Chamber and committees

Which study was that?

I cannot speak for what other people might believe to be true. I am a legislator; I have to go with the facts and the evidence, and the facts and the evidence say that that is not true.

It is often indoors, if that is what you mean, so I imagine that it is similar to Scotland. I think the committee has raised the fact that, even in a country such as Sweden, where they changed the law a very long time ago and there is relatively robust enforcement, prostitution still exists. You are right about that.

However, I have heard from Sweden that, when you criminalise the buyer, you change the power balance. It gives women who are in prostitution a sense that they have slightly more power in relation to the sex buyer than they had before, because now they have the law—and, one would hope, the police—on their side. If they have a problem with a sex buyer, they can go to the police about it. That makes an important difference to the power balance.

I am not sure that I understand the question. Are you talking about the way in which our current laws are drafted or are you asking about the way in which the bill is drafted?

Yes—I have acknowledged that.

That is quite right—that has come through in the evidence, and it has been raised with me in my meetings with the Crown Office.

For obvious reasons that the committee will understand, women working in prostitution will often not be willing to go to court. Many of them fear for their safety, they might have threats made against them and so on. Obviously, they might not want buyers to know that they have gone to court to get convictions. My view is that it would be good if we could get as many convictions as possible without relying on the women’s evidence. I believe that that can be done, but I accept that there will be occasions when the women will need to give their testimony.

Can you be more specific, Ms McNeill?

First, the reason why there is resistance to the idea of criminalising the buyer is that, as I have just explained, Scotland is a very profitable destination for pimps and traffickers. It is a top destination—that came out of a report from an all-party parliamentary group at Westminster; the committee can look it up. We are talking about millions of pounds being made from the commoditisation of girls and women. I gave you the national referral mechanism figures. Some of the people who are being exploited in the sex trade in Scotland are children. As a country, we need to consider whether we think that that is acceptable, or whether we want to change the law to address that. That is why there is resistance to criminalising the purchase of sex, but I do not think that that is a good enough reason not to do it.

As we have suggested—it came up when we discussed the bill with the Lord Advocate, and I think that it came out in the Crown Office evidence as well—this is root-cause offending. The type of men who are buying sex are quite often involved in other, similar crimes. Those men are involved in crime such as domestic abuse and other sexual crimes such as rape and sexual assault. It is appropriate, I think, that we consider criminalising this behaviour, because it sends a very strong message that, in Scotland, we do not want to tolerate this behaviour.

Screening is a myth. I come back to the figures again; I think that I mentioned them last time I was in front of the committee. There are the various proportions of women: the 2 per cent, the 38 per cent and the 60 per cent. The 2 per cent are probably the elite, at the very top of the market, and they are comfortable with the choices that they are making. I am not disputing that those women exist, and that they are in prostitution because they have made that choice. However, as legislators, we have to remember that they are not the majority, and their experience is not the same as that of the majority of people in prostitution. They might be able to screen, take a very small number of clients, make a lot of money and then leave the industry after a few years—but, as legislators, we need to consider the reality for the majority of women who are in prostitution.

I have spoken to women who have worked on street, I have spoken to women who have worked in brothels in Edinburgh, and I have spoken to women who were trafficked from Africa. There are many more examples, but I will just mention those. This is what they would describe to you. If you work in a brothel in Edinburgh, you cannot refuse clients. If you refuse more than a certain number of clients, your pay will be docked—and you have to pay fees and so on. Somebody working in a brothel in Edinburgh said to me that people have the idea that working off street is safer. She said, “I think it is slightly safer than working on street, but when we’re screaming in another room, the manager will just shut the door”—so that people could not hear them screaming quite as loud. It was not like anybody rushed in to save them or anything.

The myth of screening has developed a life of its own. If you are trafficked, as we understand the majority of women in Scotland who are working in prostitution off street to be—that is what I am attempting to target with the bill—and you are being coerced and controlled by a pimp, you will not have the opportunity to screen your clients. You will not know who is about to come through that door next, you will not know what has been advertised that you are supposed to be doing, and you will not get most of the money for it either.

We have to remember that anonymity is one of the most prized things that sex buyers have. That is the reason why the proposed law is so effective. It is not because we are going to put lots of the buyers in prison; it is because of the deterrent effect. These men value their anonymity. They use burner phones, and they use user identification, which is how women will sometimes attempt to verify them—they will try to verify whether a particular user ID is in use. They use fake names.

The women’s identities are often online, because of the review sites with pictures and so on. However, these men are very much in the shadows. They value their anonymity. It is laughable to suggest that there is any kind of meaningful screening. Do not get me wrong: I think that the women who attempt to screen will do so, because they are trying to survive in a system that is stacked against them. However, there is no meaningful screening that goes on. Most women in prostitution do not have the ability to decline punters.

If we introduce the model that I am suggesting and we have joined-up trauma-informed advocacy into mainstream services, as well as specialist services for people who are in prostitution, I imagine that things will get much better. In their evidence to the committee, the Crown Office and the police said that support is an important part of the issue. If the police are using a policing model in which they do welfare checks, they need to be able to signpost women to adequate support where they can feel that they are getting help.

You are quite right to mention that, quite often, women who are involved in prostitution have difficulty in engaging with mainstream services because of fears about what might happen to them in relation to accommodation and what might happen to their children if they disclose that they are in prostitution. Often, they do not want to make such a disclosure. That is why it is important that we spend more money on support services. A large part of that involves advocacy for women who are in prostitution so that they get the housing, financial support and so on to which they are entitled but which they might be afraid to access. We need to make sure that people get the support to which they are entitled. Often, for the reasons that Mr MacGregor set out, that does not happen.

We have a pyramid that we can share with the committee—Maren Schroeder or Anna Macleod will find it for me in a minute, and I can show it to you—which shows, basically, the distribution of those women.

I keep saying “women”, and I hope that the committee will forgive me for doing so. I acknowledge that there are men and boys who are involved in prostitution, but women and girls account for 96 per cent of the people who are exploited in prostitution, so I use “women” as shorthand.

As I said, we have a pyramid that I can share with the committee. It covers some of the figures that I have set out already. The 2 per cent at the top of the pyramid are the sexually exploited elite. I think that the people in that 2 per cent would say that they made a choice to go into prostitution, and it is their choice to do that. Next is the 38 per cent. We start to see the choices and agency of the people in that group reducing quite dramatically. They are forced into prostitution by things such as inequality, poverty, racism, sexism and lack of opportunities. Next is the 60 per cent—the majority, obviously. There is a high number in that group, and they are enslaved. They are there against their will; they have not made the choice to go into prostitution. Sex buyers quite often report on punters sites that they suspected that somebody was trafficked but that they did not do anything about it and carried on with the transaction anyway.

I want to ensure that the committee understands that, of the women who end up in prostitution in Scotland, about a third have come through our care system. We really need to do better for girls who have been in care. The committee will understand the situation better now, due to the public focus on the grooming gangs scandal. That is an extremely common model for forcing girls into prostitution. Girls who are 13 or 14 years old and have been through the care system are groomed into prostitution by older men.

In this study, a quarter to one third of the women and girls were sexually abused as children, or entered prostitution under the age of 18, so we can assume that they did not make a choice to be there. Trauma, addiction and mental health problems are the norm. About 80 per cent of them reported mental health issues, and a half to four fifths had substance abuse problems. Homelessness and poverty are major drivers for entering prostitution, which is why I am suggesting that our support model would include advocacy to mainstream services, because that is a very good model for providing support. Fifty per cent of the women grew up in poverty.

The figure for trafficking is very significant. Unfortunately, I believe that our figures on trafficking are not accurate. As the committee will probably understand, because most of this takes place indoors, we do not have a good understanding of the true nature and scale of sex trafficking in Scotland. In this study, the figure for such victims was between 36 and 39 per cent, but I suggest that the numbers are much higher than that. I had a conversation with the UK’s Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner a couple of weeks ago, and she agreed with me—she thinks that those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg.

I suggest to the committee that these women and girls are worth more than a life in prostitution and what that will do to them. It is important that we change the law as a matter of urgency.