Labour’s most ambitious pledge isn’t to reach the highest sustained growth in the G7, or to transition Britain to zero-carbon electricity by 2030. It is to halve male violence against women and girls over the next decade. At least 100 women were killed by a man in 2023. So achieving this would be an extraordinary feat that would transform the experience of being female in the UK. But a real test of Labour’s commitment is whether it is prepared to protect some of the most vulnerable women in society who find themselves trapped in prostitution.
Prostitution puts women in mortal peril; it is hard to quantify precisely but women in prostitution are many, many times more likely to end up murdered than other women. Femicide Census figures highlight that 47 women involved in prostitution were killed by men in the UK between 2009 and 2023.
Too often, these women are effectively written off. An example came just last week in BBC reporting of the trial for the alleged murder of mother Samantha Holden, whom her family described as a “kind and beautiful soul who will be forever loved”. She was found by her 18-year-old son strangled and suffocated to death. That wasn’t how the BBC framed her death: “murdered sex worker found dead by son, court hears”, its headline read for hours before it was changed in the face of righteous anger. This plays into two damaging social mores. The first is the age-old assumption that women who take payment for sex – who are overwhelmingly coerced or trafficked into this rotten “industry” – are somehow less deserving than other victims of male violence. The second is the newer idea that governments should turn a blind eye to this commercial sexual exploitation because “sex work is work” and the state should let it take place rather than clamping down on men who buy sex. Both are pernicious in undermining the protection of women from violent men.
Women being killed is a feature, not a bug, of prostitution. You only have to read a sample of the appalling online reviews to see how men view these women as objects who exist to satisfy their sexual desires, however violent. In one study, a significant minority of men who buy sex openly said their payment entitled them to demand any act of their choosing; more will truly think that. The very notion of consent disintegrates in a situation where a man is paying for sex: how can a woman meaningfully consent with someone she knows could kill her in minutes if she says no or is perceived to make the wrong facial expression?
Rape becomes a hollow concept; sexual assault the entitlement of a paying customer. One survivor, Esther, told me her decision to tattoo every limb was an insurance policy to put violent men off from going too far because it made her body so recognisable.
Men who buy sex are more likely to commit violent crimes. For some men, paying for sex clearly acts as a conveyor belt to violence and sexual assault. Why would any society serious about tackling violence against women leave that belt running for young men whose sexual norms are already unhealthily influenced by violent porn?
Feminist and advocacy organisations, such as UK Feminista and Cease, are putting this question to the Labour government, with its breathtakingly ambitious target of halving violence against women and girls. Does the government see the vulnerable women harmed by male sex buyers – one nine-country study found almost seven in 10 prostituted women were suffering from PTSD – as worthy as other female victims? There are encouraging signs; two home office ministers, Diana Johnson and Jess Phillips, are former officers of the APPG (all-party parliamentary group) on commercial sexual exploitation, which has recommended that prostitution should be recognised as a form of violence against women and that the buying of sex or profiting from the prostitution of another person should be criminalised. Phillips last month pledged the government would look at all levers to reduce the demand for commercial sexual services to protect women from exploitation.
But Labour will need to confront the “sex work is work” mantra championed by the pimp lobby (who have rebranded them “sex workers”), who have a strong hold on parts of the left. It is easily bought into by men who pretend that prostitution is a transaction underpinned by equal power dynamics, and by privileged naïfs who swallow the “happy hooker” myth that plenty of women love offering sex for cash, but never stop to ask themselves if they would accept £20 for performing a blowjob.
The reality is that prostitution is overwhelmingly reserved for women without other choices: with drug and alcohol addiction, or histories of domestic and/or child sexual abuse. The average age of entry into prostitution is 15. And women are being trafficked into the UK from countries such as Romania and effectively held as sex slaves to be raped by several men a day paying for the privilege. One study found more than half of male sex buyers understand that most women in prostitution are lured, tricked or trafficked but exploit them anyway.
Meanwhile, the state looks the other way. Too few police forces use the fact that it is a crime for someone to solicit sex in public to crack down on men buying sex, while arranging to buy sex online is entirely legal. Sexual exploitation websites such as Vivastreet and Adultwork rake in huge profits as a result of pimps advertising women. Their business model drives demand for sex trafficking by making it exceptionally easy for criminal gangs to connect with buyers. Sex trafficking is almost 10 times more profitable than other forms of forced labour, yet is much harder to prosecute under UK law because it involves proving that terrified women have been forced into sex work, which is in practice extremely difficult.
The international evidence shows that criminalising the buying of sex reduces male demand for prostitution; sex trafficking is most prevalent in countries such as Germany where prostitution is legalised; in Sweden, where sex buying was criminalised in 1997, male demand for prostitution has declined significantly, with no increase in risk for prostituted women, as the pimp lobby often argues. Male demand for prostitution is not innate. Governments shape it through legislation.
So back to the key question: will Labour take the opportunity to reduce this deadly form of violence against women and girls?
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
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