Commercial Sexual Exploitation

Tonia Antoniazzi 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.

[Carolyn Harris (Neath and Swansea East) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that under the United Nations protocol on trafficking, a victim does not need to have travelled in a vehicle in order for a trafficking offence to have been committed, yet under the UK’s Modern Slavery Act 2015, they do? This means that exploiters who are not actually moving a victim in a vehicle from one place to another are not being prosecuted as traffickers. It would make a huge difference if there were parity between the two pieces of legislation, to make sure that trafficking is justly prosecuted.

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. I know that the Minister is listening and will likely agree with her, as I do.

Multimillion-pound pimping websites have been allowed to operate freely. Men who drive demand for sex trafficking by paying for sex have been left to abuse with impunity, while the most popular pornography websites in the country have been free to peddle videos of rape and sexual abuse.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady for bringing this debate forward. She was active on this subject when she was on the Opposition Benches, and I commend her for that. To be fair, so was the Minister in her place tonight, so I am quite sure that, whatever we ask for, the Minister will respond in a very positive fashion, and I am glad about that.

Does the hon. Lady not agree that we must be at pains to ensure that the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is not used as a trafficking channel? Would she join me in asking the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to meet the relevant Republic of Ireland Minister to discuss and agree how we can collectively ensure that this is not a back door to abuse and misuse?

--- Later in debate ---

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

I thank the hon. Member for his contribution, because, having been a shadow Minister for Northern Ireland and from working with Women’s Aid in Northern Ireland, I know that this is a real problem. I welcome his offer to join him in meeting the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and the Minister to discuss this further, and I thank him very much for his intervention.

The previous Government stood by and let this happen, which was a shocking abdication of duty. Women and girls deserve so much better from the Government. I am looking forward to seeing this new Government stepping up and protecting women and girls from commercial sexual exploitation, and in this debate I will set out how.

First of all, let us be clear: prostitution is violence against women. Men who pay for sex are not regular consumers harmlessly availing “workers” of their services. Healthy, non-abusive sexual relationships require both parties to mutually and freely want to have sex. Offering somebody money, or food or a place to stay, in return for their performing sex acts is sexual coercion. It is simply not possible to commodify sexual consent. As the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls has stated,

“prostitution is intrinsically linked to different forms of violence against women and girls and constitutes a form of violence in and of itself.”

Most women exploited in prostitution were highly vulnerable before even entering the sex trade, and suffer severe consequences as a result. A Home Office report noted that approximately 50% of women in prostitution in the United Kingdom started being paid for sex acts before they were 18 years old, while up to 95% of women in street prostitution are believed to be problematic drug users. I and my hon. Friend the Member for Neath and Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) have met these women and seen the struggles that they have in Swansea city centre, and I know that they are there to fuel their drug use. They are pimped out, and it is heartbreaking.

This is how I use my politics: when I think about the most vulnerable people in society, I think about the women who were crying because they have had their children taken away from them permanently. They were not able to make ends meet, and they had to be taken out by their pimp to earn in order to feed themselves and to live their lives in a basic way. I really do believe that we should always think about those women when we talk about women in this House.

I want to read the words of Crystal, a survivor who has spoken out about her experience of prostitution. She said:

“I became involved in prostitution in my early twenties, courtesy of my then ‘boyfriend’; I now use the word pimp. My body always hurt from the constant rough sex. I’d get jaw ache from blow-job after blow-job. Group stuff was especially harrowing…I developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I got flashbacks and nightmares, when I could sleep. The addiction and the prostitution went together—I sold myself to fund my habit, and I couldn’t do it sober. It was a vicious cycle.”

Too often in discussions about prostitution and sex trafficking, there is silence when it comes to the people who perpetrate this kind of abuse: men who pay for sex. So it is only right that I also read their words today. Here is what one man wrote in a forum for sex buyers about a woman he paid £100 to perform sex acts on him:

“This is a classic case of ‘the pretty ones don’t have to work hard’...She’s Polish, and her English is not good...I was reminded of The Smiths’ song ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’...All the while she seemed completely disinterested and mechanical...I finally decided to fuck her, in mish...All the while, she kept her face turned to one side.”

I apologise for the language, Madam Deputy Speaker.

As one of her first acts in government, I urge the Minister to recognise the violence that women such as Crystal endure and the harmful actions of sex buyers by adding prostitution to the Government’s tackling violence against women and girls strategy, just as the Scottish Government have done.

So what do we know about sex buyers? We know that 3.6% of men in the UK report having paid for sex in the previous five years, and we know that the level of demand for prostitution varies over time and place. That is because men who pay to sexually exploit women are not helplessly reacting to uncontrollable sexual urges; they are making a choice, and that choice is influenced by a range of factors, including the risk of criminal sanction.

Importantly, we also know that the harm perpetrated when a man pays for sex is not restricted to the individual woman he exploits. As the Home Affairs Committee concluded last year, sex buyers “fuel demand for trafficking”. The cohort of men who create demand for the prostitution trade is the same cohort that creates the demand driving the trafficking of women into that trade. So we have a group of men perpetrating a type of violence against women that financially incentivises further violence against women. That should prompt a robust legal response from Government that holds sex buyers accountable for the severity of their actions.

But that is not the legal response we have. In England and Wales there is a loose patchwork of laws relating to prostitution, with no consistent objective underpinning them. Third-party facilitation of prostitution is illegal in some circumstances yet permitted in others. Victims of sexual exploitation face criminal sanction for soliciting in a public place, while individuals who pay for sex face criminal sanctions only if they kerb-crawl or pay for sex with an individual “subjected to force”. Even then, the law is very rarely enforced.

The consequences of this legal fudge are all around us, hidden in plain sight. Across the country, vulnerable women are being advertised online and moved around networks of so-called pop-up brothels. Organised crime groups dominate this ruthless trade, exploiting predominantly non UK-national women.

Let me give a snapshot of what is happening. Over a 12-month period, Leicestershire police visited 156 brothels, encountering 421 women, of whom 86% were Romanian. In Bristol, the Police Foundation identified 65 brothels over a two-year period. Over three quarters of the brothels displayed links to organised crime groups, and 83% of the women in them were non-British nationals. In city after city, women are being trafficked and exploited, and for one overriding reason: there are men willing and able to pay to abuse them. This has to stop. It is just unbearable.

Mia de Faoite, a survivor of prostitution who now trains the police on how to combat commercial sexual exploitation, points to how we should do this. She says:

“Prostitution is what most people imagine it to be: violent and dangerous. In the six years that I was involved, I endured a gang rape and three separate rapes…The only countries in Europe who are making a substantial impact in the fight against modern day slavery are the ones who have acknowledged and faced the cause: the demand.”

Mia is right, and I urge the Minister to listen to her.

A growing number of countries and states are waking up to the fact that without demand from sex buyers, there would be no supply of women into prostitution and sex trafficking. By criminalising paying for sex and decriminalising victims of sexual exploitation, the Governments of Ireland, France, Sweden, Norway and Canada have shifted the burden of criminality off victims and on to perpetrators. England and Wales must be the next countries added to that list.

Sweden was the first nation to adopt demand reduction legislation in 1999, affording us more than two decades of evidence. The results are stark: demand has dropped, public attitudes have transformed and traffickers are being deterred. The most recent research found that 7.5% of men in Sweden had paid for sex. Just 0.8% of them had paid for sex in the previous 12 months—the smallest proportion recorded in two decades and the lowest level in Europe.

I have seen at first hand how agencies collaborate to implement Sweden’s sex purchase Act, having met police and support workers there tasked with holding sex buyers accountable and assisting victims. Co-ordinated multi-agency working, backed up by strong political leadership, have been key to translating the legislation into real change on the ground.

Those who want to preserve the right of men to pay for sex have claimed that outlawing this abusive practice would simply drive the prostitution trade underground, making it harder to identify victims. However, as a study commissioned by the European Commission concluded, there is a logical fallacy at the heart of that argument. Sex buying is largely opportunistic and relies on advertising. Sex buyers have got to be able to find women to sexually exploit, and the police can look at exactly the same adverts that they do. If sex buyers can find women being exploited, so can the police.

Solely going after sex buyers is not sufficient to stop sex trafficking, however. We also have to crack down on the pimping websites that enable and profit from this abhorrent trade. Pimping websites are commercial online platforms dedicated solely or partly to advertising women for prostitution. They function like mass online brothels, making it as easy to order a woman to exploit as it is to order a takeaway. Despite it being illegal to place a prostitution advert in a phone box, the same advert can be legally published for profit on a website. Our laws have not kept pace with technological change, and pimps have got rich as a result. As the Scottish Parliament’s cross-party group on commercial sexual exploitation found in its inquiry into pimping websites, a small number of highly lucrative websites dominates the market, centralising and concentrating demand online. The sites make it simple and fast for traffickers to advertise their victims and connect with their so-called customer base in towns and cities across the UK.

Shamefully, the previous Government not only failed to stop pimping websites from operating, but collaborated with them. Since 2018, Home Office officials have met 20 times with Vivastreet, one of the biggest websites advertising prostitution. What has been the result of that collaboration with mass prostitution rings? The Home Affairs Committee’s conclusion was:

“The threat posed by websites advertising prostitution, the continuing failure of their owners to implement even the most basic safeguards against pimping and trafficking, and the sheer scale of trafficking for sexual exploitation they facilitate, is at total odds with the National Crime Agency and Home Office’s decision to collaborate with them. We found this public partnership working inexplicable, particularly given the total absence of evidence that it has led to a reduction in the scale of trafficking facilitated by these websites—and the flagrant facilitation of trafficking enabled by, for instance, single individuals being allowed to advertise multiple women for prostitution.”

The Home Affairs Committee, the all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation and the Scottish Parliament’s cross-party group on commercial sexual exploitation have been united in their conclusion that in order to bust the business model of sex trafficking we have to drag our anti-pimping laws into the 21st century by making it a criminal offence to enable or profit from the prostitution of another person, whether that takes place online or offline. Hand in hand with that anti-pimping law, we need a cross-Government strategy to help survivors exit sexual exploitation and rebuild their lives. That is because in order to stop sexual exploitation, we have to end impunity for pimps and punters, and provide support—not sanctions—for victims.

I turn to pornography and the action that we need to finally start tackling the rampant commercial sexual exploitation on pornography websites, as well as their wider harms. A groundbreaking inquiry into the pornography trade by the all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation concluded that we cannot simply end the epidemic of male violence against women and girls without confronting the role that pornography plays in fuelling sexual objectification and sexual violence. The fact that Government have hitherto failed to tackle even the most egregious abuses perpetrated by this predatory industry is not because that has proved too difficult, but because there has not been sufficient political will. That has to change now.

The findings of the group’s inquiry were extensive and unequivocal. I urge the Minister to study them carefully. I will highlight just a few. First, pornography consumption fuels sexual violence. There is extensive evidence from experimental, non-experimental, longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of that. Research indicates that pornography influences viewers’ so-called sexual scripts, shaping their understanding, expectations and decisions in relation to sexual behaviour. Pornography also serves to dehumanise and sexually objectify women, fostering attitudes that underpin violence against women and girls.

Secondly, illegal content is freely accessible on mainstream pornography websites. Lawlessness characterises the online pornography trade, with films featuring child sexual abuse, rape and trafficking victims found on some of the UK’s most heavily visited sites. Thirdly, the inquiry concluded that sexual coercion is inherent in the commercial production of pornography. I will quote the words of Alia Dewees, a survivor of pornography and trafficking who now works to support other survivors. Alia was just 20 when she was first paid to perform in pornography. Giving evidence to the all-party group, she recalled,

“when I did not want to consent, when I was feeling uncomfortable, unsafe, or unwilling, I did not have the freedom to leave that shoot without repercussions. I didn’t have the freedom to leave and know that I wasn’t going to be sued for breach of contract.”

Alia experienced that immense pressure to participate in filmed sex acts because on a previous date she had signed a legal contract to do so. That is commercial sexual exploitation. Like too many other women, she was subjected to a horrifying level of sexual abuse in this so-called industry. She bravely spoke out.

There are simple, practical steps that Ministers can take now to rein in the lawless activities of pornography sites and implement basic safeguards. Such measures should include making the regulation of pornography consistent across the online and offline spheres, as recommended by the British Board of Film Classification, and requiring online platforms accessed from the UK to verify that every individual featured in pornographic content on their sites is an adult and gave permission for the content to be published there. Safeguards must include giving individuals who feature in pornographic material accessed from the UK the legal right to withdraw their consent to material in which they feature being published or distributed further. We have the power to make that burden a little lighter by giving individuals who feature on pornography websites the legal right to have that content taken down.

I would like to pay tribute to the Ministers on the Front Bench. Labour voted in support of the amendment tabled by the now Minister of State at the Home Department, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham (Dame Diana Johnson), but it was blocked by the Conservative Government. Now that Labour is in power, I hope that we will see vital safeguards in a Government Bill soon. In opposition, Labour could only use words in the fight against commercial sexual exploitation. Now we can use deeds. This Government must shift power out of the hands of punters, pimps and pornographers, and place it into the hands of women and girls.