Commercial Sexual Exploitation

Debate between Ian Paisley and Sarah Champion

Wednesday 4th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

It is not only a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley; it is also a relief to be able to do so and I thank you for your kindness in enabling it to happen.

We need to recognise that there is a crisis of commercial sexual exploitation in this country. The trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable women and girls around the UK to be sexually abused is taking place on an industrial scale. That is for one simple reason: demand. There are a minority of men in this country who are willing to pay to sexually access women’s bodies. Currently, the law gives them licence to do this. For too long, Parliament has turned a blind eye to the suffering and societal carnage that these men create.

I am here today with two clear messages for the Minister. First, there is a sexual abuse scandal happening right now on her watch. It is enabled by prostitution advertising websites and driven predominantly by heterosexual men who pay for sex. Secondly, there is a solution: making paying for sex a crime to help to stem demand and then helping the women exploited in the sex trade to exit it, by removing penalties for soliciting and providing them with properly resourced support services. The Government and the officials who advise them cannot claim that they did not know what was going on or were not aware of the scale of the problem. To end the exploitation, we have to end the demand.

Let me contextualise the scale of this problem. A recent inquiry into organised sexual exploitation by the all-party parliamentary group on prostitution and the global sex trade, of which I am a member, found that sexual exploitation of women and girls by organised crime groups is widespread across the UK. There are at least 212 active, ongoing police operations into modern slavery cases involving sexual exploitation in the UK. Our inquiry suggests that this represents just a small fraction of the true scale of organised sexual exploitation.

While most police forces do not proactively work to identify all the brothels in their area, some do track them. The scale that they find is astonishing. Leicestershire police visited 156 brothels, encountering 421 women in the year ending 31 December 2017. Some 86% of those women in the brothels were Romanian. Northumbria police visited 81 brothels between March 2016 and April 2018. Of the 259 women they met in the brothels, 75% were Romanian. Over half of those brothels were recorded as connected to other brothels, agencies or non-UK organised crime groups. Greater Manchester police has identified 324 potential new brothel addresses since March 2015. It told our inquiry:

“the majority of those identified reflect the hotspot areas for modern slavery in Greater Manchester.”

Let me quote Detective Sergeant Stuart Peall from Lancashire constabulary:

“From what we can evidence there nearly always appears to be a man or some sort of control involved. The females we encounter very rarely pay for their own advertisements. They also don’t pay for their own flights into the UK. There is clear organisation from what we have seen”.

The methods used by these organised crime groups to recruit women include deception, coercion and the exploitation of women and girls’ pre-existing vulnerabilities.

Let us be clear: women who are trafficked by organised crime groups are being subjected not to forced labour, but to rape. Based on evidence from the Poppy Project, Equality Now calculated that, on average, victims are exploited into prostitution for between eight and 20 months. Most women who are trafficked in the UK reported being forced to have sex six or seven days a week and see an estimated average of 13 sex buyers per day. From that, we can extrapolate that the average victim of trafficking for sexual exploitation is raped anywhere between 2,798 and 6,828 times. Those rapes are committed by men who pay for sex. If we scale that figure up to the 1,185 women referred to the national referral mechanism for sexual exploitation in 2017, we start to see the scale of the problem.

We must recognise that commercial sexual exploitation is part of a continuum of violence against women and girls. Commonly, it begins when they are just girls. Many women who are involved in prostitution experienced different forms of abuse, often sexual, when they were children.

The grooming process, and the beginning of a girl’s experience of the continuum of violence, is worth reflecting on. For many girls, it begins with something seemingly innocent, such as getting a slightly older boyfriend and going for car rides with him. Things then become more risky, and she might drink alcohol or smoke cannabis at the boyfriend’s insistence, and the pressure to return the favour with sexual acts then begins. Very quickly, as happened repeatedly in my constituency of Rotherham, that becomes organised sexual exploitation where the girls are passed between adult men who systematically sexually exploit them in the most horrific ways. Since the events in Rotherham came to light, attitudes in the UK have started to shift towards recognising that those girls are not prostitutes who willingly choose to sell their bodies, but victims who are exploited by men operating in gangs.

Now that child sexual exploitation is viewed as a national crisis, it is time for us to recognise that sexual exploitation does not stop when people turn 18. Instead, the girls who do not get the support they need to escape and repair their lives continue to be sexually exploited, perhaps by the same organised gangs or pimps, into their 20s, 30s and beyond. Finally, after years of campaigning, we consider the grooming and subsequent exploitation of a child to be abhorrent, but we must ask why society’s attitude is that when they turn 18, they are suddenly consenting adults who make a choice about selling sex, even when we are aware of past childhood abuse, trafficking, slavery, coercive control, intimidation, violence or drugs and alcohol dependencies in the background.

Let us confront the fact that the term “free choice” rarely, if ever, accurately describes a person’s path into prostitution and the sex trade. Sometimes we are talking about girls who have not escaped their early life trauma, who were perhaps in and out of care, groomed under the influence of drugs in their teens, or repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted throughout their lives. That may sound emotive, but it is corroborated by the supporting statistics. Home Office research shows that 50% of women became involved in prostitution before the age of 18, and three out of four women involved are aged under 21. Another Home Office study in 2016 showed that 70% of the women had spent time in care, and 45% had previously experienced sexual abuse. Do we really believe that those women and girls can give informed consent when many are inherently vulnerable or trapped in a cycle of abuse?

Commercial sexual exploitation is happening on a staggering scale, and prostitution procurement websites, where women are advertised to sex buyers, are key enablers of it. A buyer can go to sites such as Vivastreet or Adultwork, casually search for women in his area and contact the mobile number provided to arrange an appointment. It is quick, easy and highly profitable for the web companies. The Joint Slavery and Trafficking Analysis Centre, which is hosted by the National Crime Agency, says that those prostitution websites

“represent the most significant enabler of sexual exploitation in the UK”.

Claims that the sites enhance women’s safety are deeply misguided. Prostitution advertising websites significantly increase the ease and scale of organised sexual exploitation in this country.

Thankfully, other countries have started to act. Since the United States signed into law the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 earlier this year, Adultwork and a host of other sites have shut down their prostitution adverts there. In France, the Paris prosecutor launched an official investigation on charges of aggravated pimping into Vivastreet, which has since shut down its prostitution adverts in France. In Britain, our inadequate laws against commercial sexual exploitation prohibit a person from placing a call card for prostitution in a phone booth but allow companies such as Vivastreet to make millions advertising women online. That has to change urgently. This week, Vivastreet claimed that it is

“working closely with the Home Office to help develop an industry-wide approach to identifying and preventing online trafficking.”

That is not enough. The Government must take on corporate pimps, not collaborate with them.

Our law needs to be updated so that it clearly sets out that it is a criminal offence to facilitate or profit from someone else’s prostitution. Under section 53A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, it is already an offence to buy sex from a person who has been subject to force, coercion or exploitation by a third party, which means it does not have to be proved that the buyer was aware of the exploitation of the person they were paying for sex with. Sadly, research by Dr Andrea Matolcsi of Bristol University in 2017 suggested that there was only a low level of awareness of the offence and that the maximum fine of £1,000 did not deter buyers.

Our laws are simply not fit for purpose. To reduce demand for prostitution and sex trafficking, the law has to send a clear message that it is never acceptable to exploit someone by paying them for sex. To do that, the Government should urgently extend the existing prohibition against paying for sex in a public place to make it a criminal offence in all locations.

Although prostitution websites facilitate commercial sexual exploitation, they are not the root cause. The root cause is demand. Only a minority of men pay for sex. A study of 6,000 men by University College London found that 3.6% of men reported having paid for sex in the last five years. The men who were more likely to have paid for sex were young professionals with high numbers of unpaid sexual partners, which quashes the myth that the sex trade is a place of last resort for the lonely few. It is the demand of those men that drives the supply of mainly vulnerable women and girls into the sex trade. It is the money of those buyers that lines the pockets of the pimps and traffickers. The sex trade, and all the harm and suffering it entails, exists because of them.

Let me be clear: someone paying someone else to perform sex acts on them is abuse, just as exchanging accommodation, employment, services or other goods in return for sex is sexual abuse. A man who pays for sex is not a regular consumer, innocently availing themselves of a worker’s services. Offering someone money, goods or services for sex is sexual coercion. It is a form of violence against women.

Globally, 96% of victims of sexual exploitation are women and girls. When people pay for sex, they undergo a convenient act of forgetting. Only 44% of sex buyers who took part in a London-based study thought that prostitution had a very or extremely negative impact on women, which shows that many people who pay for sex ignore the fact that the women they pay for are likely to be vulnerable, may be in desperate need of money to pay off debts to their pimp, and have little or no agency in the situation. They do not think about the life or events that lead a woman to being in a brothel as opposed to working in an office or a shop.

There has rightly been outrage about the recently publicised cases of men working for aid agencies who exploited women overseas by paying them for sex, but where is the outrage when they come back to this country and sexually abuse in our own backyard? Across the UK, men are paying to sexually exploit vulnerable women and girls who they have shopped for online. We need to join the dots between prostitution, modern slavery, sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation. The common thread is men who pay to sexually access the bodies of women and girls.

There is no separate and distinct market specifically for sex-trafficked victims; the market is for sex. Detective Constable Julie Currie of the Metropolitan police’s modern slavery and kidnapping unit told the APPG:

“In the vast majority of cases, males paying for sex would give no thought to where the woman has come from or what circumstances have led her into prostitution.”

As Dr Maddy Coy from Florida University states:

“Policy approaches which presume a distinct market for the purchase of girls’ bodies for sex from that of the adult women are blinkered to the myriad of connections that span the age of majority.”

What links these forms of exploitation is the men who pay to abuse women and girls, their sexist attitude of entitlement and objectification, and the sex inequality that underpins it. Crucially, we need to acknowledge that there is nothing inevitable about this exploitation, and that we can and must take action to tackle demand from men who exploit vulnerable people by paying for sex.

I say to the Minister today that to reduce the demand for prostitution and sex trafficking, the law has to send a clear message that it is never acceptable to exploit someone by paying for sex. To do that, the Government should urgently extend the existing prohibition against paying for sex in a public space to make it a criminal offence in all locations. At the same time, it is vital that people exploited through prostitution are not criminalised, but instead supported to exit prostitution and access the services they need. As a result, penalties for loitering and soliciting should be removed from the statute book.

This “end demand” approach to prostitution is often referred to as the Nordic model, or the sex buyer law. So far it has been adopted in Sweden, Norway, France, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, so it is already in operation on UK soil. We urgently need to extend this legislation to the rest of the UK.

There is extensive evidence of the effectiveness of the sex buyer law in reducing demand. In Sweden, which was the first country to adopt an “end demand” approach back in 1999, anonymous surveys conducted in 1996 and 2008 revealed that the proportion of men in Sweden who reported paying for sex dropped from 13% to 8% in that period. The most recent study of prevalence rates found that 0.8% of men in Sweden had paid for sex in the previous 12 months, which is the smallest proportion recorded in two decades and the lowest in Europe.

Crucially, public attitudes have changed. In 1996, 45% of women and 20% of men in Sweden supported criminalising paying for sex. By 2008, support for such criminalisation had risen to 79% of women and 60% of men. That is the point of the law—it changes attitudes and prevents commercial sexual exploitation from happening in the first place.

Reducing demand also makes countries more hostile destinations for traffickers. A review of the sex buyer law in Norway concluded:

“A reduced market and increased law enforcement posit larger risks for human traffickers... The law has thus affected important pull factors and reduced the extent of human trafficking in Norway in comparison to a situation without a law.”

Similarly, the head of Stockholm police’s prostitution unit has pointed out:

“How will the traffickers survive without sex buyers? The sex buyers are the crucial sponsors of organised crime. The traffickers are not into this because of sex... They are in this because of the money.”

Paying to sexually access another person’s body is a choice—a choice to abuse. The law must serve as a deterrent and send a clear message that society will not stand idly by while a minority of men exploit vulnerable women and girls.

Changing the law around the selling and buying of sex is crucial to prevent sexual exploitation, but there are other ways in which we can reduce demand. We should seek to change attitudes towards women, exploitation and abuse through education. We need to confront the uncomfortable truth that many children are being groomed for sexual exploitation from an early age, so we really need age-appropriate relationship education in primary schools. When it comes to reducing the demand for commercial sexual exploitation, we should also educate boys about respecting women’s bodies, about gender-based violence and about negative gender stereotypes. That is why I am very sad that last week the Secretary of State for Education rowed back on his commitment to introduce relationships education in 2019; now it will hopefully be introduced in 2020.

Providing routes out of commercial sexual exploitation is also important. Solutions are required that provide wraparound care at the moment that a woman presents in crisis. The Modern Slavery (Victim Support) Bill, which proposes the provision of up to 12 months of rehabilitative care, recovery and support for victims, could be vital in ensuring that vulnerable women and girls are fully supported in their exit from prostitution.

In line with that, the Government need to properly fund sexual violence support services, such as Rape Crisis, which are struggling to keep up with demand. As the MP for Rotherham, I have witnessed to what happens when, confronted with the evidence of widespread sexual abuse, those in authority have looked away; when they have described exploitation as a choice; when they have dismissed it, or minimised it; and when they have known about it but failed to do all they could to prevent it.

We have a duty to act now, not to look away. It is time for this Government to recognise that prostitution is a form of violence against women and girls. I urge the Minister to legislate now to end demand by criminalising those who pay for sex and by closing the loophole that enables websites to facilitate abuse. Being abused is not a choice, but our seeming indifference to it is.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

Before I call the next Member, Fiona Bruce, I will just say that I do not intend to put a formal time limit on speeches. I think everyone will have time to speak, provided that they bear in mind that I intend to call the first winding-up speech at 3.28 pm. Members therefore have about six or so minutes, without a formal time limit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Champion]

I will give my time to the Minister, because I would really like her to answer three questions. First, will she legislate to ensure that websites cannot financially benefit from exploited women? Secondly, will she stop criminalising women who are forced into prostitution? Thirdly, will she criminalise both the buyers and those who force women, and benefit from forcing women, into prostitution?

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

The Minister has two and a half minutes.