A Home Office minister has said she would like to see paying for sex “outlawed” as part of a bid to stop women being trafficked into prostitution.
Sarah Dines told the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee on Wednesday that demand for the services of sex workers was “part of human nature” and had been “around for thousands of years”.
She suggested that despite the government’s failure to follow other countries in adopting the “Nordic model” of making it a crime to pay for sex she was in favour of such action.
“Sex work, the demand is there, it’s unfortunately part of human nature, I would like for it to be outlawed,” the minister told MPs.
“What we are doing is using the legal system to make the UK the most unfriendly country for this sort of practice that we can.”
Ms Dines added: “The sex industry, the sex trade, prostitution, the trafficking in general, the abuse of others for money or power has been around for thousands of years. Reducing that demand is difficult.
“There have been various models across the world in different countries, people have tried different things, we know for example in the sex trade the Nordic model, we know other countries have tried outlawing various practices. What is clear is that discouraging demand is very difficult.
“We have to be very clear about the evidence in that. What we are doing practically is we are funding a lot of work to stop this trade. It goes to the very heart of the whole reason why we have now got the Illegal Migration Bill now passed because we want to squash the international organised crime aspect of this.”
The minister’s comments came during a hearing on human trafficking in which she was pressed on the lack of prosecutions of men having sex with trafficked women and what the government was doing to reduce demand for paid sex.
Ms Dines insisted that pursuing the international crime groups responsible for trafficking women into Britain was key to reducing the problem but came under fire over the government’s claims that migrants crossing the Channel in small boats are “gaming” the modern slavery laws.
Ms Dines told the committee that the reluctance of trafficked sex workers to support prosecutions against the men exploiting them was one reason for the lack of statistics to prove the claims of abuse made by the Prime Minister and Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
She said that four examples provided to the committee of specific cases, plus police testimony, demonstrated that there was problem with migrants taking advantage of the modern slavery legislation.
But her defence of the government’s arguments was dismissed by committee chairwoman, Dame Diana Johnson, who accused the minister of having “no reliable data” to prove the truth of the claims of abuse.
“Giving four examples of individuals is not data that should help determine whether a policy is working or not,” she said.
Dame Diana highlighted a call by the Office for Statistics Regulation for ministers to ensure that the source for claims made in public were clear and that the statistics did not support the claim that people were gaming the system. She asked Ms Dines if she accepted this verdict, saying that it was the view of the national regulator of the use of statistics.
The minster replied that the Home Office did “strive to collect good quality data” but cautioned “that the type of crimes, the type of harms that we are trying to stop, are incredibly difficult to get the data on.”
