Sex, Lies and Statistics

Here Dr Magnanti, formerly known as 'Belle de Jour',takes on the moralising approach of present-day officialdom and Guardian columnists, particularly one J. Bindel, regarding sex work.
An 'official' survey found huge numbers of allegedly trafficked female sex workers - most trafficked workers are agricultural workers, often working in horrible conditions with their passports taken away so they can't even leave, and the actual number of people trafficked for sex was very small though even one is too many. The figures, as Dr M points out, are extrapolated from very small data sets, or just plain made up.

Dr M has said elsewhere that 'there is no one image of sex work' - the low end, that familiar from films (and a street corner near here I must say) is the girl in a short skirt leaning into a car, has little similarity to the high-class escort charging several hundred pounds a session.

The law in the UK doesn't work that well at present - forbidding workers to work more than one in a building stops them backing one another up in case there's trouble. But it's better than the currently fashionable alternative - the "Nordic Model" which criminalises the buyer but not the seller. This is supposed to facilitate exit from sex work, but (i) not every sex worker wants to exit and (ii) you have removed their source of income and made them more vulnerable to crime and violence. As with Prohibition, the sleep of reason breeds mobsters. It may end up criminalising otherwise law abiding people for no other reason than morality. And as Dr M points out, it doesn't work.

Dr Magnanti is quite against legalisation of sex work - which brings in all kinds of other issues - but in favour of decriminalisation, which means the abuses and criminal activities associated with sex work can be dealt with without endangering vulnerable people.

I was reminded a lot of 'Porn Panic!' by Jerry Barnett but apparently the Barnett is more recent than the first version of this book.