Showing posts with label Woman's Hour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Woman's Hour. Show all posts

Monday, November 20, 2017

Sex, Lies, and Paperbacks

I heard the feminist Julie Bindel recently on the radio talking about prostitution. I thought it would be interesting to read her new book and was delighted to find that no one seems to have a copy. I could get one off Amazon of course but I'm not going to pay for it. I've asked in libraries and been told I can request it, which I don't want to do. It's not in bookshops. There is a feminist/socialist bookshop in Bold Street in Liverpool and they had a copy but it wasn't on the shelf and they had to look for it.

So even though she's had free publicity for her book from Woman's Hour and free publicity from The Guardian it doesn't look as if many people are going to read it. I could get the gist of what she's saying from the radio programme and the newspaper article. I was pleased to see that she's no longer claiming that when she went to Nevada they found learning disabled women who were being double pimped.

She had claimed that on an earlier appearance on Woman's Hour, although that hadn't been in her report. The report said that one learning disabled woman had been found, which is one too many obviously, but hardly any indication of what will happen here if we legalize brothels.

In her Guardian article she makes no claim that there is less prostitution in Sweden now because of the law criminalizing men for paying for sex. She writes that prostitution is 'a consequence of women’s inequality' and that 'it should be possible to eradicate it'. Yet Sweden is held up as the best example of an equal society, and after 18 years of the law they haven't eradicated it.

While looking for her book I came across a similar book by Kat Banyard called Pimp Nation. I read Chapter 5 in the bookshop and was annoyed that she is repeating a false statistic that I've seen before. Around the year 2000 prostitution was legalized in the Netherlands, but in Sweden they began to prosecute men for paying for sex. Banyard writes that 127 prostitutes were killed in the Netherlands during that time but only one in Sweden.

I heard Rachel Moran state this on Woman's Hour, and it's false. The 127 prostitutes were killed over a 30 year period, not 15 years, and most of them were killed before prostitution was legalized not after. So it looks as if fewer women are being killed in the Netherlands now than before legalization. Not more, which is what they are trying to pretend.

What's more, no prostitutes were killed in Sweden in the 9 years before the new law prosecuting punters. Banyard tries to dismiss the one killing since 2000 as 'domestic'. It wasn't domestic, the authorities handed over Petite Jasmine's kids to a violent ex-partner because she was a prostitute, who then killed her. This is what the authorities in Sweden do. They take away their children. They also deport them or get them evicted.

Banyard doesn't mention this in her book of course. She's happy to point out that in New Zealand prostitution might not be called fully decriminalized because prostitutes aren't allowed to solicit near schools, but she doesn't mention the extra-judicial punishments of prostitutes in Sweden. She doesn't mention that two women who choose to work together for safety can be arrested in Sweden, as also happens in Britain.

Prostitutes can be treated like pimps, as can their landlords if they don't cooperate with the police to evict them. I would like to know if it is men or women who are prosecuted, and if it is women whether they are younger or older. My guess is that it is women in their 20s and 30s who get prosecuted, not so much men or older women.

There are police in Sweden (and Norway) whose job it is to identify prostitutes, find out who their landlords are, contact them, and get the women evicted. Or deport them, or take their children away. Then they tell the world that they treat prostitutes as victims. Victims, yes, but of the police. 'Violence against women', yes, but it is this Nordic model which is violence against women, not prostitution.

Woman's Hour has got a lot to answer for. They let Julie Bindel pretend that she'd found learning disabled women (in the plural) being double pimped in Nevada. They let Rachel Moran state the false 127 statistic. Then Bindel again plugging her new book.

I used to like Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour until she started having a go at the transsexual woman guest whose only crime was to contradict Murray by saying she didn't think it was too much of an imposition for a top hotel to require their female employees to shave their legs when in skirts with bare legs. Jenni later came out with a statement stating that trans women aren't really women, that they can't understand what it's like to be a woman. I think that it's Jenny who is the one who is out of touch with how most women feel.

Kat Banyard got the false statistic from Jim Wells, who was a politician in Northern Ireland (before he started making homophobic comments). He's a Protestant Christian so he together with Catholics in the south of Ireland have campaigned to ban sex work. Radical feminists like Kat Banyard ally themselves with social conservatives like Jim Wells, she quotes him in her book.

She thinks that if a man pays for sex with a woman then he can do anything he wants with her during that time, and that men like nothing better than asphyxiating prostitutes by forcing their erect penises down their throats. That's why she thinks sex work can't be a real job, because you can't be taught that. The reality is a sex worker will tell her clients what she will and will not accept: most that I've encountered don't allow kissing, fingering, oral sex without a condom or anal sex (or asphyxiation). She can even tell her client she doesn't want him to get on top of her if he's too big (that has happened to me twice, I'm tall and slightly overweight: I respected what they wanted).

This blog allies itself with sex workers, transexuals and gay men. Not that I think these three groups have anything in common except that they are under threat by people like Jim Wells. It allies itself with sex-positive feminists, as opposed to radical feminists like Bindel and Banyard.

I ally myself with sex workers like Laura Lee who after she was presented with the false 127 statistic at the Northern Ireland Assembly found out the truth about it. I ally myself with all the sex workers who are arrested just for trying to make themselves safe by working together, and the ones targeted by the punishment squads in Sweden and Norway. I ally myself with transsexuals and support their right to be who they really are. I ally myself with gay men and women and believe they can make parents who are just as good as heterosexual couples. Jim Wells - who doesn't believe that - can keep his opinions to himself. So can all the liars with their false statistics and their hidden agendas. I know what side I'm on.

I realize that many will doubt that sex workers are arrested and evicted in Sweden and Norway. The whole idea of the Nordic Model is that prostitutes aren't punished. Bindel said in her recent Woman's Hour appearance "They shouldn't be arrested - ever". I have collected all the evidence on my blog page The truth about the Swedish Model. Even more on my new page don't erase or edit out Petite Jasmine. You can also read my An Open Letter to Rachel Moran for more information about the 127 statistic. You may want to read my review of feminist Natasha Walter's book Living Dolls where I expose her false statistics.

UPDATE: After reading more about Petite Jasmine I can see that there are people who are trying to say that she didn't have her children taken away because she was a sex worker. There is no evidence that she was drinking and taking drugs, although she was accused of these things.

Jasmine wrote in a letter to a Swedish MP after her house had been stormed by social workers and her children forcibly taken into custody "I was subjected to an investigation which in a desperate way tried to find all those signs that they already from the start were convinced would be there, because I had been selling sex. Drug abuse, sexual abuse, emotional disturbance. They had a difficult time finding any of this, but it should certainly be known that they tried." So before she died, she herself had said that it was because she was a sex worker, and I believe her.

Someone asked why we don't mention the four women who have been killed in New Zealand since their change of law in 2002. We have no reason to believe that these four women (Mellory, Suzie, Anna, and Sky) would have not died if New Zealand had different laws. It isn't the policies of the New Zealand government that have resulted in the deaths of these four women, but it is the policies of the Swedish government that have resulted in the death of Petite Jasmine. That is why we protest at the policies of the Swedish government.

Sweden has not reduced prostitution. Neither can they claim that their policies have resulted in an end to the murder of sex workers. There were no murders in the nine years before the introduction of the new law. They want us to believe that the Swedish law has stopped women from being killed because prostitution is no longer tolerated there. They want us to believe that prostitutes are treated nicely there. All three of these are false: there has been no reduction in deaths, prostitution is just a common as before, and women are persecuted.

It wasn't just Petite Jasmine who was the victim. Her children witnessed their father stab and murder her, and stab and seriously injure a social worker. I want to leave you with more of what Petite Jasmine has written. I do this not to use emotion to promote my point of view, but to show what she was like and as a tribute to this brave woman. It is a translation from the Swedish so it might not be always grammatical.

"After one year and three months finally see her standing in front of me. The feeling when she runs into my arms and hug me, to get sniff her hair immediately becomes soaking wet of my tears, drag your finger along her small nose and chin, stroking her little hand and hold on her tiny body hard in my embrace and kiss her eleven thousand times in the forehead. To finally get to see her in the eye and say seventeen thousand times how missed and loved she is. And never want to let go again, but must. Created by my body when we two have been and we are part of each other forever. The love for my children is indescribable. (And justice system as said joint custody and half the time, where were you when everything was going on?)"

Thursday, March 20, 2014

the prostitution debate on Woman's Hour

On the BBC Radio 4 programme Woman's Hour recently (03/03/14) Gavin Shuker MP talked about the results of the cross party committee report he chaired on reforming prostitution laws. He is a former Evangelical Christian (Pentecostal) pastor and he talks the language of radical feminists. It's a clear example of how religious groups and radical feminists are 'singing from the same hymn sheet'.

Here's what he had to say "There's always going to be a small group of people for whom it's a choice that they've made actively, but for the vast majority of women involved in prostitution it's a choice that's been made for them or a choice they're trapped in."

To which presenter Jane Garvey replied "And surely - you would imagine - that the vast majority of men who choose to pay for sex will know that the women who are doing it don't want to be there or there are a string of reasons why they find themselves in that position." No pun intended I'm sure.

The point is that the vast majority of men who choose to pay for sex are well aware of what all the research shows - that in Britain coercion is very rare. Neither is there any credible research to show that women are trapped in prostitution.

He goes on to say "The challenge is to men's attitudes of buying sex and in countries where they've successfully changed the law and made a difference to the prevalence of selling sex that's what they've done. They've tackled it head on and said it's unacceptable to purchase sex and our law's going to back that up rather than the other way around."

He's obviously referring to Sweden and some other Nordic countries. It's generally agreed that the law criminalizing the purchasers of sex in Sweden has had no effect at all on the majority of sex workers apart from making their lives more difficult. It has had some effect in reducing on-street sex work but that has always been a small part of the sex work industry and in Britain we have done much better through the use of ASBOs.

He also says "Prostitution is a form of violence against women and girls." This is just radical feminist propaganda and there is no evidence for it whatsoever.

He's obviously swallowed the radical feminist creed hook, line and sinker. He's just propagating radical feminist lies that have no foundation in reality. He continued "What you're confronted by though when you go into this with a genuinely open mind and you take more than 400 different submissions is you're confronted by alarmingly similar and consistent reports of the nature in which women have come into that trade. Many of which have come in under the age of 18 before they are able to even legally consent, with alarming numbers of care leavers, people that have been sexually exploited as a child, people that have been sexually exploited for money under the age of 18. Now if we're not going to take a serious look at our law in light of that ... then I think we need our heads looking at."

I have been trying to find out where is the research that shows that many prostitutes started before the age of 18. On the AVA site they state 'According to evidence submitted to the UK Government between 50-75% of women entered prostitution before they were 18, with 15 years being the average age of entry. [Home Office (2004). Paying the Price.]' However, when you look on the Home Office document Paying the Price: a consultation paper on prostitution July 2004 you can't find where it says that. On page 97 under Annex C (Age of first involvement in prostitution) the only place it mentions 15 years of age is where it mentions 3 studies, the largest of which was of 48 women and the most recent was 1998. Nowhere does it say that 15 years is the average age of entry. Just the opposite. The Home Office document does not make it clear what type of prostitutes these are; it seems that they are talking about street prostitutes who have always been a small minority among prostitutes and who hardly exist in Britain today because of ASBOs.

So when Gavin Shuker says on national radio "Now if we're not going to take a serious look at our law in light of that ... then I think we need our heads looking at" he is seriously misrepresenting the facts. Let him state where he gets his information from, because I can't find it. You can still listen to the programme here.

Rachel Moran
The next week on Woman's Hour (10/03/14) Jane Garvey talked to Rachel Moran and Ana. Rachel Moran said that she used to be a street girl and Ana said she was trafficked. However, blogger Maggie McNeill has good reasons to believe that Rachel Moran is not telling the truth. Another blogger, Laura Lee, believes the same thing. It seems that religion has reared it's ugly head again, only this time it's not Evangelicals like Gavin Shuker but Roman Catholics.

Ruhama is a Catholic organization connected with two orders of nuns. These nuns, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and the Good Shepherd Sisters, used to run the Magdalene laundries in Ireland where large numbers of young women were imprisoned without trial. A wide range of innocent women and girls were sent to Magdalene asylums because someone in authority felt they were sexually active or might become so.

Presenter Jane Garvey asked Rachel Moran "If the punters are criminalized, won’t this drive them and the prostitutes to even more risky circumstances?" To which Rachel replied "Well you only have to look at the difference between Sweden and Holland to get your answer to that. There’s been 127 women murdered in Dutch prostitution in the last 15 years. Now in Sweden there’s only been one prostituted woman murdered."

I have been unable to find this statistic anywhere on the web, although I did find on this page that 127 have been killed in the last 30 years. Prostitution in the Netherlands was not fully decriminalized until about 15 years ago so it's important to get the facts right. Were these women killed before or after decriminalization? Whatever the facts it seems that religious extremists, whether Evangelical or Catholic, are quite happy to say things that aren't true to further their cause.

As for Ana, the woman who said that she was kidnapped and taken to Ireland, I'm wondering why they had to go to Ireland to find a case of trafficking. I believe that trafficking does exist but that it is at a low level in countries like Britain. Could this perhaps be Ruhama again saying things that aren't true? You can still listen to the programme here.

Valerie Lempereur
It would not be the first time that someone pretending to have been a prostitute wrote a book and had an effect on the debate about changing the law. Dutch journalist Valerie Lempereur wrote the book Behind a Window in the Wallen (Achter het raam op de Wallen) under the name Patricia Perquin. People believed what she said and it had the effect of changing the law for the worse.

Maggie McNeill has written about this in a post on her blog, and in the same post she gives information about the situation in the Netherlands. In September of 2007 Amsterdam commissioned a study which was published in 2010; it’s 232 pages long and available only in Dutch. Maggie has put the conclusion and summary in English on her site. I've had a quick look at it and done a couple of searches using keywords but as far as I can see there is nothing about prostitutes getting murdered.

So I can only conclude that the authors of the study did not see murder as a problem for sex workers in Amsterdam because it doesn't happen. It looks as if Rachel Moran's statistic about 127 of them being killed in the last 15 years is totally wrong. This study also shows that underage prostitution is essentially nonexistent in Amsterdam. It looks as if Gavin Shuker's statistic about there being lots of underage prostitutes is also totally wrong.

One thing that I disliked in the Woman's Hour discussion of prostitution is when presenter Jane Garvey said that you can use statistics to prove anything. People can try to use statistics to prove anything but bad statistics can be challenged. I don't think the BBC should just allow false statistics to be broadcast if they can't be backed up. The BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less is very good at debunking incorrect statistics.

Dr Brooke Magnanti's book The Sex Myth debunks many of the statistics used by people who want to ban pornography, erotic dancing and prostitution. I especially like the chapter in her book about the belief that the presence of lap dancing clubs in Camden has increased the incidence of rape. Dr Magnanti - who is a trained statistician and a former sex worker - shows that this belief is false.

So statistics are important because they support the cause of decriminalizing sex work and not criminalizing the clients of sex workers. I can't accept the idea that statistics can prove anything and we just have to go with our gut feelings. Are most sex workers in Britain coerced or aren't they? It's not that difficult to get to the truth. The debate is hotting up, and the consequences could be that the lives of sex workers are made more difficult and dangerous if the law is changed on the basis of the falsehood of religious extremists and radical feminists.

UPDATE: I've just found out that Croydon Community Against Trafficking are screening a film about trafficking at the New Life Christian Centre in Croydon. "Our fellowship is in the evangelical and Pentecostal/charismatic traditions that lay emphasis on Bible based faith and an ongoing experience of the Holy Spirit." The same type of Christian are causing trouble for gays in Africa.

As it says in this Independent article 'Roger Ross Williams, the director of God Loves Uganda, a documentary about the influence of conservative US Christians in the East African nation, said, “The anti-homosexuality bill would never have come about without the involvement of American fundamentalist evangelicals.”' I'm sure that they would like to cause trouble for gay men and lesbian women in this country but public opinion won't allow it, but they can make trouble for sex workers by confusing people about the true nature of sex work.

I have been looking at the document produced by Evangelical/Pentecostal Gavin Shuker and his all party parliamentary group. There is very little in the way of facts and figures, it doesn't seem to refer to research, but there is a lot of opinion and some anecdotal evidence. They don't have any information to back up their assertions.

I've found out more about the 127 statistic. Laura Lee on this page states:-
"Given his obsession with this 127 statistic, I'd like to clarify: the statistic relates to 118 murders that occurred between 1985 and 2012 being investigated by a police cold case team in the Netherlands. In 25 of the cases, the victims were not sex workers, or it is not known if they were sex workers or not. Most of the sex worker victims were working illegally and outdoors, not indoors. Eighty-six of the murders took place before October 1, 2000 (i.e. before prostitution was legalised in the Netherlands)."

I don't know if Rachel Moran was ever really a sex worker and I don't know what her association with Ruhama is, but we can be sure her '127 women murdered in Dutch prostitution in the last 15 years' statistic is false. If she was really concerned about the deaths of prostitutes then she would try to get her facts straight.