Shiraz Socialist

I was going to write about the proposed ban on happy hour, another part of the current government’s reactionary and moralistic social agenda, but then this issue came up instead. So the defence of the £3 six pack of Carling will have to wait for another day, though suffice it to say that I think Roosevelt hit the nail on the head when it comes to drinking in times of economic downturn. Anyway, let us turn to a more important subject than drinking, and a more vulnerable group than alleyway pissers and alcopop-swilling morons.

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, seems to have come over all full of moral fire and purity with her latest set of proposals to criminalise the buying of sex from a woman (or man, presumably) “controlled for another person’s gain”. That definition would apply to 95%+ of street sex workers, whether the person doing the controlling is a dealer, a pimp or even a partner with a drug habit that the woman concerned is working to fund. All very noble, one might think: after all it is the punters being criminalised and who could possibly want to come to the defence of greasy kerb crawlers? There have been various voices supporting the measure, of varying quality – witness Mary Warnock’s ghastly, moralistic article in today’s Observer, which could have come from Richard Littlejohn if it one were merely to substitute the word “immigration” in place of “sex trade”. On another level, Cat at Stroppyblog puts a more radical case for supporting the measure which, whilst still not correct in my view, is at least worthy of debate.

To me, most obvious issue with this measure is that it will have precisely the opposite effect to the one which is supposedly intended. The very nature of the current sex trade is that it exists in the shadows, away from the public sphere and the checks and balances of everyday life. That’s fine if you’re the punter, who in most cases has a warm home, partner/wife and family to return to after taking your walk on the wild side and parting with fifty quid. It’s not so good if you’re the sex worker, trying to remain alive whilst dodging law enforcement, criminal predators and often carrying psychiatric issues, a drug habit or both. It also makes life more difficult if you’re a worker from one of the various organisations which try to put support services in place for sex workers and their attendant issues. To put it bluntly, you cannot help people that you cannot see, and the criminality of sex work leaves it in a netherworld which is very hard to reach into in order to provide support for those vulnerable individuals who work within the industry. No amount of bleating from the government about this law “targeting punters” will change the fact that its effect will be to drive vulnerable sex workers further into the impenetrable darkness that already surrounds their work. Drug habits and pimps don’t go away just because “men paying for sex” has been made into an illegal activity, but working environments for sex workers certainly do become even more dangerous as a consequence of the measure.

The reaction to Smith’s proposals also offers up a rather more general and damning indictment on various strands within liberal and radical feminism. Whether one agrees with Smith’s stance or not, I think it’s fairly obvious that it isn’t in and of itself “progressive” or “feminist”. It’s the sort of proposal which could just as easily have been put forward by a Conservative administration, and indeed would fit in rather well with the sort of government-as-moral-actor model favoured by religious conservatives within the US Republican Party. Seen in the wider context of this government’s clampdowns on internet freedom, banning of “anti-social” activities in public and assaults on civil liberties, it can be seen as part of a much wider and more authoritarian social agenda. It isn’t really about any kind of emancipatory politics at all, a fact that seems to be lost on certain feminist (and other centre-left) commentators.

Why is it that some feminists seem determined to back this, in spite of the voices of advocacy groups for sex workers clamouring against it and the vast amount of qualitative evidence which suggests it would not work? I think it actually comes down to strands within feminism (and I am not speaking about all feminists here by any stretch) which seem to think that members of oppressed groups who also happen to be women are essentially passive “victim figures” incapable of any emancipatory activity which is not prescribed by their more enlightened (usually white, often middle class) sisters in the media or academia. There is an inherent conservatism there which patronises and marginalises voices which do not fit the expected norm, and I think there is a little of that at work here.

What, then, actually would work? I think the problem is that the system’s failings in dealing with the issues presented by sex workers are multi-faceted and not easily reduced to either media-friendly soundbites or simplistic moral platitudes about “nasty men paying for sex”. It isn’t simply a matter of cutting off demand by criminalising punters (even if that weret the effect of the measure, which it won’t be). I think what is needed is to address the issues which drive women and men into street level sex work in the first place. One such measure should be a massive programme of public investment in effective drug therapies. One of the most poisonous shifts of Whitehall goalposts within the past decade was the abandonment of “drug free” as the objective by which standards of drug services were judged. This was replaced by “in active treatment”, meaning that someone parked on Methadone treatment for fifteen years is seen as a “positive outcome” when reports are given to the press. The knock-on effect of this has been a rise in the street-level availability of methadone for illegal purchase. The fact is that class A drug addiction is a major root of street sex work, and that effective therapy and novel treatments (ranging  from residential rehab to “chemical washes” with modern opioid receptor antagonists such as Naltrexone) <i>can</i> produce drug free outcomes. Freedom from a drug habit makes gaining freedom from sex work much easier.

Another area where sex workers are made vulnerable is by their immigration status if they are trafficked into the UK. It is nothing short of criminal that women should be scared to access services for fear of deportation. Give them all unlimited leave to remain, full recourse to public funds and a work permit. Once more the gaps through which helping hands can reach, will open up.

And of course, there’s the biggie. Legalise sex work and grant sex workers the full right to unionise in the workplace. Making the sex trade publicly visible means that the oppression which it brings into the lives of sex workers can be tackled head on. Unionisation gives those workers the right to forge their own emancipation within the protections offered by the law and the labour movement. I fail to see why we would deny rights to sex workers which we ourselves would demand as of right. The right to work safely and without fear of attack or criminalisation is one which I am prepared to fight for in my own workplace, and I think therefore that sex workers should be able to do the same.

Will any of those things happen? They’re certainly recognisably more radical than Smith’s proposals, and in my view (and others’) would be more effective. However none of them chime in with the current government’s authoritarian agenda. Furthermore, all of them would be politically unpopular with a populace under the thrall of memes about “dirty junkies” and “whores” taking money from the state. Therefore the government will probably stick with what it is currently doing. I for one though see nothing within that agenda that I could possibly support, and it amazes me to see some of my fellow “progressives” doing so.

For more information on the struggle to unionise sex workers, look at the International Union of Sex Workers website.