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Women, Justice and Gender Equality

I wanted to take this opportunity to speak about three aspects of violence against women: forced marriage, treatment of women in prison, and prostitution. I am very glad that the Prime Minister’s announcement on forced marriage legislation means that I do not need to speak about the first aspect. On prisons, Baroness Corston’s report is forthcoming shortly, so I will leave that important debate until it is published. I want to give my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock) a chance to contribute, so I shall speak briefly about the issue of prostitution. Members will know that when I was a Minister I had the privilege of launching the Government’s strategy on prostitution. In doing so, I changed the policy for zones of tolerance of prostitution that had been outlined in a consultation document to one that focused much more on the safety of the women and dealing with the men who paid for sex. The evidence shows that that was the right approach. The countries that have licensed or regulated prostitution have seen a dramatic increase in all facets of the sex industry. There has been a huge increase in people trafficking and child prostitution, and indications of an increase in violence against women. I want the Government to go further than I was able to persuade them to go. I want them to look at Sweden, which introduced legislation that, first, criminalises the buying of sex, secondly, decriminalises the selling of sex and, thirdly, provides proper support services to help women to escape from the capture that is prostitution. In just five years, Sweden has dramatically reduced the number of its women in prostitution. In the capital city of Stockholm, the number of women in street prostitution has been reduced by two thirds and the number of men paying for sex has been reduced by 80 per cent. In addition, the number of foreign women being trafficked into Sweden has fallen massively. The Swedish Government estimate that in the past few years only 200 to 400 women and girls have been trafficked into Sweden—a figure that is negligible compared with the 15,000 to 17,000 women a year who are sex trafficked into neighbouring Finland. The big trick in Sweden was not just to pass the two laws, but to provide the support that women need to leave prostitution. Things did not start working until the police were trained. The problem about an effective prostitution strategy is that it depends on the commitment of the police. When the police were trained about the new powers to help women to leave prostitution, there was a massive transformation. The police understood that prostitution is a form of male violence against women, where the exploiter or buyer should be punished and the victim or prostitute needs to be helped. They started to put women into projects to reduce the level of drug abuse among women, reduce the number of women involved in prostitution, and reduce the damage to their children. Among our police forces, there is a patchy approach to tackling prostitution. Of the 629 successful prosecutions for kerb crawling in Britain, Cleveland—one of our smallest police forces—was responsible for 106. Let me praise Cleveland police force. It has the sense not only to prosecute men who pay for sex, but to arrange with the magistrates courts to deal with all the prosecutions on one day and with the local newspaper to publicise the names and addresses of the men involved. As a result, very few of the men come from Cleveland. The men in that area know what happens. Our policy is only three quarters of the way towards the policy that we need. We ought to adopt the policy that Sweden has adopted. Even within the framework of the present prostitution policy, an enormous difference can be made simply by the way in which local police forces choose to police prostitution and paying for sex. I cannot find any successful prosecutions for kerb crawling from Thames Valley. As a Thames Valley MP, I hope that that is a failure in the statistics. There are no cautions for kerb crawling either. In a funny way, I am not surprised. In order to get better policing of prostitution in my constituency, I had to persuade local businesses to raise £16,000 for a camera in the area where prostitution affects Slough. The local businesses were happy to do that. Slough council, unfortunately, was not. Our police said, ““Yes, it’s priority, but not enough of one.”” Luckily, the council offered us a slot to watch the camera, so it can have an effect. When local communities are besieged—it feels like that—by prostitution, when people have to take their children to school via drug litter, and when they bring their children back from Brownies and see men and women having sex in people’s back gardens, they cannot bear it. They feel that their home is not their home, and we have a responsibility to tackle that. When I introduced the Government’s policy, I was attacked for including a proposal to ensure that if two women worked together in a flat, it would not be treated as a brothel, and I am unashamed of that. It is right to make the penalty for brothel-keeping 14 years in prison, but two women who are prostituting themselves together should not be sent to prison for 14 years. I ask the media not to take cheap shots, but instead to let us make sure that between us we have a policy that keeps women who are involved in prostitution safer. Last year in Ipswich we had a horrible reminder of how dangerous the profession is. Let us not fall for the myth that it is the oldest profession, and that we will always have to live with it, because we can get rid of it. The way to do that is to target the men who pay for sex and who are responsible for violence against women.