my recent pages

I've created a number of pages recently on this blog. They can be seen on the right of this post. The reason why I have done this is because there are issues that I want to deal with in detail. They are reference for people who need to know facts about these issues. I want to keep posts more for my own experiences although since the lockdown I haven't had many of those.

I have been finding out about prostitution in developing nations (the Global South). This has been reflected in recent posts, 'behind the veil of vice', 'sex in the cities' and 'prostitution in developing nations'. I have put the important information in a slightly more coherent form in the page 'trafficking'.

Most of the information I have copy-and-pasted from various sources so sometimes there might be inconsistencies. I have referenced some of this but if you wish to find the source then copying sentences and Googling them will usually let you see where they have come from. I have divided the pages into different sections using horizontal rules. They will be updated when I get new information.

'trafficking' shows how this issue has been used by evangelicals and especially George W Bush to try to stop sin. What they are doing to poor countries needs to be exposed.

'brothel-keeping' is about how a simple change in the law can make life better for many sex workers.

'public opinion' is about how the Swedish government has manipulated the opinion of people in a sinister way.

'the reality' is about the true nature of most prostitution in both affluent and poor countries.

'Dworkin' is about how one or two people managed to change public opinion for the worse.

'MacKinnon' is about how an American legal expert influenced the law in Sweden.

'Ireland' is about how the Nordic model is working out in Ireland, both North and South.

'Rachel Moran' is about the so-called survivor whose book says something different from what the prohibitionists believe.

'more about the Nordic model in Sweden' is about how the Nordic model seemed to start working after about ten years and why. The police were given more resources then but also there was the financial crisis. We now know there was a drop in the amount of prostitution in Denmark too about the time of the financial crisis. So the drop can't be explained by the policy of arresting punters, because that didn't happen in Denmark.

Daily Mail interesting today

There are two things in the Daily Mail newspaper today that interested me. One is that Sir Martin Sorrell was accused of having sex with a prostitute in Shepherd Market in Mayfair, London. The other is MP Jess Phillips complaining about twitter trolling and demanding an end to anonymity online.

I am familiar with the Shepherd Market area of London. In 2012 I took photographs of the walk ups (brothels) there although I have never paid for sex there as it is slightly more expensive than Soho.

This is my photograph of 50A Shepherd Market which is the one that Sir Martin is supposed to have visited. The most interesting thing about the Daily Mail article is that the reporter tried to find out who owns the flat. The Land Registry says that it was owned until recently by Viscount Curzon, the 6th Earl Howe. There is an interesting interview with one of the women who works at the flat.

Jess Phillips was on Woman's Hour last week talking about the inquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade (Behind Closed Doors). A sex worker also on the programme said that it's impossible to get rid of prostitution. Her reply was that we can reduce it. If you look on the report there are two statistics that appear to show that prostitution has been reduced in Sweden because of the new law.

Both are wrong though. I will quote the relevant paragraph from page 22 below:-

Sweden became the first country to adopt this abolitionist law in 1999. Anonymous surveys conducted in 1996 and 2008 revealed that the proportion of men in Sweden who reported paying for sex dropped from 13% to 8%. The most recent study conducted on prevalence rates found that 0.8% of men in Sweden had paid for sex in the previous 12 months - the smallest proportion recorded in two decades and the lowest level in Europe.

The first statistic (13% to 8%) is not to do with men who pay for sex, but men who at some time in their lives have paid for sex. So a 72 year old man would answer yes in the 1996 survey if he paid for sex when he was 18 in 1942 and a conscript in the Swedish army or navy. He would be too old to participate in the next survey in 2008. It tells us nothing about whether the amount of paid-for sex in Sweden is increasing or decreasing.

The second statistic (0.8%) is to do with people who pay for sex. Active sex buyers, who report that they have paid for sex within the 12 months previous to the survey being conducted. But when you look at the actual statistics, the number of people who pay for sex increased between 1996 and 2008 (1.3% to 1.8%). The new law criminalizing men who pay for sex was introduced in 1999. So it went up, not down.

The only way to explain this mismatch between the two sets of statistics between 1996 and 2008 is that the number of men who pay for sex did increase after the 1999 law was introduced, despite it now being illegal. Older men, who perhaps paid for sex while away from home as young men in the war, became too old to participate in the 2008 survey, or died. Sweden was neutral in the war but there was conscription.

Since 2008, the number of men who pay for sex has decreased (1.8% to 0.8%). Numbers can go up as well as down, as we have seen, and the changes have nothing to do with the 1999 law. Men aren't becoming too afraid to visit sex workers. I suspect that the Swedish figures have always been the lowest in Europe, between 1996 and 2014 the number dropped by only about a third.

This drop was probably something to do with the 2008 financial crisis. It certainly hasn't gone from 13% to 8% to 0.8%, which is what they may be trying to imply. The number of mdl who have paid at some time in their lives has decreased by a very small amount since 2008 (7.9% to 7.5%), which is consistent with older wartime men no longer participating in surveys.

The evangelical Christian politician Jim Wells used a false statistic to get the Nordic Model adopted in Northern Ireland. He said in the Northern Ireland Assembly that 127 sex workers were killed in a 15 year period after legalization in the Netherlands when in reality they were killed over a 30 year period with most killed before legalization not after. He's been in the news again after comparing abortion to the holocaust and has been castigated for his homophobic comments.

The evangelical former pastor MP Gavin Shuker is the leader of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade who produced the report. It seems he has learned from Mr Wells about how to get the Nordic model adopted. Gavin Shuker, Jess Phillips and her chums at the APPG want to use statistics creatively too to get the same law here. I hope they don't succeed.