Chamber and committees

That is a fair comment. As I said to the committee, we have wrestled over that area. I have set out my preferred approach, which may not end up being the committee’s or the Parliament’s preferred approach. I chose it because I believe that, in relation to some laws that have been in place for a very long time and in different circumstances, we now have updated ways of thinking about things and conceptualising exploiters and the exploited.

To me, the approach that I have set out seems like the most straightforward way to achieve the policy intent. However, I accept that there are other ways of going about that, and I am open to further discussion on whether it might be better to go down the route that has been taken in other recent pieces of legislation, such as the Miners’ Strike (Pardons) (Scotland) Act 2022 or the Historical Sexual Offences (Pardons and Disregards) (Scotland) Act 2018.

We will go away and do a bit more research and work on that area. We will speak to some of the stakeholders about that part of the bill in more detail. I agree with you that there is a discussion to be had there.

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?

I will start with the point on driving practices underground, because it is quite a prevalent argument that the pro-exploitation lobby uses. What the word “underground” means is never defined. It could mean that prostitution has gone indoors where you cannot see it, or it might mean that it is more unsupervised or more unregulated—those are the definitions that I can think of. However, that is not what the data shows. Prostitution cannot really go underground, because it is an act of purchase, so the buyers and the sellers must connect with each other. Sweden’s national rapporteur on trafficking, Kajsa Wahlberg, said:

“prostitution activities are not and cannot be pushed underground. The profit of traffickers, procurers and other prostitution operators is obviously dependent on that men easily can access women … If the buyers can find the women … the police can too.”

That claim is frequently repeated, but it is not supported by the evidence at all. The most compelling example of what you are talking about is probably what we have seen in France. The claim that the law was in contravention of the human rights of those who were selling and pimping, and that more violence was created by the law, was thoroughly examined by the European Court of Human Rights, and it was rejected in June 2023 in the judgment on MA and others v France. The court stated that the applicants had not demonstrated that the contested legislative provisions had had any effect on their situation or had exposed them to an increase in violence or danger. The harms that the opponents to that court case described are real. Women in prostitution are subjected to horrendous and consistent levels of abuse and violence, but those harms are inherent in prostitution and they existed in France before the law. It is not the law that causes the harms; it is prostitution.

Does that answer your question?

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.

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.

It would reduce the number of people involved in prostitution. We need to be clear about that from the start. Some people have the idea that, because prostitution will always exist and always has existed, we should not seek to have an appropriate legal or legislative framework to manage it. My view is that, as legislators, we need to look at the international evidence, the harm that is being done to women who are in prostitution and the harm to society, and we need to come up with the best possible option.

This is not a perfect solution—there are no perfect solutions. Other countries have criminalised the buyer through a challenging-demand model. Demand drives the supply. The buyers, 99 per cent of whom are men, demand the service, and the traffickers and the pimps step in to fill that demand. That is what drives the trafficking inflows. We know from the data on buyers that, if buyers know that they will get a criminal record and that what they have done will be made public, most will stop. You reduce the demand by creating that deterrent effect. In the countries that have brought in such a legislative framework, the market for prostitution has contracted. We can see that, and we have data for that. I will ask Maren Schroeder to go into the specifics. We also have international data that shows that the trafficking inflows into a country will also drop. We know that the model works.

It is also about decriminalising the women. I say “women” as a shorthand, because we estimate that 96 per cent of sellers are women. It is not all women; there are men who sell sex as well—I put that on the record—but I say “women” as a shorthand because the majority of sellers are women.

What also seems to happen is that, when the women are decriminalised, they develop a better relationship with people in law enforcement and are able to work with them. In the countries that adopt that approach, not only do they create crimes around the purchase of sex; it tends to lead to better investigations and investigation results on other crimes that are connected to that, the obvious one being trafficking.

We saw that in France. The statistics there showed that, when France changed the law quite recently—the French law is only a few years old—investigations into other crimes relating to the purchase of sex went up by 54 per cent. When I went to Sweden a few years ago, the Swedish police told me that, too. One of the police officers there, who was in charge of the issue in Stockholm, told me that he had no idea that that would happen once they started to criminalise the sex buyers. He said, “Well, we would go and arrest them, and then we would look in their car and find all these other types of criminality”—I am sure that you can imagine. Moreover, someone who was selling sex gave them very good evidence that led to the arrest of high-profile individuals for other issues.

It creates an environment in which things are all working together towards the ends that we as a society want to see. We do not really want to put these people in prison; we are seeking to create a deterrent effect, so that men who buy sex realise that that is exploitation and stop doing it, and then the market will drop.

I will let Maren Schroeder give us some facts and figures on the international data.

The committee will know about the national referral mechanism, which is set out in UK Government legislation. The women will have access to that and to a temporary recovery and reflection period, during which they are protected from deportation. That period normally only lasts for 30 days, but, in practice, it can often last up to 12 months, until they get the conclusive grounds decision. In that time, they are entitled to things such as safe accommodation, healthcare, legal advice and other support, but they still have to pursue the immigration route if they want to stay in the country.

My bill is part of a suite of support that is offered to victims, but it would not have any impact whatsoever on how the support is set out.