Prostitution and Sex Trafficking: Demand

Sharon Hodgson Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Gateshead South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, and I congratulate her on securing this debate, however short—we are all managing to squeeze little bits in. Does she agree that those who argue that outlawing pimping websites will just drive this all underground are absolutely wrong? Actually, the reverse is seen: prosecution rates go up, so the demand decreases.

[Tracy Gilbert]

I agree. One piece of misinformation surrounding the actions that I have proposed is that outlawing pimping websites would simply displace trafficking to the dark web, making no impact on the scale of sexual exploitation. That claim lacks both logic and evidence. Advertising victims of sex trafficking on the dark web carries multiple disadvantages and barriers for both traffickers and sex buyers. It requires technical expertise from the traffickers to post the adverts and from sex buyers to locate and access the adverts. Advertising on the dark web would substantially restrict the customer base that traffickers could access via their adverts, as well as making it harder to advertise victims in the first place.

A similar myth is that outlawing paying for sex would just drive prostitution underground, making it harder to identify victims and perpetrators, and have no impact on the scale of offending. There is a logical fallacy underlying that claim: men who pay for sex must be able to locate women to sexually exploit. Police officers’ support services can look at exactly the same adverts as sex buyers to locate victims and perpetrators. In short, if sex buyers can find the women being exploited, so can the police.

Perhaps the most destructive myth of all is that being paid to perform sex acts is work, making the men who pay women for sex ordinary consumers. We need to be absolutely clear as policymakers and as a Parliament that there is no such thing as sex work. Giving someone money, accommodation, food or other goods or services in exchange for a sex act is sexual exploitation and abuse. It is never acceptable, and our laws must reflect that.

I thank hon. Members for making the time to attend today’s debate. I hope that, together, we can start to end this exploitation of women. I conclude with the words of Mia de Faoite, a survivor of prostitution, who said that demand reduction legislation that criminalises sex buyers and decriminalises victims works because it puts sex buyers

“at risk of bringing what they do in the dark into who they are in the day.”