Euan McColm: Tolerance of prostitution or pretending it is a choice is turning a blind eye to abuse and criminality

This was not, she said, about supporting the sale of sex but about protecting those women who did so.

The majority of MacDonald’s fellow MSPs disagreed with her and the idea was abandoned.

In those days, prostitution was already tolerated in parts of the country. In Edinburgh, in particular, massage parlours – the Sunday-best name for brothels – operated with impunity. Behind grand New Town facades, fine upstanding men were buying women by the hour.

The argument in favour of police and the local authority turning a blind eye to the existence of these establishments was that they provided a safer environment. Better a woman work in a brothel than she walk the streets.

This position, well-intentioned though it may have been, misunderstood the reality of prostitution which is that the majority of the women involved do it where and when they are told to by the pimps who control them.

In 2014, Leeds Council and West Yorkshire Police agreed to establish a tolerance zone in the Holbeck area of the city. This would reduce the nuisance to residents while allowing support workers to engage with women in prostitution and help them leave the sex trade.

Following public protests, the Holbeck scheme ended in 2020.

The bleak reality is that by turning a blind eye to the sale of sex, police were turning a blind eye to trafficking, coercion, abuse, and rape. And, in doing so they made the Holbeck area more dangerous for any woman who passed through.

The Scottish Parliament was last week invited to take an intolerant view of the matter of prostitution, specifically of those men who pay women (or their pimps) for sex.

Alba MSP Ash Regan unveiled what she calls the “Unbuyable Bill”, which would criminalise the buying of sex while decriminalising those who sell it. Announcing her proposal, Regan described prostitution as a form of male violence against women. And she claimed a woman formerly in prostitution had told her she’d sold sex to sitting MSPs.

This, I find perfectly easy to believe.

Regan’s Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill would quash historic convictions and create a statutory right to support for those in – and trying to leave – prostitution. The bill seems to me to have compassion for women who sell – or are sold for – sex running through it.

Different views are available.

A group named Scotland for Decrim, which describes itself as a “grassroots campaign fighting for the full decriminalisation of sex work in Scotland” says Regan’s plans would endanger “sex workers” by exposing them to more violence, poverty, and exploitation.

The group uses the language of far left activists who characterise the complete decriminalisation of prostitution as a matter of liberation, rather than libertarianism.

It is certainly true that, for some who are involved in prostitution, their work is inextricably linked to their politics.

Some years ago, a politician told me of a committee hearing in which one such activist in prostitution gave evidence. The woman confidently made a number of points but under gentle questioning, repeatedly broke down in tears. Behind the ideological sloganeering, the politician in question saw – and was moved to console – a deeply troubled young woman.

I prefer to avoid the comforting euphemism “sex work”.

Prostitution is not, for the majority of those engaged in it, work. It is a prison.

It is not work for the women who risk their lives to feed chronic addictions, nor is it work for groomed teenagers, plied with drugs and then rented out by criminal gangs.

And it is not work for women trafficked from overseas and forced into lives of perpetual danger and degradation.

Although statistics are – for obvious reasons – difficult to obtain, recent government estimates have suggested there are around 15,000 trafficking victims in the UK. Some of those are forced into manual work or crime. Many of the women are pimped out.

They are not workers. They are slaves.

The myth of the empowered sex worker is enhanced by some pimps who create online profiles for the women they control on which happy photographs, upbeat descriptions of “preferences”, and enthusiastic messages about being “on tour” are displayed. The customer is absolved of guilt because he’s doing business with a strong independent woman. Even when he is not.

Regan contests that, rather than being a job like any other as some activists claim, prostitution is commercial sexual exploitation that targets the vulnerable which is “driven by demand and is enabled by silence”.

This is surely not a controversial position, is it?

Those who oppose Regan’s stance talk of bodily autonomy. Who has the right to tell anyone what they can and cannot do either with or to their own bodies?

This strikes me as a luxury view supportable only by the belief that everyone involved in prostitution chooses that life.

We know that is very far from true. The chilling facts about the exploitation of teenage girls have been making headlines for years, now. And those who have read the dreadful details of these cases know of the horrific, life-changing injuries inflicted on some victims by men who paid to rape them.

There are countless other cases of women in prostitution being abused and murdered by the men who pay to use them.

Of course, prostitution is eternal but so, too, is almost every deeply harmful thing and we don’t shrug our shoulders about those. We don’t stop trying to minimise violence simply because violence has always existed.

Men who pay for sex are part of a ring. They support, enable, and commit acts of abuse. They are conspirators in the destruction of lives.

Shouldn’t men who do such things be considered criminals?