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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Carers allowed to help clients visit sex workers

194 replies

StealthPolarBear · 29/04/2021 20:44

words fail me

OP posts:
Zinco · 01/05/2021 06:10

From the article I linked above, it suggested that in Holland the sex workers for the disabled (or some of them) were separate to general prostitution. So their job was specific to people that were heavily disabled.

It's conceivable that some women could genuinely believe that this work is a good thing to do, and they were helping these patients.

5zeds · 01/05/2021 08:07

Is it “legal” for parents to procure the services of prostitutes for their children and children’s friends if they are over 16?

EmbarrassingAdmissions · 01/05/2021 09:15

@NiceGerbil

Or a person with some common sense and empathy etc.

And it was women on this thread who argued that if it's legal and something men generally can do then it's discrimination not to facilitate it for men in care. And that was that.

Those who made that statement surely can give their views on the situations I have mentioned.

I don't recognise your characterisation of that argument - so I don't know if anyone else would - or is that how you see Hayden's interpretation of Art. 8?

Hayden included discussions of risk assessments and care plans. The fact that something is legal doesn't mean that it can be implementable. However, I understand the concern that this judgment might be used with somebody for whom there would be a risk assessment that has no flags - in which case, carers are being asked to facilitate prostitution. Hayden's judgment looks to protect them from prosecution for that. Robert Buckland is appealing as Secretary of State - it looks like the appeal is on grounds of Article 9 to protect the rights of the carers not to do this (I haven't seen the document).

I don't want a creep in which a carer's job specification includes arranging these services - I'd rather it wasn't in there at all. I don't know where that leaves carers who support these transactions and wish to arrange them for their charges. For young men who are violent and whose liberty is restricted, I don't know if they are mostly cared for by male care teams.

There are a number of experienced (social) carers on this thread. They describe scenarios and circumstances in which this is happening already.

I did see someone upthread mention that she'd not work for somebody who engaged with sex workers. I should think many of us do work with, for, alongside, or supervise men who do this. From threads on MN, it would seem that we're also in relationships with them or related to them. We mostly don't know about it.

I grew up somewhere where there was a brothel every six houses or so. Sex workers lived in the other houses but they were working the streets rather than in the brothels. [I've just edited out an unnecessary detail about how my childhood involved a substantial informal risk assessment about avoiding men who thought they were entitled to consider any child or woman in the area as somebody to be accosted or purchased.]

I also remember some traumatised women in the area who cared for family members at home until they became sex pests for them and their children. They didn't necessarily blame some of those family members who had had profound brain damage from birth etc. or who had had substantial brain trauma through injury or illness. Some of them transacted with sex workers (no idea how they arranged it). Others of them had sympathetic GPs who committed the family members to mental hospitals or asylums etc. - when they existed.

Care in the Community and a lack of resources brought the private arrangements and problems back into the community. Very little has been clarified - and Hayden's potted history of the restrictions on sexual activity or an intimate life for adults with learning disabilities, TBI, or severe mental health diagnoses gives a timeline for this.

Nobody has a right to sexual access to a non-consenting adult. Sex work might be legal but I have always considered/experienced it as profoundly damaging to wider social relationships and communities. I still jump when somebody bangs on the front door aggressively (so that's every courier) because it takes me back to all the men who'd bang on our door. My mother was so fed up or cowed with it she'd send me upstairs to lean out of the window and call down that they'd got the wrong house.

I can not bear the idea that this would be written into someone's job specification or that carers will be expected to facilitate this. I am very far from the only adult who has lived in circumstances like this and carries that experience with her. I should think it's very probable that a substantial number of carers would potentially be traumatised by having to do something like this.

If there were an enquiry or Buckland called for evidence, then I would contribute a version of this.

StealthPolarBear · 01/05/2021 10:06

EmbarrassingAdmissions Flowers
Hope your life is steadier now.

OP posts:
MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes · 01/05/2021 10:10

I don’t like the increasing idea that there is a real need to experience sex to have a life, and therefore disabled people must be facilitated to have sex or we’re ‘expecting them to live a more moral life than others’. There are other elements to life, why with all the potential of living in modern civilisation is there so much ‘need’ for men to experience sex? The hypocrisy compared with the way the working poor (which often includes carers) are treated is disgusting - if avenues of opportunity are shut off, the rest of us are told to find other avenues, or be told how inadequate and shit we are. Why the difference in the matter of sex? Take up a sport, take up an art - participation is still possible even when we’re not going to be great - take up crafts, gardening, mechanics, find something else! Surely finding avenues that can suit is the carers job, not facilitating those that don’t?

The activity I compare to isnt drugs but rape, which prostitution is often closely related to. Some healthy men rape. Should carers therefore facilitate disabled people by holding down unwilling victims?? It’s a question of where do you draw the line, and always in a male-oriented society men draw it to facilitate men’s merest sexual whims.

MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes · 01/05/2021 10:19

In fact, since violent tendencies have been mentioned, some healthy men like to commit murder. Who’s up for facilitating that ‘because otherwise we’re expecting disabled people to live more moral lives than others’?

MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes · 01/05/2021 10:31

I find the excuse of different activities being legal/ illegal to be very very thin indeed. Law and legality /illegality is nothing but an excuse. Laws are the codification on a piece of paper of the moral standards a society is prepared to accept. They change, as morals change, as @NiceGerbil clearly knows upthread. If you’re relying on a piece of paper to create an absolute difference between two activities that are actually the same in experiential terms, you are on a very slippery slope indeed.

EmbarrassingAdmissions · 01/05/2021 10:35

@MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes

In fact, since violent tendencies have been mentioned, some healthy men like to commit murder. Who’s up for facilitating that ‘because otherwise we’re expecting disabled people to live more moral lives than others’?
If you're arguing this as your good faith interpretation of Art. 8 then I can not understand you.

If you're interesting in nuance and plausible extrapolations - there is a seminar on this CoP judgment and related issues on May 5 (details upthread) by human rights specialists and others who might be in a position to comment on whether your interpretation is feasible.

MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes · 01/05/2021 10:38

I’m interested in the known fact that men push boundaries. Always.

5zeds · 01/05/2021 17:59

@EmbarrassingAdmissions I think it’s ok for @MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes to discuss it here. She doesn’t have to wait for or engage with any seminar.

Lougle · 05/05/2021 17:29

@GCmiddle

I have worked with people with learning disabilities and autism for years, including on relationships and sexuality. I have never come across a case of a woman with LD who is is considered to have sexual desires that need to be 'accommodated' in this way. It's always men. I wonder why....
Probably because women with LDs are far more likely to be targeted by men without LDs and taken advantage of. I dread the complexity that my DD1 is heading towards as she comes of age (15 currently, but it feels like adulthood is only a blink away).

I do think this judgement is only a clarification of the protection that would be afforded to care workers. It doesn't advocate for the procurement of sexual services for people with LDs and it doesn't indicate that the man in question is likely to be able to avail himself of the services he is requesting. It's merely saying 'the law does not currently prohibit this'. There is still the caveat that the carer would need to be willing, as would the woman providing the sexual service (leaving consent Vs coercion and monetary gain aside).

Capacity is a really difficult subject, too.

MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes · 05/05/2021 17:57

Frankly, there are all those small additional problems that the difference in biological sex causes, all those ones that some like to tell us aren't important and don't exist until it becomes more inconvenient. If considering how to facilitate sex for males is a minefield: considering all the issues connected to contraception and parenting, in the context of learning disabilities, for the women is rather more delicate.

Lougle · 05/05/2021 18:57

@MayYouLiveInInterestingTimes

Frankly, there are all those small additional problems that the difference in biological sex causes, all those ones that some like to tell us aren't important and don't exist until it becomes more inconvenient. If considering how to facilitate sex for males is a minefield: considering all the issues connected to contraception and parenting, in the context of learning disabilities, for the women is rather more delicate.
Yes, as the parent of a female with learning disabilities, this is a frightening issue.
5zeds · 05/05/2021 20:42

I don’t think they’re better or worse just different.

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 06/05/2021 00:06

Extract

As a care provider, you get to care plan and risk assess all sorts of fun stuff. This male client likes buying ladies’ underwear for their own personal reasons, pick a kind and open-minded member of staff to support them to go get one with minimum fuss and put it down to experience. We don’t worry about how the girl at the till looked at you, it’s no biggy, but well done.

But this? Do we need to research and see which brothel has the best hygiene rating? Reviews? DBS checks? Accessibility? Disabled parking?

In my years of supporting people experiencing mental health issues, many of the vulnerable women who’ve come through the service have had terrible trauma and many of those women have had drug and alcohol problems and abusive relationships and many have been coerced into prostitution. Vulnerable people aren’t just in care homes or the ones receiving support. Many don’t get that chance.

Here's a question.

Am I to support a service user to see her and pay for sex, whilst also trying to support her to exit and recover? But maybe I haven’t met her yet, maybe that will be next year. Will she engage with support from the support worker who pulled some creased notes out of a money bag and asked for a receipt?

Continues here...
www.wepsbr.com/post/sex-and-the-support-worker?

Startingagainperson · 06/05/2021 00:16

It’s a very strange case. The judgement was made because it was deemed discriminatory that the ordinary Jo could legally pay for sex workers and so therefore those who are disabled shouldn’t be barred because of their disability.

However there are so many issues with this. The article that I read, made it sound that the person with disabilities ‘wanted to experience sex’. And that is something that is understandable for a human being to wasn’t to experience.

However I do have a real problem with anyone ‘wanting to experience sex’ and the solution is paying for it. One of the reasons is that sex isn’t something that you have once and you don’t want again. Usually you want it more. So it is a lifelong paying for sex workers?

Another is that sex should be part, always, of a consensual (and hopefully loving) relationship. Sex not part of a consensual non-paying relationship is always harmful in some way. So sorry, for whatever reason you shouldn’t just get to pay your way out of it as you will cause harm. This overrides your ‘wish’ for sex.

Plenty of people don’t have sex their whole lives. Two of my relations have never had sex. They are both women. One looked after her mother until she died. She was a good catholic and missed her ‘marriage years’ and doesn’t have the confidence to get a husband now. She’s fantastic and never moans. Of course it must be pretty rubbish for her. But the idea that she should be entitled to it is ludicrous.

So it’s made me think that paying for sex workers should be made illegal. Why is it legal to pay for sex? Makes no sense. Sex workers should not be penalised. But payers should, whether disabled or not disabled.

MargaritaPie · 06/05/2021 21:00

If I understand correctly, the ruling doesn't mean care workers can be forced into assisting a client to book an appointment with a sexworker or help them travel to it etc. It just means if the care worker wishes to assist in helping out and does so it means they won't be guilty of any crime.

PurgatoryOfPotholes
"But this? Do we need to research and see which brothel has the best hygiene rating? Reviews? DBS checks? Accessibility? Disabled parking?"

I understand the gentleman booked a sex worker from the TLC Trust charity which is designed for disabled clients, sex workers register for the site knowing so. Brothels are illegal in Britain so it will just be a matter of client going to the sex worker's place where she will be alone or vice-versa. For queries like accessibility they can be discussed during the booking process.

"So it’s made me think that paying for sex workers should be made illegal. Why is it legal to pay for sex? Makes no sense. Sex workers should not be penalised."

Legal to pay for sex in Britain because a lot of people and orgs (this includes many leading human rights and health orgs, see the signatures on this letter) believe the Nordic Model would put sex workers in greater danger. Sex workers are still penalised under the Nordic Model for working together.
decrimnow.org.uk/open-letter-on-the-nordic-model/

But to avoid derailing this thread with debate on the law, there is more discussion on law models on this thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4222357-Nordic-model-demand-in-Daily-Mail

Iootraw1 · 08/05/2021 09:28

If a man is not disabled enough to be able to still participate in sexual acts then can he not pick up a phone himself and ring for a sex worker?

I would tell a patient to go ‘do one’ if they asked that of me.

MargaritaPie · 08/05/2021 21:22

Can't really comment without knowing details.

Maybe some disabled men have a speech impediment as part of their disability and find using the telephone difficult and worry the prostitute might not make out their speech or think they might be a hoax caller? I dunno just guessing.

I would tell a patient to go ‘do one’ if they asked that of me.

You have the right to decline but I hope you would be polite about it if it were to happen.

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