The deluded idea of making sex illegal to buy

There are times that I look upon those who would rule us and wonder where the collective IQ leaked out to. This is one such time: they're proposing that it should be made illegal to purchase sex in the United Kingdom.

Britain will today take a significant step towards reforming prostitution laws as the first cross-party report for almost 20 years recommends that only pimps and punters should be jailed or fined. The MPs and peers will recommend that the UK adopts a system whereby soliciting is no longer a punishable offence, but anyone who pays for sex is committing a crime. Prostitutes who are caught loitering on streets plying their trade should be given anti-social behaviour orders rather than being prosecuted, the group will say.

The Independent covers the same story:

What the All Party Parliamentary Group on Prostitution broadly proposes is Nordic-style reform, which is what the European Parliament also backed last week. This would shift the burden of prosecution from mostly women sellers to mostly male buyers and pimps. MPs are right to say that one of the root problems with Britain’s laws on the sex trade is that they send conflicting messages about who is in the wrong. If trafficked women, especially, are to be helped, they must be assured that the law is on their side. It is why the MPs want the mass of current legislation consolidated into a single Act, which makes it clear that only those who purchase sex will feel the rigours of the law.

One minor lunacy is the idea of ASBOs instead of criminal punishment. But an ASBO is only a way station to a criminal punishment anyway. Effectively it's a sentence that if you do that again you'll be jailed. Which, given that under the current law no one is jailed for being a prostitute seems to be an increase, not a decrease, in punishment.

But what's truly nonsensical, delusional even, is the basic philosophy at the heart of all of this. That many people don't like the fact that prostitution exists is true. But then I don't like Simon Cowell's existence either and no one at all claims that this gives me the right to ban him. The only possible claim that can be made in favour of the banning of prostitution, or even of the declaration that it is something wrong that we would like to minimise, is that it represents some form of slavery in which people are forced to do things they do not agree to doing voluntarily.

And that is indeed the claim that is being made, see that reference to "trafficking" in the Independent. However, the one thing that we do in fact know about the "slavery" in prostitution is that it doesn't, in this country at least, actually exist. For we had a plan whereby every single police force in the country went out looking for people who were indeed sex slaves. People who were being forced, against their will, into prostitution (ie, repeatedly raped, a vile crime). And when they had a look through all of the brothels, working flats, saunas and street walkers they could find not one single police force was able to come up with sufficient evidence to charge anyone at all with the crime of holding someone in such sex slavery. Operation Pentameter it was called and it's the biggest refutation of the hysterical case about trafficking that could possibly have been devised.

The vision some have of people being forced onto the game is simply untrue. What we do in fact have is consenting adults deciding to offer such services as they wish to offer for the cash being proferred to them. And this isn't something that requires customers to be made into criminals: nor is it something that requires suppliers to be made into criminals either. It's just not something that requires anyone at all to be made into a criminal. It's consenting adults deciding what to do with their own bodies.

The only laws which should (apart, perhaps, from a little bit of zoning and planning law) apply to commercial sex are those that apply to non-commercial sex. Consent, age, these sorts of thngs, and nowt else.

This entire suggestion to adopt the "Nordic Way" is based upon a delusion. That there is some amount of sex slavery which the innocent must be protected from being sucked into. But given that we cannot find any evidence of the existence of sex slavery that is indeed a delusion. It's simply nonsensical piffle and those who would rule us should be ashamed of offering up such an idiotic policy.

Instead I would propose an Act making bansturbation illegal. Bansturbators being those who get sexual pleasure from banning one or more behaviours of others. There's definitely too many of those around and unfortunately they seem to be in control of the legislature at present.