PAYING for sexual acts would become a criminal offence in Scotland under a Bill introduced last month. Alba MSP Ash Regan’s “Unbuyable” Bill has cross-party support and would bring the law into line with both the Scottish government’s policy on gender-based violence and its international legal obligations under the Istanbul Convention and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw).

“Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here,” she says. “Prostitution is a system of violence that turns women into commodities. It can’t be reduced to a matter of individual ‘choice,’ because it affects the ability of all women to achieve equality.”

“There is currently — as, I think, we all recognise — an absolute epidemic of violence against women and girls in our society, and I believe that commercial sexual exploitation is a very important area from which we should not look away.”

There are estimated to be between 6,000 to 8,000 women involved in prostitution in Scotland. The police and the Crown Office already regard prostituted women and girls as victims of commercial sexual exploitation. The Bill aligns the law with this by decriminalising the victims, quashing historic convictions for soliciting, and providing a statutory right to support services to assist women to leave the trade.

“In all my years of research and work on this issue, of all the women I met who had been exploited in prostitution, not one wanted to stay in it for a moment longer than they had to.”

A hugely important aspect of the Bill then is its aim of driving investment in services to support women to exit and rebuild their lives. Of course this is one part of a wider picture. Despite an escalating crisis of VAWG, women and girls’ access to services and to justice is getting worse.

A recent review of violence against women services in Scotland recommended an immediate increase in public spending just to provide a minimum core service to women and girls in need. West Dunbartonshire has the second-highest rate of domestic abuse in Scotland but its only specialist service, Clydebank Women’s Aid, set up 40 years ago, is being forced to close due to council funding cuts. In Glasgow the specialist police unit is reported to be buckling under the strain of a rapid rise in sexual offences against girls and women with officers currently dealing with 584 live cases of rape and domestic abuse in the city.

Women and children are at the very sharpest end of public spending priorities and cuts; left suffering the consequences of violence while perpetrators evade them.

The “Unbuyable” Bill is about the prevention of one type of violence — prostitution — through changing male behaviour. Known as the Nordic model, this “challenging demand” approach is backed by the Scottish government’s own evidence review and a recent one undertaken by A Model for Scotland. It’s the policy of the party of government in Scotland, and of the “workers’ parliament,” the Scottish TUC.

“Currently it is not illegal to buy or sell sex in Scotland,” Regan explains, “but the current law is complicated. There are offences around the edges — for example, kerb crawling and soliciting for sex is a crime, but 90 per cent of the trade is now off street. Living off the proceeds of prostitution is unlawful.”

“My Bill makes things much clearer, and the focus is on the buyers. It’s men’s demand that drives the trade and the proportion of men who have paid for sex at least once has doubled in the last 35 years. We know anonymity is extremely important to the majority of sex buyers. They fear being found out. Criminalising them threatens their anonymity — it’s the key to reducing the demand.”

What does she say to those who claim prostitution is “work,” like any other?  

“Well, if that’s true, and prostitution is OK for some women, then it must be OK for all women, and that’s the hypocrisy of the politicians who are happy to go along with prostitution being presented as a type of ‘work,’ the ones who support decriminalisation or legalisation. They wouldn’t want their own daughters to be prostituted, but they think it’s good enough for other people’s.

“This is not a ‘normal job’. It’s a market place for degradation, humiliation and abuse.”

In Germany which decriminalised prostitution in 2002, jobcentres initially required women to apply for “jobs” in brothels as the state regards this as a normal type of work. This was subsequently clarified by the courts as an unlawful requirement.

“And how would you apply health and safety laws to prostitution? You can’t make it safe. It is inherently harmful. A US study said that women who are exploited in prostitution are 18 times more likely to be murdered than someone in the general population. Rates of PTSD among women who have been through prostitution is higher than we see in combat veterans.”

For these reasons Regan estimates that by preventing harm, her Bill will deliver significant long-term financial savings for local and national governments.

Entering prostitution is often presented as a “decision” based on economic necessity. While it may be for some women, levels of vulnerability for people who become involved in prostitution are typically high, with 50-90 per cent abused as children and 75 per cent having experienced homelessness.

The modus operandi of pimps involves befriending/grooming with the supply of drugs and alcohol or accommodation and the use of manipulation, violence and threats to maintain compliance.

While not everyone involved in prostitution is trafficked, Scotland’s current laws make it a highly profitable destination for sex trafficking, with reported figures at a record high. Police figures show in 2020, 84 women were sexually exploited by trafficking gangs in Scotland. Nine of the women were underage, with the youngest being only 13 years of age.

Last year a gang was convicted of trafficking vulnerable women around Scotland to work in a network of rented flats used as brothels in Glasgow and Edinburgh. One of those convicted had accumulated proceeds of £2.6 million. Glasgow High Court heard how £200,000 had been spent advertising the victims on one adult site. This is big business with those benefiting most being those who extract “rent” through control of pimping websites, which are the digital marketplaces for human goods.

Why, when we’ve had devolution for 25 years, has it taken so long to act? The progressive vision for a Scottish Parliament was that it would start to redistribute wealth and power and democratise our economy, and in doing so, begin to seriously address inequality between the sexes. The STUC women’s committee led a campaign for equal representation in the new parliament on the belief this would effect a change in political priorities that would benefit working-class women and challenge the male domination of politics, culture and society. One of the crucial areas crying out for change then was that of male violence against women and children. So how come nothing’s happened?

Regan explains: “I first got involved with this issue more than a decade ago, helping Rhoda Grant, the Labour MSP, when she introduced her private member’s Bill around 2012. But unfortunately that didn’t get cross-party support. An earlier attempt by Labour’s Trish Godman in 2010 ran out of time. When I became an SNP government minister [for community safety] I tried again then. But it didn’t happen even though it was government policy.”  

The main barrier to progress at that time was the SNP’s Bute House Agreement with the Scottish Greens, who back decriminalisation. But that barrier is no more.

“Right now the Bill has cross-party support, it aligns with SNP and Scottish government policy, so there’s no reason it can’t progress,” says Regan.

However Scottish ministers remain tight-lipped about whether it will receive government support. The stage 1 debate will be in the autumn. Plenty of time then for Scottish Morning Star readers to write to their MSPs demanding their support.