This is my appearance on the BBC’s Daily Politics with author and sex worker Charlie Daniels discussing France’s proposals to make it illegal to pay for sex. My report adopting the “Nordic Model” will be going to the European Parliament early in 2014. Andrew Neil hosts the discussion.
The video lasts 9 and a half minutes.
Excellent appearance Mary…as always. So glad you are dealing with this issue so passionately and tying it in with the Slavery issue also. It is horrendous to contemplate that there could be 10000 people in virtual slavery in this country. Steve Breame
Thank you Steve. My report should go to the plenary session of the European Parliament at the end of February. If it goes through, it will give us useful ammunition to continue the fight against slavery. Best wishes, Mary
And also what you are doing is asking for the person buying the right to use a slave to be prosecuted, not the slave. All the smokescreening about porn and sex work being a job like any other completely sidesteps the reality that the sex industry and clients pay a premium for their worker’s health and safety to be put at risk with not wearing safety wear (condoms), that its largest recruitment tool is coercion, drug entrapment or slavery of underage staff for financial gain of the employer, that their industry totally flouts employment law around equality legislation, sexual harrassment, and violence towards staff and in fact allows clients to pay extra to do this to employees etc etc. Most of the male media seem to have real reality issues that they say treat the sex industry like any other industry but it doesn’t have to abide by any industry standards regarding the health and safety and human rights of its workforce. The police’s reaction shows that, along with its attitude to male violence against children, male violence against women and/or children in the home and male violence towards women and children in the street, the police consistently show themselves to have more empathy with the male perpetrators than the victims of violence, causing me to wonder if they are fit for purpose in gender or child abuse cases. There is a limit to how many times they can throw their hands in the air and talk of missed opportunities a la Saville, numerous rape and domestic violence cases, Rochdale, Oxford etc before it gets to the point that you wonder, if the victim is naming the perpetrator of a crime, why do the police consistently take the perpetrator’s side by allowing him to continue his crimes unabated and how can a police force riddled with men who by their demographic, must be frequent users of violently sexist on line porn. As Obama says, our Government, justice system and police force seem to be refusing to join up the dots in an effort to say that violently sexist media doesn’t drive sexist violence in the way that violently homophobic media drives attacks on homosexuals or violently racist media and organisations drive racist attacks. Does oxygen work differently in France to how it works in the UK = no … but sexist media works differently to racist or homophobic media in driving violence = yes. Err, you can fool some of the people all of the time, etc … time for our Government to either step up to representing all taxpayers or admit that its institutionally sexist in heart and soul.
I’m curious about the figure you cite, claiming that as many as 90% of the sex workers in the UK are trafficking victims. Can you provide the source of that statistic?
It seems to be contradicted by the findings of British police operations such as Operation Pentameter Two, which found relatively few cases of trafficking, or reports such as ‘Migrant Workers in the UK Sex Industry’ by Dr Nick Mai, which found that trafficking victims constituted a small proportion of those studied.