Prostitution Breaking out from circle of despair

Balance is needed between society's wellbeing and protecting the vulnerable

Around the world, ways are being sought to control and confine the oldest profession. Debate centres on whether it is better to legalise prostitution or to decriminalise it.

The arguments are that to legalise the sale of sexual services could offer some prostitutes a safer environment but could push others further into the twilight danger zones. Decriminalisation could help stop the pointless circle of committing crime to pay the penalty of crime.

There are those who would say any changes should be introduced solely with the well-being of society in mind; others seek to protect the vulnerable women who practice prostitution. All of the schemes which emanate from cities such as Amsterdam, Utrecht or New York maintain a status quo: that the woman is the sinner and that whatever measures are taken to support her, any changes in law must be to confined her.

Women's groups aimed at helping women out of prostitution take a third way. Ms Julie Bindel, assistant researcher at the research centre on violence at Leeds Metropolitan University said: ''Working with prostitutes should be about getting them out of the business, and that means criminalising the men who use them.''

Maintaining that prostitution is about violence against and abuse of women and children, she says that to legalise the sale of sex and take it off the streets would not protect women any better from HIV, other sexually transmitted diseases, rape, violence, drugs, or housing or child-care problems, which form the package which women take on when they become involved in prostitution.

As Ms Bindel said: ''Paying taxes on your earnings as a prostitute doesn't stop you getting HIV or being raped or murdered.''

A network of organisations called Women Against the Prostitution of Women (Wapow), which includes groups dedicated to helping women exit the profession, is seeking to criminalise pimps and kerb crawlers, and where laws already exist, to have them enforced. As men create the demand, the network lobbyists insist, they should pay the penalties.

Bindel said: ''Prostitution has been decriminalised in Amsterdam but it has only been destigmatised for men. Women are still seen as slags and there are more children going on the streets, more prostitutes being murdered. I want to limit commercial sex and I want to work to get women out of prostitution, not to keep them in it by slinging condoms around.''

That prostitution is so individual to the towns and cities in which it is practiced means that blanket legislation is not seen as a viable proposition even by the less radical reformers. In Scotland's two major cities alone there is the polarity of Glasgow's drug abusing population of prostitutes with their chaotic lifestyle on the streets, and the Edinburgh women who do shift work in saunas, working as regulated hours as the sales staff in Marks and Spencer.

The favoured route is decriminalisation rather than legalisation.

Ms Sheila Jeffreys, a respected researcher in the field, who lives in Australia, has said the legalisation of brothels in Victoria may have created a highly profitable sex industry but while it has ended street prostitution it has given the men who run the sex industry the power to view women's bodies as objects to be used.

Prostitutes have been both demonised and romanticised throughout history. However, the women are, in the main, victims of social and economic circumstance in which prostitution becomes not simply an option but perhaps a necessity.

The bizarre regulations which surround prostitution in Scotland are ripe for reform: it is not in itself an offence but a woman can be charged with soliciting or importuning (to loiter with condoms in her possession, or to loiter wearing suggestive clothing).

There is no specific law in Scotland against men concerning prostitution. A man could be charged with breach of the peace if he was reported for carrying out a sexual act in a public place but it is lawyers' experience that these cases rarely go to court.

If one woman offers sex for money in a house, it is not an offence; if two do, it constitutes operating a brothel.

A woman cannot be sent to prison for soliciting in Scotland and therefore receives a fine when she appears in court. She must then go back on the streets to raise the money to pay the fine. This ''revolving door'' syndrome, as Ms Louise Loughlin, of the East End Community Law Centre in Glasgow described it, leads to imprisonment for non-payment of fines.

Ms Loughlin said the average fine is #100, although women arrested regularly are fined up to #250. For non-payment of a #100 fine, a woman could spend three nights in Cornton Vale prison.

''Most women have two or three children and are drug users,'' Ms Loughlin said. Their chaotic lifestyles mean they often lose custody. They may have mental health problems because of their drug use and they may have housing problems - a tenant can be evicted for bringing men back to a flat or for drug use.

''If you made prostitution legal, you would not be addressing the problem, which in Glasgow is drugs. Legalisation in Glasgow would drive women further underground,'' claimed Ms Loughlin.

The Scottish National Party has formulated a policy to try to address the problem. SNP home affairs spokeswoman Roseanna Cunningham said it was pro-prostitute rather than pro-prostitution. It favours the decriminalisation route of abolishing the register of prostitutes, cancelling prosecution for non-payment of fines, and placing responsibility with local authorities for decisions about toleration zones and the licensing of premises.

Ms Cunningham said: ''If we have any hope of dealing with the issues of prostitution, we have to remove the fear of being charged.''

She stressed that issues of prostitution vary enormously, citing the ''stark variation between Edinburgh and Glasgow'', and suggested that very young prostitutes must be protected, pointing out they are victims, not criminals.

Echoing Wapow's stance, Ms Cunningham added: ''The existing laws are very much laws against the women. It is a long-standing grievance that nothing is ever done to deal with the male customers.''

She also believes a balance must be achieved which takes into consideration public objections to on-street activity, and the protection of the prostitute. She sees prostitution as a whole set of interlinked social problems and says: ''As a society we have to find better ways of dealing with the issues which arise from prostitution.''

Ms Lesley Hinds, an Edinburgh Labour councillor who was on the city's licensing board during the controversy over saunas becoming the tacitly accepted home base of prostitutes, says there was never an actual policy about taking prostitutes off the streets. It was not, she said, a black and white issue, or even a single issue, but ''decriminalisation seems a sensible road to go down.''

She does not see the revolving door syndrome described by Ms Laughlin as helpful to anyone but suggests legalisation would be a far more complicated route. Ms Hinds agrees with the Wapow reasoning that to legalise prostitution is to make it acceptable as a profession, thereby legitimising exploitation of women.

The Edinburgh sauna situation came about because police had other priorities. The idea that having the women working in the saunas provides them with protection they cannot achieve on the streets holds some water and certainly there is an opportunity for the women to receive condoms and undergo regular health checks, Nevertheless, said Ms Hinds: ''The men are scooping off the money.''

The irony of the huge gulf in the way the law on prostitution is applied in Scotland's two main cities is that they are both covered by different sections of the same legislation - the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982.

In Edinburgh, saunas get their licences under Section 41: ''A licence, to be known as a public entertainment licence, shall be required for the use of premises as a place of public entertainment where, on payment of money, the public are admitted or may use any facilities for the purposes of recreation or entertainment.''

In Glasgow, street prostitution comes under Section 46: ''A prostitute whether male or female for the purposes of prostitution loiters in a public place, solicits in a public place or in any other place so as to be seen from a public place or importuning any person who is in a public place shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding #1000.''