Should David Cameron ‘nudge’ prostitutes?
Dear Lynne Jones,
As a fairly anonymous Labour MP, you get away with saying slightly more stupid things than the people at the top of your party (and that’s saying something). Your call earlier this year for prostitution to be legalised was a wonderful example of your spectacular inability to grasp a few basic truths about this behaviour and the evidence continues to mount that your support of prostitution is very unwise.
Whenever I come across a free-market thinker who is convinced that drugs, prostitution and other such delightful crimes should be legalised, they never fail to drop in Holland as an example of where legalised drugs and prostitution works really well. Not so. Holland has been forced to accept that around half of their 25,000 prostitutes are working illegally (many of them are from outside the EU) and their major cities have begun a concerted crackdown on red-light districts. Even Amsterdam, famous for its liberal attitudes, is shutting down part of its red light district, particularly areas where prostitutes display themselves in shop windows lit by neon lights. Amsterdam officials are buying up scores of buildings currently housing the sex trade, with a view to closing down the windows, as many of the brothels are linked to racketeering, human trafficking and organised crime. This is great news as far as I’m concerned, because any idiot who thinks that legalising prostitution makes it safer is living in a dreamworld.
However, clamping down on prostitutes is not the only possible answer. Now that David Cameron and the Conservative Party policy unit are raving about ‘Nudge’ and other books on persuasion and human influence, the Dutch city of Eindhoven is putting the principles into practice. Prostitutes in Eindhoven are going to be awarded “credits” in return for good behaviour under a new scheme to encourage them to abandon their line of work. They will receive so-called “street miles” that they can use to purchase designer clothes or furniture for free, provided they take up an offer by the city council to take steps leading to a career change and a safer lifestyle. Veronique Beurskens of Eindhoven council said “we needed to come up with incentives that these women might latch on to” as the city moves towards closing their designated sex work zone in 2011. The city will also fund assertiveness classes to help sex workers sever ties with their pimps, as well as workshops, advice and courses on how to find new jobs. The council is also trying out several more outlandish ideas put forward by art students from the Eindhoven Design College, such as giving some of the “dames” a makeover involving designer clothes to boost their self-confidence and creating a fashion label conceived by the prostitutes themselves.
Sounds great. Not sure what Gordon Brown would make of this but David Cameron would, in theory, be interested in this idea. Sadly, I fear the worst. Incentivising prostitutes by offering them huge cash prizes does seem bizarre. How do you check that someone is really a prostitute?! Could people be tempted into the trade, particularly those struggling on low incomes, if they get a bonus from the taxpayer for doing so? The whole initiative has been lampooned in the Dutch media, where some commentators have dubbed it the “whore miles” scheme and the plan is even receiving a lukewarm welcome among some prostitutes. ”This is fine if they actually want to move on to something else but some might not want to,” said Metje Blaak from Red Thread, the Dutch Prostitutes’ Union. “At the end of the day, this is a step towards making street prostitution illegal, and what will happen to the women then?” She added that prostitutes do not easily make the switch to a normal nine-to-five job. I can believe that!
After getting over the surreal existence of a union for prostitutes (do they donate to the Labour Party? – Ed.) perhaps you and the beloved free-marketeers will open your eyes and realise that giving people freebies doesn’t change their life circumstances or address the reasons they became prostitutes. It might sound like a victimless plan but it will solve nothing. ‘Nudging’ people to do the right thing is all well and good but I worry that blindly supporting these initiatives in the absence of tackling the root cause of why people behave like this in the first place could waste millions of pounds just like the Labour government have done. Good luck with trying to convince the residents of Birmingham about legalising prostitution!
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
LFAT, prostitution isn’t actually illegal in Britain. Only actions associated with it – kerb-crawling, managing a brothel etc. – are. The act of money for sex is entirely legal, and should stay that way. Where possible, people should be encouraged to leave (and not to enter) but it certainly shouldn’t be illegal.
Again, I come back to the point about incentives. How do you intend to ‘encourage’ people to leave when prostitution is not strictly illegal? Offer them some HMV vouchers? It being a legal activity but with illegal attachments raises serious problems for preventing people going into prostitution.
Those who prostitute themselves usually do so out of desperation. The few who choose to do so due to the extra money they can earn will continue to do so no matter what – as is their right.
But those who do not wish to must know that there is a way out that won’t leave them desitute and/or on the streets.
Having prostituion illegal won’t help anyone, and just criminalise more. Prostitution is not wrong in and of itself. What I – or anyone else – does with their own body is up to them, and only them.
I agree that desperation is usually involved, but giving incentives to prostitutes would surely tip more people into this behaviour than would otherwise seek it out? Making a horrible job that results from desperation seem more appealing sounds very dangerous to me.
I hardly think that giving clothes vouchers counts as offering ‘a way out’ – how about addressing the issues surrounding the financial destitution that prostitutes seem to face in the first place? The city of Eindhoven is looking at the symptoms, not the cause.
You appear to be (deliberately?) mis-reading me. Address ing the financial destitution that drives people in prostitution is precisely what we should be doing, and offering incentives in terms of financial support for people to leave prostitution and look for other kinds of work instead.
TD, I don’t think LFAT is mis-reading you, deliberately or otherwise. I read two different approaches in your respective posts.
You seem to regard criminalising prostitution as pointless, in which I would agree with you. You also support measures to offer help to prostitutes to enable them to escape the destitution which has driven them into the trade.
LFAT seems to be concerned that directing help specifically to prostitutes would make it more attractive to become a prostitute in the first place, in order to receive the assistance. Serial episodes of short-term prostitution could become quite tempting, in fact. He seems keen to address destitution more generally (rather than just destitution amongst prostitutes), in which regard I would agree.
Well done Patently for articulating what I have failed to articulate on my first day back at work after a week off. This post is not about legalising prostitution – it is about the dangers of incentivising certain behaviours and the message that incentives send out to people. Incentives and disincentives do not solve the underlying problems faced by society in many areas, be it prostitution, recycling, pensions etc. My concern is that the focus on ‘nudging’ people will come at the expense of really getting to grips with an issue.
I’m not sure I can ever see what people’s problem with prostitution is.
Ther sitgma is a hangover from judeo-christian moral values and doesn’t have a place in the modern world.
I think LFAT highlights a valid concern. While I don’t think that criminalising prostitution can ever be effective (oldest profession and all that!), targeting positive benefits is heading towards to kind of social engineering that delivered unto us the housing estate utopias we all know and love today… Sometimes a well-meaning intervention can be worse than no intervention at all.
Crushed, I strongly disagree with that. Although I don’t have the evidence to hand, I’m fairly confident that people don’t end up in prostitution out of choice, more out of dire necessity. For people to get to that stage is very worrying and should concern everyone, irrespective of our history or religious beliefs.
Shaun, nice to have you back again. Glad you agree with my argument that incentives can go horribly wrong. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be used at all because in some situations they can certainly be effective, but in the wrong hands they can wreak havoc on the policy agenda.
I’m totally free-market on it so think that if people freely choose to be prostitutes, then they should be able to do so. The key thing is free choice.
If you are addicted to heroin and selling your ass to feed a habit, that’s not a free choice. If you are dirt poor and unable to get a real job and you’re selling your ass to feed yourself and your children, that’s not a free choice. If you get sold on street corners because your pimp/trafficker will beat you to death if you don’t, that’s not a free choice.
To my mind the goal should be to try and create a social and economic order where those factors don’t conspire to coerce people into doing things they otherwise wouldn’t choose to. Were that accomplished, my guess is not too many women would choose a life in the sex trade…
I find myself agreeing with Shaun.
If it is her free choice to become a prostitute, then I have no problem with her doing so*. I just don’t believe that it ever is, beyond a de minimis number of exceptions.
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*although I would be very disappointed if she was my daughter
LFAT, prostituition, like most markets has different market segments going from the cheap and cheerful kerbside to high class escorts who presumably cost several thousand pounds per night.
I have few problems with the legalisation of prostitution. It is, afterall, a transaction between two consenting adults. It should be regulated to make it safer for both the prostitute and the punter.
You are confusing this with peoples’ desires to avoid regulation and state intervention which is presumably what is causing the problems in Amsterdam etc…
Assuming that we could close the borders sufficiently to exclude trafficked sex slaves (or punish the traffikers harshly enough to dis-incentivise them, just to be absurd for a moment); assuming we could also raise the minimum income of all women in all circumstances so that they all had at least a 3 bedroom house, a car, enough to eat and wear and 2 foreign holidays a year: assuming all that, I assure you that the newspapers would be just as full of escorts and masseurs as they are now.
Those who assert otherwise are simply demonstrating how little they know of women in general and prostitutes in particular.
There is no shortage of women who either enjoy whoring or for whom it is a minor inconvenience compared with the revenue it brings in.
Sad from the point of view of the Christian Taliban I’m sure, but no less a fact of life than the Labour party always raising taxes and always being chased out of office during an economic crisis.
Nothing can eradicate prostitution and legalisation and light regulation is the only moral, pragmatic and Tory course.
Dear letters man
As you say, you do not listen to arguments from experience, knowledge, reason or logic. Instead, your knowledge of this subject derives from when your mother dipped your soldiers in your boiled egg at breakfast.
Go away and talk to some prostitutes. Ask Metje Blaak how many of the prostitutes in her association are really coerced into being prostitutes. Consult adultworld.co.uk and read the blogs – how many of the women there sound as if they are compelled to sell their bodies? make a few appointments and chat a la Gladstone. Try learning from experience rather than from what your mummy told you.
I know this is futile because you are not interested in evidence or reality but as long as people like you drive policy, the Tory party is doomed.