OAP home allows residents to book sex workers

[Charlezee]

www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4767106/investigation-into-nursing-home-for-allowing-prostitutes.html

What do you think?

[SolidGoldBrass]

Also, while I agree that no one has the right to have sex, I think it's an important human right to seek ways to get your sexual needs met. I don't think it's at all acceptable for someone else to decide that a person's sexual needs are irrelevant and they should just accept that they will be celibate for the rest of their lives.
Please bear in mind that most human beings need affectionate touch to thrive, to the point where isolated people are often advised to book something like an aromatherapy massage, just so that someone touches them in a well-intentioned fashion.

[badinage]

If you're moving the frames of reference to beyond this particular case where the defining characteristic was that the care home staff did the procuring - and now want to discuss private arrangements between a resident and supplier, the care home staff are still meant to comply with health and safety and conduct risk assessments, especially if the service performed is going to be unsupervised. Part of that risk assessment is whether the presence of the service provider would cause discomfort and generate objections from other residents. This is why a prostitute trading on the premises would be unlikely to pass those tests. The same policies would apply to woo pedlars and harmless idiots, as well as charlatans who are out to exploit. The policies are there to protect residents and not just the perceived rights of the few.

So I'm very comfortable that those policies are in place, because they serve to protect elderly people from con-artists and charlatans and preserve the rights of all residents to a degree of comfort and security in their own home. Many elderly people would feel discomfort and insecurity about prostitutes entering their home and trading sex. They have rights too.

[AbigailAdams]

Great posts badinage.

[SolidGoldBrass]

Badinage: sex workers, especially those who are in the business of their own free will, and most definitely those who consider themselves as healers, are discreet (not least because they are aware that many people have a hostile attitude towards them and they would rather avoid verbal or physical abuse from randoms). They are not morons. They would not be rampaging around a care home in lingerie brandishing dildos and lube.

[Leithlurker]

You cannot at all be comfortable badinage or else you are able to claim full knowledge of every resident, their politicle, religious, and moral beliefs. For example as solid gold points out a resident arranges for a visit in their own space not in a communal space of a medium. The person in the next room may have a strong and fundamental religious belief and be extremely upset by the presence of someone who says they can talk to the dead. You would resolve this by having a blanket ban on anything taking place that is likely to upset someone instead of allowing people who are competent if not able to make private arrangements that unless some incident happens will remain entirely private.

Solid your points about the need for affectionate touch and how it is very close to being authoritarian to determine for large numbers of people what they need and what they must do with out, yet allow other humans to act in any way they like.

[Beachcomber]

I don't have any living grandparents.

My DH does though - his grandmother lives in a care home. She is mega - she set up the first feminist organisation in her region, was an active participant of the French resistance and was gang raped by soldiers during WWII.

I think she has the right to spend her final years in a safe fair and equal environment where she doesn't have to put up with the male entitlement of her fellow male residents to bring prostitution into her home.

[OldLadyKnowsNothing]

I don't see why any of the other residents need know anything about these visits at all. "My niece is visiting" used to be the line.

[Beachcomber]

The problem is though OLKN - she isn't stupid.

She knows that 'my niece is visiting' is bullshit.

She knows that 'what you don't know won't hurt you' is shoddy entitled crap.

[Leithlurker]

Kudos to your DH's grandmother Beach, but factualy she has no ownership of the home, she has the ability to control what happens in her private space but not what happens in other residents private space.

Something that keeps cropping is how one side has rights but never both sides. So we always have an imposition of will and morality, on others, I wonder if that would have been recognisable to your DH's Grandmother as the thing she was fighting to stop.

[Beachcomber]

Sexual assess to another human being is not a right.

[OldLadyKnowsNothing]

Well, I hope when I visited my uncle in a care home, no-one assumed he was paying for my presence!

[ReallyTired]

I think its repugnant to get a prostitutes in because a patient is groping a member of staff.

I imagine that supplying prostitutes to someone with learning difficulties would encourage such behaviour rather than nip it in the bud. Frankly I don't think someone with an IQ of 50 should be allowed sex. They have the level of responsiblity of a six year old and should be treated as such. If they want someone or something to love then maybe a cat or a puppy is more appriopiate. (No I do not mean beastiality)

If someone who is physically disabled (without learning difficulties) wants a sex worker then there should be nothing to stop him. However the idea should come from the client.

If people in a care home want to have sex with each other then thats fine. The role of a careworker would be to make sure that they use contraception and limit risks of STDs. Ie. provide condoms and offer the woman a hormonal injection.

Clearly care has to be taken to make sure that no one is being sexually exploited.

[Leithlurker]

No but the the ability to make your own choices and lead an independent life free from coercion is a right. This is should not be about piting one person's rights against another save for the illegal. Its easy to get in to the grove of arguing that no one has the right to buy sex or the right to have sex, but as Solid said earlier people do have a right to be seen as human beings. Writing of peoples need to thrive, to be touched, to experience all parts of being human is to as good as cut them off from being a full member of the human race.
Again one groups desire for something in order to feel fully human or to have lived a full life could be extended in to areas such as child birth, is that up for debate as what is permissable to refuse as it is merely a wish rather than a right.

[Beachcomber]

LL all I can make out from your post is that you do think having sexual access to another human being is a right.

WTF has childbirth got to do with men thinking they have a right to women's bodies?!

[badinage]

You cannot at all be comfortable badinage or else you are able to claim full knowledge of every resident, their politicle, religious, and moral beliefs.

I struggled a bit with the syntax and grammar there, but I think what you're alleging is that I'm claiming to know every care home resident's belief system.

I am not. I don't know the belief system of all the residents of the care home featured in this story.

But neither, it appears do the people who run it.

Because they didn't consult the other residents, or the council, or the safeguarding and procurement policies.

The only people they consulted were the male residents asking them to procure sex, the prostitutes they booked - and eachother in the naive and dangerous belief that their personal safety would improve if they contracted out the danger posed by sexually aggressive men to some other woman.

[badinage]

And as I keep pointing out, the policies that were so wilfully ignored in this instance cover every trade entering the premises, including mediums, hairdressers - anyone at all in fact who is invited into what is a shared home. So if residents objected to a medium operating in their midst or even in the next door room, those objections would be factored into the risk assessment.

If the council or the care home management got further involved and actually started to procure these services and making decisions about who got the right to trade and do business in the homes, then they must follow proper procurement procedure which requires chosen businesses to have proper policies and evidence of fiscal propriety, including the requirement to pay tax.

[Doreen1a]

"Part of that risk assessment is whether the presence of the service provider would cause discomfort and generate objections from other residents."

Why would it? Do you think the prostitute is going to service her client in full view of every other resident? Prostitutes are very discreet- the other residents won't even know when a prostitute comes and leaves for all they know it could be someone's family member.

[Doreen1a]

"Frankly I don't think someone with an IQ of 50 should be allowed sex"

I disagree. Just because someone has a low intelligence doesn't mean they are ignorant to the concept of sex and consent to sex.

[Moominsarescary]

Not just that, you don't treat a grown adult like a child regardless of capacity or IQ. Maybe a cat or a puppy would be more appropriate ffs

[badinage]

Prostitutes are very discreet- the other residents won't even know when a prostitute comes and leaves for all they know it could be someone's family member.

Really? So how come the article and story to which this thread relates, states that the sex took place in a 'special room' which had a red sock placed over the door handle to signify to other residents and staff that a prostitute and resident were having sex and should not be disturbed?

[Leithlurker]

Thanks to the syntax and grammer police for pointing out how crap my writing is, I am glad that your far larger brains and egos managed to not explode with the confusion.

Red sock at night prossie out of sight eh! I doubt the red sock idea was down to the the sex worker more like a care home policy, and not a very good one. Although what we do not know is if that room could also serve other purposes that require other staff and residents not to go in whilst it is in use. It could be a treatment room, a visiting space for confidential advice sessions, somewhere that residents can have privacy with someone with out it being in their own quarters.

[Leithlurker]

Beach you are not a stupid person do not try and deliberately miss the point, having ivf, or having children in any way including adoption is not a right either. So if your arguing that their is no right to experience sex which is what both solid and I have suggested is not a right but part of being human, it follows that you are then happy to accept that women who feel that they have not lived a full human existence because they have never had children should also just accept that this is how it is as they have no right to do have children, even though our society in provides assistance and help for women to do exactly that.

As to your point about access to sex being a right, I have stated several imps that my stance is that I think it perfectly possible to reframe the idea away from sex work and in to a therapeutic one. This would remove any and all abuse, all the safeguards that badinage is on about would be on offer including crb checks. Tax would be paid, although I am not sure of those earning at the higher earning side of sex work that tax is always avoided. This is not the same as legalising as it would be pretty specific clients and overseen by the state so not just a free market situation.

[AbigailAdams]

Nobody has a right to have a child LL. I don't know where you got the idea that they did. You can experience sex without using a prostitute.

You really do see women as a commodity don't you. And more importantly you think it is OK to treat them as one.

[Leithlurker]

Ok Abigail, you repeat back to me EXACTLY what I said but include an insult and an assumption about what I "think"

Perfect example of why trying to have a conversation with radfems is like hearding cats. I told beach she was not stupid either you are, or you choose insults as a debating tactic which is a little bit shit really.

[AbigailAdams]

I haven't insulted you have I? You want to be able to pay for a woman's body. That is treating her as a commodity. Why would that be an insult to you?

Well admittedly, I may have misunderstood as your argument isn't that coherent and pretty irrelevant, but you seemed to be implying that we think women have a right to have children, for some reason?