Commercial Sexual Exploitation

Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)]

There have been huge advances in the battle for women’s equality in recent decades, but on some issues, we have gone backwards. Chief among them is commercial sexual exploitation. [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Siobhain McDonagh)]

Order. I ask that Members leave the Chamber quietly, out of respect for the Adjournment debate.

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

Giving someone money, accommodation, food, a job or other services on the condition that they perform sex acts is sexual exploitation and abuse, yet the global trade in sexual exploitation—perpetrated primarily against women and girls—is bigger than ever before. Sex trafficking is the most profitable form of modern slavery in the world, while violent, misogynistic pornography is consumed on an unparalleled scale, mostly by men. This was not an accident, and it was not inevitable: we could and should have done so much more to protect women and girls. Instead, the past 14 years have been a veritable golden age for pimps and pornographers.