If prostitution is about choice we need to start by asking, "who chooses". Few prostituted women have chosen it as a career. Research shows that some 80% start as children, groomed into prostitution often by a man posing as a boyfriend. Others, unable to earn a living in other ways, turn to prostitution and the drugs they use to help them deal with that experience end up controlling their lives. A significant number of women are controlled by violent gangs, some have been trafficked across borders, some between different towns where they offer "fresh meat" to clients who see the women they pay for as a mere commodity for pleasure.
These clients really do have a free choice, yet their choice causes violence towards women – prostituted women are 40 times as likely to die a violent death as other women. So policy needs to target the men who choose to buy women. In countries where prostitution is legalised the violence does not end. Nevada, where prostitution is largely legal, has the highest rate of murder of women of any US state. As a woman from New Zealand, working in a legal brothel, said after she had been violently raped, "I can't report it, it's part of the job." And because countries which make this legal find that their sex markets grow hugely, more women are at risk.
The Home Office is right to direct policy in this area towards the men who pay for sex. I believe that it would be preferable to have the simple approach which Sweden has adopted, which is to criminalise all payment for sexual services. Because the argument is already focusing on how can the poor man know if a woman has been trafficked or controlled. The law in Finland requires the man to know and no one there has been prosecuted. But the offence proposed for the UK is subtly different. The two separate aspects are that the man has paid for sex, and the woman was trafficked. If both are proven, he is guilty.
The debate still tends to start from the premise that men cannot control their demand for sex. I do not accept that, and think that buying the sexual services of women can be stopped. The fear of arrest is a deterrent. An American study found that being arrested reduced the likelihood of future demand for prostitution by 70%.
In a society where women and men are not equal, prostitution reinforces inequality, reducing women to commodities, and by commercialising sexual relationships makes society more cruel and brutal and less loving for us all.