you can't solicit it in a public place, and you essentially have to work alone because of laws against running brothels -- two prostitutes working together constitute a brothel in the eyes of the law.

Johnson's bill would impose what is known as the Nordic model. Sweden's 1999 legislation -- which decriminalises the seller of sex and criminalises the client -- is often dubbed as a 'progressive' solution to prostitution and is built on a feminist definition of prostitution as a form of male violence against women. To radical liberal feminists, what's not to like -- punish the men who buy sex in this patriarchal world. The Nordic model is legislated in Norway, Iceland, Canada, France, Sweden and Northern Ireland in a bid to reduce demand and ultimately abolish the trade.

But the idea of the model is misleading and in fact evidence shows it has led to more violence against prostitutes in all of these countries. Attacks against sex workers in Ireland alone have risen by 92%, since the introduction of the model in March 2017.

The bill had its first reading in the House of Commons on 9th December 2020 and was originally given a 2nd reading date of 21st of January 2021 but this didn't occur. The wording of the bill hasn't been published and the only information published so far is the description:

A Bill to criminalise paying for sex; to decriminalise selling sex; to create offences relating to enabling or profiting from another person's sexual exploitation; to make associated provision about sexual exploitation online; to make provision for support services for victims of sexual exploitation; and for connected purposes.