Chamber and committees

The example of France and the European Court of Human Rights is so compelling that it is in the policy memorandum—or it should be. We will check that and make sure that, if it is not in there, we follow it up and send it to the committee.

Yes. We have seen in other countries, particularly in Sweden, that there is an improved relationship between the sellers and law enforcement. That comes back to what I was saying earlier about the police getting lots of tips from sellers about sex buyers who had also committed other crimes. That information is documentable.

Maybe we need to have a think about who is in prostitution, because I feel as though you were implying that if you decriminalised sale, it might attract more people into prostitution.

Okay.

Melissa Farley is very good on this. She would probably be described as the leading researcher on prostitution and its harm. She says that 2 per cent of people who work in prostitution feel fairly happy and can mitigate the risks against them. They feel that they have made the choice to do that.

She then says that 38 per cent of people working in prostitution are likely to be women who have suffered child sex abuse, including incest. They might have come from very chaotic, violent backgrounds, or they might have come through the care system. A lot of women who end up in prostitution have been through the care system, which, to my mind, is a shocking statistic that should give us all pause. Almost a majority of those people have entered prostitution as a child or are under immediate, extreme financial hardship. The rest—60 per cent—are trafficked. The 2 per cent might think that decriminalisation is good. Overall, if you look at the make-up of people who are involved in prostitution, you can see that they are not people whom you would want to criminalise at all.

On the policy intent, we recognise that prostitution is violence against women and that prostitution is the market for trafficking. The UK as a state, and Scotland as part of that, has various international legal obligations to reduce prostitution and to make our country hostile to sex traffickers, and we should remember that most trafficking is of women and girls for sexual purposes. People who are trafficked and coerced into prostitution live some of the most degrading existences possible.

I have a very good report here, which I can share with the committee in a moment, about the tactics that are used by pimps against women who are controlled in prostitution and how prostitution amounts to, in the words of Reem Alsalem in her recent research, “degrading treatment”, which is obviously contrary to the women’s human rights. It also constitutes, in many and most cases, actual torture.

We cannot look away from this. I am establishing that there is a problem here. There are something like 6,000 to 8,000 women working in prostitution in Scotland, which is a significant number. We have a really significant problem in Scotland.

The policy approach and legislative framework that I am suggesting to you is not much of a change from the existing law. We already have laws on prostitution and kerb crawling, so we can already arrest sex buyers; the bill would allow us to arrest them in all contexts and not just in public places. It would decriminalise the victim, as we would now conceptualise them, and would offer them a legal right to support.

The framework is not new. It is most often referred to as the Nordic model, and some countries refer to it as the equality model. It has been used in a number of countries around the world, mostly in Europe but not exclusively, because Canada is one of those countries. The first country to use it, in 1999, was Sweden, which has a lot of data, which I am sure the committee will want to look at to see how the model has worked. Sweden was followed by a number of countries; Northern Ireland, which is obviously part of the UK, has a very similar law, as do France, Ireland and Norway. Quite a lot of countries that are close to us have followed the approach.

In the countries that have taken that policy approach, you can clearly see that the intention has reduced the market for prostitution: in Sweden, on-street prostitution dropped immediately by 40 per cent and has not gone back up, and trafficking inflows into the country are much lower. There is a report with data from more than 150 countries that clearly shows that. Maren Schroeder can come in on that in a minute.

The framework also creates a hostile environment for serious organised crime. It creates a hostile legislative framework for traffickers, which is what we want—we want to disrupt them as much as possible. It also decriminalises those who are selling. Those people are often traumatised and need specialist counselling and support. It is a difficult industry to leave, especially if someone has been trafficked; they might not even know which country they are in, might not speak the language and might not have access to their identity documents, for instance.

We should be looking at this issue. I certainly pursued it when I was in government. When I left, the bill was a year 3 or year 4 bill that the Government was going to pursue, although I admit that that is a few years ago now.

I will ask Maren Schroeder to discuss the costs.

Do committee members have the financial memorandum in front of them? The table detailing the costs is on page 21. Do you want me to read out the table?

It is quite difficult. Data in this area is patchy. The best data that we have comes from the Encompass Network’s snapshots. It spoke to 291 women who were working in prostitution. Maren Schroeder will remind me what the figure was for those who had been trafficked—was it 80 or 90?

Yes. About 90 women were trafficked, which is about one third of the women Encompass spoke to. I would say that, as the Government has recognised in its reports, the average trafficking victim probably comes from eastern Europe, while Nigeria and Vietnam tend to be up there among the top source countries.

Women who have been trafficked and are under the control of third parties probably do not speak any English. They are constantly surveilled. They are held in apartments, and the business model involves moving them around the country. They might be in Glasgow for four weeks, then the person who is controlling them will put out new adverts in Aberdeen saying, “New in town!” and move the women there for a few weeks, then they will move them somewhere else. The buyers require “fresh meat”, so the women are moved around constantly.

My view is that that figure of one third of the sample underrepresents the full scale of trafficking, because that type of victim never engages with services. No one ever talks to them about their health or their safety. They never come into contact with the police, because they are surveilled all the time and kept in confined and constrained environments. I believe that we are very much underestimating the figure.

We have wiretap evidence from Sweden of traffickers discussing the countries that they want to go to. They can be heard saying, “Do not bother with Sweden, it is too difficult there.” Traffickers are only interested in money and the most lucrative, lowest-risk destinations, which is where they are at least risk of being detected, interrupted, arrested and convicted. They will just not bother with anywhere that they think will be too much trouble. The international evidence consistently shows lower flows of trafficked people into countries that have the proposed model for addressing prostitution—I gave you some stats about that earlier.

Let us consider the example of Germany—Maren Schroeder is German, which has been helpful. The committee will be aware that Germany has pursued a different and opposite approach to prostitution. It started off in 2002 with the decriminalisation model, but only a few years later it realised that that was an absolute disaster for people who are working there. It had not affected trafficking. In fact, trafficking and exploitation were worse than before. It was a minefield of organised crime.

The prostitution market doubled after the legislative model was changed. Prior to 2002, about 90 per cent of the women who were working in prostitution in Germany were German. Now 80 to 90 per cent of the people who are working in prostitution in Germany are of foreign extraction, so we can assume that they have been trafficked. We think that about 80 per cent of them have been trafficked. Despite the fact that it was expected that the market would be regulated and unionised, and the women would be protected, the murder rate became, quite frankly, astronomical.

Germany has since gone the other way, moving to a more regulatory model.

We do not know. We would have to take that away and come back to the committee. However, we suspect that you are right—we suspect that it would be cheaper.

The Scottish Government funds TARA Scotland quite extensively in order to work with trafficking victims, so that money is accounted for.

People who work in prostitution would not have to give evidence or have any involvement in this whatsoever. They would be completely decriminalised, which is not the case now, and they would have a legal right to access support. I believe that there is a lot in this legislation that would be beneficial to people who work in prostitution.

I will pick up on the language that you used. I want to make committee members aware, if they are not already—I suspect that some will be very aware—that the term “sex work” is not neutral language. Many of the survivors who I have spoken to are very distressed about that type of language and see it as glossing over the reality of what prostitution is really about and what it has done to them. They would not use that term at all. I believe that the term is being used to legitimise prostitution and to gloss over the harms that might be involved in it. We would not use it; we would always use terms such as “commercial sexual exploitation”, “prostituted people”, “women exploited in prostitution” and, for those who have exited, “survivors of prostitution”, as they often want to call themselves.