Jacqui Smith has watered down prostitution legislation
In its original form, the bill would have created an offence of buying or attempting to buy sex from anyone "controlled for gain by a third party", challenging the widely held view that prostitution is always a victimless transaction.
The proposal caused outrage, but it also exposed a paradox at the heart of the argument that prostitution should be legalised. Central to the legalisation claim is the idea that most women enter prostitution voluntarily, that they make a good living from it – better than stacking shelves in Tesco's is the patronising example that's usually trotted out – and encounter violence only rarely.
This is the "fairtrade" position, championed by the English Collective of Prostitutes, and it gets almost reverential attention from some columnists and commentators. What they don't explain is this: if this benign view of prostitution in the UK is accurate, why should punters be worried about a law that would have applied only to a tiny minority of women who have been trafficked or are under the control of pimps?
If the vast majority of women who sell sex are self-employed businesswomen, who see only the men they choose, are able to insist on safe sex at all times, have no drug or alcohol problems and have never met a pimp, most men who pay for sex had nothing to fear from Smith's original proposal.
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It's a lost opportunity, and one that may not come around again for quite some time if a Conservative administration replaces Labour at the next general election. Politicians on the right are inclined to listen to commentators who claim that buying sex is a human right. As Labour ministers tacitly acknowledged before they took fright, what that can amount to is insisting on a right to abuse.
