Why?
Decriminalisation of trade is to protect vulnerable women.
Current Law?
The common trend is for women to work alone, risking their safety in the process, because working together increases the risk of arrest.
This has become more of an issue recently, she said, as police have been cracking down on brothels.
Working in a secure location will create a secure enviroment for the women and men to work in a controlled manner without risking their safety.
The International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) argues that current legislation “treats our consent to sex as less valid than that of other women”.
Human rights and medical experts support it
In 2016, Amnesty International published a draft policy arguing in favour of decriminalisation, saying sex workers should be entitled to the same rights as other workers. It argued that the criminalisation of prostitution “threatens the rights to health, non-discrimination, equality, privacy, and security” of a sex worker.
The World Health Organisation also condemns the criminalisation of sex work, and backs research in The Lancet which shows that decriminalising prostitution would help lower rates of sexually transmitted infections, particularly HIV/Aids.
Decriminalisation will actually make sex workers safer
Criminalising prostitution means that sex workers are less likely to contact the police to report abuse. The laws in the UK also take away sex workers’ rights to work together. If sex workers are allowed to work together in one building, they will be safer, says IUSW.
“If I decided I was too nervous to work alone, I would not be allowed to have a friend over to work in a pair for safety: it would technically mean I was running a brothel,” one sex worker told The Independent.
UK laws “make life harder for those it purports to protect by precluding the possibility of establishing informal networks of self-regulation and protection”, argues Luke Gittos, law editor for Spiked Online.
