Chamber and committees

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.

Yes, although it is the Scottish Government that allocates funding to the trafficking awareness-raising alliance project Scotland. Is that funding shown in our figures, Maren?

That is a good question that gets brought up quite a lot. The main takeaway for the committee to remember from Northern Ireland is that, even without strong enforcement, the law has had a measurable deterrent effect. The issue in Northern Ireland is not with the legislative framework, but with the enforcement of the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Criminal Justice and Support for Victims) Act (Northern Ireland) 2015. I will bring in Maren Schroeder, because she has looked into it extensively.

In 2017 or 2018—I cannot remember what year it was; I will have to check—I went to Northern Ireland when I was preparing the first time around for my member’s bill and spoke to the then attorney general, John Larkin. We discussed in a private meeting that, at the point that I visited, they had not made a single arrest. He admitted to me that there were enforcement challenges.