Chamber and committees

Yes. For those on the committee who do not know, I have been working and researching in this area for probably more than a decade. I was working as a volunteer on the issue before I got elected. When I got elected, I was about to do a member’s bill on the same topic in 2018, and then I was made a minister. I was made a minister in this area of law, so I thought, “Okay, that’s great—I will be able to do this as a minister”. Some of the front-line services that work in this area and I thought that that approach might be more appropriate, because, if you think about it, this piece of legislation directly takes on serious organised crime. It would be good for the Government, with all the support that it has around it, to do that; however, that is not where we are. I was not able to progress the bill when I was a minister for various reasons; I have done it at the first possible opportunity after leaving Government.

We have been engaging with the Government extensively. I have been meeting the minister who is responsible for this area every couple of months or so. I update her on progress. We meet regularly, and we continue to talk about the bill. We met most recently on Thursday last week. Last week’s meeting was to hear from the Government about what issues it might have with the provisions of the bill, and I believe that the minister set that out in her letter to the committee.

Once we get to the point of amendments, the Parliament will provide us with drafting services. If the Government and I agree on amendments, I would be happy for the Government to draft them.

No. We are not suggesting that my bill will provide any redress whatsoever, but I am making the point to the committee that many of the women will have entered prostitution as children or will have been trafficked, and they will have criminal records in relation to their own exploitation. I think that, as a society, we would agree that that is completely unacceptable.

That is my preference for how we should go about it. If the Parliament does not agree, I am perfectly willing to look at other options. For the sake of transparency, I point out that, in her letter, the Minister for Victims and Community Safety said that she did not think that basing our approach on the Horizon legislation was the right way to go, and I think that the Law Society of Scotland might have said the same.

There are a couple of other options. We could do something like what was done in the Miners’ Strike (Pardons) (Scotland) Act 2022, or in the Historical Sexual Offences (Pardons and Disregards) (Scotland) Act 2018. There are other ways of doing it.

It does.

Sure. I will send that to the committee.

This is a table that we have created, which shows rates of people in prostitution by legislative framework from 2006 to 2014. I will read those out to you. Obviously, countries have different-sized populations, so the rate is per 100,000 people. Sweden’s rates of prostitution per 100,000 are 6.6 to 15.4, and the Republic of Ireland’s rates are 16 to 20. We can contrast those with countries that have a different model, which we can go into later. Germany has a legalisation model and its rates per 100,000 are 185 to 493; in the Netherlands the rate is 147 and in New Zealand it is 183. It could not be starker. I will make a note to circulate the table to the committee, because the data clearly illustrates what we are discussing.

Absolutely. The committee might want to have a look at Ipswich. The committee will probably be aware that, a few years ago, there was a spate of murders of women working in prostitution in Ipswich. The local community came together and decided on a particular approach in an attempt to get a grip on what was happening. By using existing kerb-crawling laws and working with the police, they made the deterrent effect so strong that they eliminated street prostitution altogether—they simply got rid of it.

There was also a cost saving to that. There is a report that estimates that, for every £1 that was spent on that, the local area saved £2. We believe that a law of the type that I am proposing would eventually—not initially, because there would be set-up costs—result in a saving. We think that the costs would peak in the medium term—about four or five years after the law came into effect. However, after 10 years, once the trafficking and the prostitution market had gone down, the number of people seeking support—it is very expensive for the state to provide that support—would, we expect, have reduced, because that is what we have seen in other countries.

Ipswich is a great example for people to look at. However, you are right. Because of the nature of modern prostitution, the kerb-crawling laws are no use to the police—they have told me that. We have had conversations with the police—in particular, officers who specialise in sexual crimes—and they have expressed their frustration about the fact that, when they go into a premises, they find people who are clearly victims, who are sometimes people who have been trafficked, but they simply have to let the punters walk past them, because they cannot do anything. I sense that the police would like to have additional powers so that they could do something about that.

On policing, the commission on the sex buyer law submitted a report in 2016 to the then all-party parliamentary group on prostitution and the global sex trade entitled “How to implement the Sex Buyer Law in the UK”, which the committee might want to look at. The commission looked at the law that applies in England and Wales. I think that it included a serving police officer and a former police officer. The report looked at the law in Sweden and considered what applicable powers and structures would be needed in a UK context. It concluded that a

“standard four-step enforcement operation ... would be consistent with existing policing powers.”

I will go through the four steps. First, police officers locate the premises that are used for prostitution. Secondly, they confirm that prostitution is taking place. To do that, they might contact the premises either in person or by phone. That is done covertly in Sweden, but it does not have to be. Thirdly, they observe—they watch the buyers going in. Fourthly, they take action.

Therefore, how the buying of sex would be policed would be very similar to how the police enforce the existing kerb-crawling legislation, which is to go to the area where the offences are taking place, observe and then make arrests.

When I spoke to the Swedish police about their approach, they explained to me that, in Stockholm, they have dedicated police who are working on prostitution. I cannot remember how many of those officers there were—I think that it was three. When they are in the office, they will visit adult websites, where they see adverts for sex. They phone or text the numbers and make an arrangement to purchase sex. After that, they usually get a message back that includes not a full address but an apartment block. The police wait outside the apartment block and then message to say that they are there, which is when they will be given the apartment number. At that point, they can go into the apartment. However, they might not do that; they might observe the sex buyers going past and then they can choose to take action at that point.

A constituent of mine wrote to me—I think that it was just last week—to say that two of the 16 apartments where she lives are being used for prostitution. When she is in the garden with her grandchildren, she watches a steady stream of sex buyers walking up the stairwell.

It is not difficult to find people buying sex. I believe that the police would tell you that, if the bill is passed, they will enforce the new offence in the same way that they do for kerb crawling.

My legislation would send a message to society—like other countries that have adopted this approach—to say that, in Scotland, we recognise who is the exploiter and who is being exploited. We now conceptualise most of the people who are in prostitution as victims. A lot of the women who I have spoken with who have exited prostitution would not think of themselves in those terms. They consider themselves very much to be survivors; that is how they want to refer to themselves.

Consider the testimony that Fiona Broadfoot gave. She came to the launch of the bill a few weeks ago and spoke with the media quite extensively. She was prostituted in Scotland, including in a brothel in Edinburgh. She explained that there were a couple of times when she was on the street with her pimp and the police arrived. They arrested her and took her away. She was a teenager at the time. There is a power imbalance between the exploitees and the exploiters, who are not just the sex buyers but the pimps.

Reem Alsalem has written a number of really good papers on the topic. She has a country report in which she talks about prostitution in the UK and recommends that we move to a challenge-demand model. She has also penned an excellent letter—if the committee has not seen it, I will circulate it. It is brutal. In it, she talks about the reality of prostitution, particularly for those who are trafficked and coerced. She also refers to pimps as being—I cannot remember exactly how she phrases it—the biggest users of torture. That is how bad things are; they are torturing prostitutes.

We should flip that and let the women who are working in the sex trade know that they are decriminalised. I know that some people think that you should not do that—they feel that, if you think that prostitution is wrong, you should criminalise everybody. However, I believe that some of these women are so traumatised by what has happened to them in prostitution that they will never really recover from it. Adding a layer of criminality to that, in my view, is just wrong. Decriminalising them does not lead to an increase in prostitution, because the demand is coming from the buyers. If you decriminalise the sellers, it will not have an impact on the size of the prostitution market.

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 whom 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.

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.