Chamber and committees

Thank you, convener, and good morning to the witnesses. Thank you for attending.

It often seems that a voice is missing from the debate, and for me, that voice is that of the buyers. We know that sex buyers are around 99 per cent male, so it is the voices of the men who pay to buy sex that are missing. Could Diane Martin and Amanda Jane Quick give the committee an idea of what the attitudes of sex buyers are to the women whom they pay? As I probably will not get a follow-up question from the convener, I will add the second part of my question, which is, if the Parliament decides that it does not want to progress the bill, what do you think the consequences of doing nothing will be for Scotland?

Can you tell us a bit more about your members? Who would be in that category? I guess that you would use the term sex workers, but would that include women who are currently working in prostitution, as well as women who do lap dancing, webcam work, dominatrix work and so on? Would it cover that whole range? Would it include managers—pimps—too?

I suppose that I am just curious about it. In the 25 years since Sweden brought in its legislation, there has been a debate about the issue in many countries. The arguments against moving to a Nordic model are always exactly the same in every country, and it is always women who make the cases for and against the proposal. I am genuinely curious as to why we do not hear from the punters in this debate, when it is one that concerns them.

Good afternoon, as it is now, and thanks to the panel for attending today.

To start with, I want to pick up on the comment that Lynsey Walton made quite a while ago about millions of National Ugly Mugs alerts. I might have heard you wrong, but did you say that the figure was 4 million?

That really sounds like a lot of violent men about whom you have to send out alerts. However, I will move on.

National Ugly Mugs openly states that it is funded by Vivastreet. For the benefit of the committee, I note that Vivastreet makes millions of pounds every year from facilitating the prostitution of thousands of women. Lynsey Walton, do you perhaps see a conflict between representing the women’s interests on the one hand and, on the other, being funded by, and possibly representing the interests of, those who profit from those women?

I want to ask you the same question about the buyers that I asked the previous witnesses. My view is that we very much do not see or hear from the buyers, and that the best that we can get when it comes to understanding their views on prostitution and the women they pay for sex comes from looking at things such as Punternet, where you can see women being reviewed as commodities, like takeaway meals. Do you have any views on why the buyers do not come forward to make the case with regard to their right to buy sex? Do you have any idea why that is?

Well, if we could find any who would want to talk to us, I am sure that the committee would be interested in hearing from them. I will hand back to the convener.

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 in 2016 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.

It is a good question and, to be honest, we wrestled with it a little bit ourselves. The reason behind the policy intent is that, as you can imagine, as the law stands, women who are selling are often arrested and have convictions for selling sex under soliciting legislation.

I have one friend who has exited prostitution. She has been out a long time now. She entered prostitution when she was 15 and she had 39 convictions by the time she was 17. I probably do not have to explain to the committee that, if you have convictions in this area, it can create a barrier to accessing services, because women often do not want to disclose that they are in prostitution. We often see women in prostitution having their children taken away from them. If you want to exit prostitution, it could have a damaging effect on your employment prospects, whether you are able to get access to housing and a range of other things. Survivors were very clear with me that they wanted not only to be decriminalised but to have any existing convictions for the offence to be quashed or pardoned in some way.

If the committee still has doubts about that, it is borne out by the Casey review report that just came out. I do not know whether any of you have looked at it. It is about the Asian grooming gangs—well, they get called that, but I call them “rape torture gangs”—and it was commissioned by the UK Government. It has 12 recommendations on that particular issue, and the UK Government has accepted those in full. You will know that many of the girls who were groomed into those situations ended up in commercial sexual exploitation, so they were prostituted. Obviously, most of them were young—in many cases, they were below the age of consent—so one of the recommendations is that no one should be criminalised for their own abuse or their own exploitation. That is the policy intent.

How we get to the outcome, I am not so set on. I very much like the idea of an automatic repeal. The reason for that is that, when the records are looked up, there will not be anything on them. The offence will not be listed and then disregarded—it will not be on there at all. If, when they fill in forms, such women are asked whether they have a criminal record, they will be able to legitimately say that they do not, because it will have been removed.

However, there are other ways to get there. There are three quite recent pieces of legislation, the names of which Maren Schroeder will help me to remember. We have based our approach on the Horizon legislation, because we want there to be an automatic repeal, for the reasons that Maren set out. Only one crime code is involved, and there is no need for a case review.

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.