Womens hour on Ash Regan's private members bill in the Scottish Parliament

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002f8lw

Ash Regan on fire here.

@POWNewcastleEastWallsend

"This all seems very light on evidence and correspondingly heavy on hypotheses."

The evidence is that demand has not decreased in the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland or Sweden. There have been reviews of the Nordic model laws in Ireland that show demand has not decreased. We have statistics from surveys in Sweden from 1996 and 2008 that show that the proportion of Swedish men who were active sex buyers increased.

We need to define 'demand'. Most people would say demand decreases if there are fewer paid-for sex acts. That could mean prostitutes having fewer clients, or it could mean that there are fewer prostitutes or clients.

What it should not mean is that there are as many paid-for sex acts but that the clients are paying less. It shouldn't mean that prostitutes are working for longer and having sex more often to get the same amount of money as before the change in law. There is evidence that this is what has happened in Norway after the Nordic model was introduced there.

Now we enter the realm of speculation. I wrote that people are unwilling to pay as much for something if it is difficult to buy. I didn't actually say that it is illegal to buy contraband cigarettes, but Microsoft Copilot says "Yes—it is illegal in the UK to buy, sell, or possess contraband cigarettes, and doing so can lead to serious consequences." Google Gemini says "While the primary legal focus and penalties in England are on the selling and supply of contraband cigarettes, it's important to understand that buying them also carries risks and can be considered illegal."

Now we all know that AI can say things that aren't true, just like newspapers, but buying contraband cigarettes does have penalties. Just like selling sex in Sweden has penalties. If a woman gets evicted from her flat and convicted of brothel-keeping because she shared it with another woman these are penalties that might not have been evident at the beginning. Penalties that most supporters of the Nordic model don't know anything about and don't want to know anything about.

Nicotine addiction is indeed one of the strongest addictions, comparable to heroin addiction. Smoking rates have dropped significantly in recent years, partly because of tax. Tax intended to discourage people from this dangerous activity. People may have beaten their nicotine addiction or they may have moved onto vapes.

That is why I am inclined not to believe the Star investigation. Do you really think that a prisoner is going to pay £1,000 for an ounce of tobacco? Where is he going to get £1,000 from? If they are allowed vapes in prison then that would only happen if they were a bit stupid. Which I suppose some of them are.

So I think my contraband cigarette analogy still holds. Another reason why men might not have wanted to spend as much money paying for sex is the 2008 financial crisis. The Nordic countries weren't hit as bad by this as others, but still people will have been spending less on non-necessities.

Norway adopted the Nordic model in 2009, so perhaps this is the reason why men started paying less there then. It looks as if there was a genuine drop in demand after 2008, it shows up in the Swedish surveys, but the proponents of the Nordic model can't claim credit for that because Denmark also had this drop in demand even though they haven't adopted the Nordic model.

Also, the 2017 survey shows an increase, as you would expect when the economy recovers from the financial crisis. The 2017 survey was limited and didn't show the proportion of Swedish men who are active sex buyers (or if it did I can't find it). It showed that the proportion of Swedish men who had paid for sex at sometime in their life was 10% (up from 7.5% in 2014) and the proportion of Swedish women who had been paid for sex at sometime in their life was 1.5% (up from 0.2% in 2014 and the highest it has ever been).

"under the Nordic model it is, if I have understood it correctly, NOT illegal to be a prostitute."

It is if the sex workers work together, that's still illegal in all Nordic Model countries. Ash Regan still wants this to be the case if her bill passes in Scotland.

Some of the "small print" NM supporters won't talk about much or at all.

Men must stop thinking their needs and desires are the most important thing. Yes I know…. But we do know that if as they do in Leeds they are photographed and named this seems to have an effect ( there was some research I believe) They really don’t want to be exposed to their friends/ family.
I know of an NGO in India who pay women a stipend to travel for an hour or two every day away from their community which is heavily reliant on prostition ,to take part in retraining and education. Many women, given the choice, do indeed choose an alternative. On a small scale this certainly does work.

About photography.

Most sex work in Britain take place indoors. Clients and sex workers dress in plain clothes to travel to meet up (it isn't like the movies where the woman is dressed like Pretty Woman and the man is in a trenchcoat). People will be discrete and you aren't going to know who to photograph unless you turn into a full time stalker.

Plus if people become aware they are being photographed they may not like this and you don't know how people or connections they may have might react. It's a dangerous game to play.

Proves the point that these men are violent.

Fascinating personal insights into the stealthy world of prostitutes and the men who pay to rape women? Or fevered imaginings?

I am sure that everyone on FWR will be disappointed to learn that "Pretty Woman" was not actually a documentary.

The testimony of some of the young girls who were trafficked by "Grooming Gangs" is that the men who who paid to rape them in the towns they were taken to were unwashed, scruffy old men in dirty clothes who looked like they were homeless. Although given the age of the girls, and the condition of many homeless men, "old" might mean anything over 30.

Is that what you had in mind? These "people" (men) with "connections"?

I don't think that she was talking about violence. If you are an innocent person there are laws against slander and libel. There are also laws to do with surveillance.

Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) and UK GDPR: These laws govern how personal data (which includes images, videos, and audio recordings of identifiable individuals) is collected, stored, and processed.

• If you are collecting personal data through surveillance (e.g., CCTV capturing more than just your own property, or persistent physical surveillance), you become a "data controller" and must comply with data protection principles.
• This means having a "lawful basis" for processing the data (e.g., legitimate interest, consent), ensuring it's adequate, relevant, and limited to what's necessary, stored securely, and not retained longer than needed.
• Individuals have rights, including the right to be informed about the processing, access their data, and object to its processing.
• Using CCTV that captures public areas or a neighbour's property, for example, would fall under these rules.

@Ramblingnamechanger

"I know of an NGO in India who pay women a stipend to travel for an hour or two every day away from their community which is heavily reliant on prostition ,to take part in retraining and education. Many women, given the choice, do indeed choose an alternative. On a small scale this certainly does work."

Nobody would argue with that. There are parts of the world where people are so poor that women are forced into prostitution. For them, getting a job in a garment factory would be a step up.

In other parts of the world there are jobs in factories or domestic service. Some women will have these jobs but want money to pay college fees, start a business or buy property. They will choose prostitution abroad as a temporary measure to get the money then return. I'm not promoting prostitution, I'm just saying this is what happens.

A well run NGO can help women in some parts of India, Colombia or Cambodia. Not all of them are well run though. I was listening to Woman's Hour a couple of years ago and they had an Indian woman who ran an NGO. I decided to find out more about it and I found something by two donors who went to India to find out how their money had been spent. They were so shocked by what they found that they tried to get their money back so they could give it to a different NGO.

I can't remember the name of the NGO or the name of the person who ran it. In Cambodia there was a woman who ran an NGO called Somaly Mam. It turned out she was telling lies in order to get funding, including claims of being sold into a brothel by a "grandfather" and forced into prostitution. She had been supported by American Evangelicals.

Under President Bush junior the American government supported some NGOs in places like India but not others. They had to comply with Republican values. This caused problems with HIV prevention programmes.

Then there were the NGOs like the International Justice Mission who did enormous harm in countries like Cambodia with their interventions.

I call them Amnesia Ireland.

I don't know what men driving around the red light district of Leeds at night are like but they are not homeless. We're talking about different things here. There's a difference between drug addicted street prostitutes in Leeds and the victims of grooming gangs. There may be a small overlap but they are not the same. There's a difference between migrant prostitutes from middle-income countries like China and prostitutes in low-income countries like Columbia, Cambodia and parts of India.

There are other forms of prostitution as well. There isn't one reality of prostitution. Each requires a different response. It isn't about men's needs and desires, it's about how to help different groups of women. That will vary in each case. Some don't want help.

In 1993 in Ireland there was a law banning street prostitution. It was a disaster because the women who couldn't afford to rent a flat or a mobile phone and place an advert in the paper became dependent on pimps. Before that street prostitutes were independent.

Rachel Moran was very annoyed about it, as well she should have been because it was only after 1993 that she had to start having penetrative sex. Before that she only did oral sex and handjobs. So it just goes to show that you can harm women by introducing poorly thought-out laws or using other means to try to control it.

Ash Regan's Twitter timeline is painful to look at. Her bill is not well supported and it's visible she can't stand it.

The Edinburgh News on 4th July says "her bill has strange opposition" although the opposition as established by now include a long list of human rights/health/anti HIV/anti-trafficking/sex worker orgs etc. Scotland's Community Safety Minister Siobhian Brown is also opposed to the Nordic Model (the article questions if this is "genuine" or "sour grapes", how pathetic).

https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/ash-regans-prostitution-bill-is-drawing-some-strange-opposition-susan-dalgety-5209739

Does anyone here speaking for the pro prostitution lobby like to explain why they are not campaigning against men’s demands. Why should we accept that the buying and selling of womens bodies is in any way acceptable or normal?

I'm not 'pro prostitution'. In fact, I would like to see a decrease in the amount of prostitution all over the world. That is something achievable. What is not achievable is eliminating prostitution, something the Nordic model advocates want.

The Nordic model hasn't decreased demand in Ireland, either North or South. They say that it has in Sweden, but only because they have manipulated the statistics to make it appear so. It is not true that the proportion of Swedish men who pay for sex dropped from 12.7% to 7.6% after the Nordic model was introduced in Sweden. This is the statistic they always use.

I don't see why people think that 'campaigning against men's demands' is going to achieve anything. You could campaign against people's demands for cannabis or cocaine but it won't get us anywhere. It would be nice if burglars stopped burgling but while we wait for that to happen we need to have sensible laws.

Prostitution isn't about buying women's bodies. Prostitutes charge for a service. You can find parts of the world where that is not the case, such as parts of India or towns in the North of England such as Rotherham. What happens there is not acceptable or normal and there are ways to deal with that.

The evidence is that with migrant prostitutes about 1% have been coerced or deceived and about 15% meet the criteria for being trafficked. It could be that they have had their passport or other documents taken away from them or that they are in debt. These women need to be helped, as do the women who are addicted to crack cocaine and heroin.

By doing this we can reduce the total amount of prostitution. The ones who don't want help can go about their business. It will take money to do this, money for rehab and other things. Money for social services not the police. In Sweden the government gave lots of extra money to the police but no extra money for social services.