Verbatim speech by Cllr Sarah Field from this evening’s debate in Leeds full council:
Thank you Lord Mayor.
I’ll get straight to the point: buying women and children for sex is unacceptable and we need criminal sanctions that stop men from doing it.
I note that in her amendment Cllr Coupar refers to “sex workers”. This is a necessary fiction to normalise the legalisation of prostitution, normalise it as just another consumer activity and normalise the position of men as merely clients. It obfuscates, rather than highlights, the harm of prostitution and completely ignores the executors of that harm.
This language of ‘sex work’ assumes that there are divisions between various forms of prostitution; such as between child and adult and between forced and so–called free. When in fact all these facets are contingent upon and encompass one another. Enormous sums of money are made from the monstrous trade in women’s and children’s bodies, leading inevitably to sex trafficking.
When we refer to sex work we are subscribing to a notion that it is ordinary work based on a bizarre notion of equality of opportunity, when in reality the VAST majority of prostitution does not fit this picture in any way whatsoever.
It’s not sex work. This euphemistic and sanitised language appeases the conscience of those who fail to acknowledge that prostitution damages women and children, it can NEVER be made safe and it fundamentally thwarts women’s rights to equality with men and their liberation, as a class, from systematic oppression.
To anyone who is happy to call transactional sex legitimate work, I’d ask if they’d be happy if it was the career choice of their daughters, wives, mothers and sisters? And would they be happy to see “sex work” careers advice in schools?
To quote feminist author Julie Bindel: “Any government that allows the decriminalisation of pimping and sex-buying sends a message to its citizens that women are vessels for male sexual consumption. If prostitution is “sex work”, then by its own logic, rape is merely theft. The inside of a woman’s body should never be viewed as a workplace.”
It seems to have become a widely accepted axiom that prostitution can never be eliminated. Have we really set such a low bar?
When five prostituted women in Ipswich were murdered in 2006, what did Ipswich council do? It completely eradicated prostitution from its streets.
Ipswich did this through serious investment and multi-agency dedication to the Nordic Model.
I am calling on this council to learn from Ipswich.Visit them and work with them and their police force. I am calling for this council to abolish the shocking and scandalous “managed zone” and commit to the Nordic model, which seeks the following:
- The decriminalisation of those who areprostituted
- High-quality services and ring-fenced funding for those in prostitution
- Buying sex to be made a criminal offence
- Procuring, pimping and sex trafficking legislation to bestrengthened and the policing of these crimes to be fully resourced and prioritised
- A widespread holistic approach of public information campaigns, education programmes in schools and training for the police
Leeds has become a city where women cannot even meet to discuss changes to government legislation, but where men are openly raping women, soliciting for sex with children and offering to buy babies.
Our city has become a notorious illustration of misogyny and this scourge must be stopped immediately.
Our women deserve better, our children deserve better, our communities deserve better and the only way forward is to end this sanctioning of sexual violence that should be morally despised.
In memory of Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Annette Nichols, Paula Clennell and Daria Pionko.