Crime and Policing Bill

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 18th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

I am proud to have stood on a manifesto pledge to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, and I know that colleagues on the Front Bench take that extremely seriously. There are significant measures in this Bill on intimate image abuse, stalking, spiking and the sexual exploitation of children. I know they mark only the beginning of the Government’s mission to tackle those shameful crimes. As a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation perpetrated by grooming gangs rightly gets under way, we must now also confront the adult sexual exploitation being perpetrated on an industrial scale by pimping websites and men who pay for sex, both of which currently enjoy near-total legal impunity.

Laws against the commercial sexual exploitation of adults in this country are outdated, unjust and totally ineffective. In fact, our current legal framework creates a conducive context for commercial sexual exploitation—a failing that overwhelmingly affects women. Pimping websites, which function as massive online brothels, operate openly and freely, supercharging the sex trafficking trade by making it easier and quicker for exploiters to advertise their victims. Those online mega-brothels make millions of pounds every year by advertising thousands of vulnerable women from across the world for prostitution in the UK. Sadly, our legislation allows that.

Men who pay for sex, so often left out of conversations on prostitution and sex trafficking but who are the beating heart of such a brutal trade, abuse with impunity. Their demand and their money drives the sex trafficking trade, yet we do very little to deter them. Let us therefore start that process today by making it crystal clear as a Parliament that it is not possible to buy sexual consent. Giving someone money, accommodation, goods or services in exchange for sex acts is sexual exploitation and abuse; it is never acceptable.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady and her party for bringing this legislation forward. She is probably well aware that we in Northern Ireland, through Lord Morrow and the Assembly sometime back, brought in specific legislation on this, for the first time in the United Kingdom. Has she had an opportunity to look at that legislative change we had at Stormont? What she brings forward is even better than what we had originally tried to get at the Assembly. Does she feel, in all honesty, that women will be protected from sexual exploitation, as she has clearly said that they should?

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

The hon. Member is right to say that there is excellent practice in Northern Ireland, and the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, which I chair, is looking at that. He may be interested in that.