Campaigners lobby for tougher sex purchase laws

End Prostitution Now is pressing the Scottish Parliament to introduce laws similar to those in Sweden, where it is criminal to buy sex but the selling of sex has been decriminalised.

Selling and purchasing sex is presently legal in Scotland unless done through a brothel or pimp, while soliciting in public is illegal.

Cllr James Coleman, chairman of the Glasgow Violence Against Women Partnership, is supporting the campaign and said: “The End Prostitution Now strategy aims to secure legislation in Scotland which criminalises the buyers of sex, decriminalises those exploited by prostitution and provides support and services to help people involved to exit prostitution safely.”

Northern Ireland this year became the only part of the UK to make buying sex a criminal offence, as part of the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Further Provisions and Support for Victims) Bill brought forward by the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party peer and MLA Lord Morrow.

Rhoda Grant MSP has tabled amendments to the Scottish Government’s Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Bill to introduce the same rules, so Scotland does not “become a haven for sex traffickers moving out of Northern Ireland”.

She told The Herald: “I believe that the Scottish Government can and should introduce appropriate legislation to ban the purchase of sex, similar to Lord Morrow’s Act in Northern Ireland.”

A spokesman for Scottish Churches, which is backing a change in the law, claimed that “evidence clearly points to reduced demand for commercial sexual services after the introduction of similar laws in other countries”.

However, a Queen’s University Belfast study commissioned by Northern Ireland’s Department for Justice found that only 2 per cent of men and women in the sex industry supported the new legislation.

A spokesperson for the Sex Worker Open University, a sex worker-led collective based in Glasgow, told Scottish Legal News: “All the evidence is that these laws harm sex workers - and harm the most marginalised of us the worst.

“Criminalising our clients and managers means that sex workers are more vulnerable to violence and exploitation, for example because when clients are criminalised, they give us less information about themselves - which means that someone seeking to perpetrate violence against us can contact us and arrange a meeting entirely anonymously: without giving us any identifying details with which to hold him to account should he turn abusive.

“It is for reasons like this that organisations like the World Health Organisation, Human Rights Watch and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women are against the Swedish model, and instead support sex worker-led organisations in our call for ‘rights, not rescue’.”