Do we actually want to rid Europe of its sex workers?

Do we actually want to rid Europe of its sex workers?

""Towards a Europe free from prostitution" – this is the call from the European Women's Lobby, a coalition of some 200 women's rights NGOs from across the EU, which met at the European parliament last week to launch their campaign. And to build a world where sex is no longer commodified and pleasure is freely exchanged is indeed a laudable feminist project. But we make our lemonade with the lemons we're given, and 21st-century capitalism, under which women's economic and social rights remain grossly circumscribed, does not lend itself to the foundation of such a utopia. So you'll forgive me for concluding that the Women's Lobby might as well be demanding a Europe free from vaginas.

At the launch conference, the lobbyists also heard assessments of the competing policies in Sweden and the Netherlands. Though not designed for societies free from sex work, these represent the two most widely recognised models for reducing violence against and exploitation of sex workers. In 1999, Sweden became the first country in the world to criminalise the buying, but not the selling, of sexual services. By contrast, under the Dutch approach prostitution has been legal and state-regulated for over a decade...

The trouble is that this is not a morally neutral discussion – prostitution provokes that almighty feminist fissure. Are you a rescuer, for whom one woman's willing wage-earning cannot trump the plight of the exploited, drug-addicted abuse survivor? Or an enabler, swallowing whole the inevitability of sex work, mythologising the happy hooker, or daring to suggest that in times of recession plenty of working-class women feel themselves but one step away from the oldest profession?

The experience of sex workers themselves is instructive about both models. A crackdown on clients forces them to work in the shadows, beyond the protection of the law. Legalisation sets up a two-tier system. Women working outside the toleration zones face the same dangers as before. Those working within them have less control over their conditions, pay higher taxes and essentially cede to the state as their pimp. Sex workers themselves say this, but sex workers are not always listened to. Perhaps because what they say doesn't always suit those who claim to advocate on their behalf.

Meanwhile, hard facts are hard to come by. Research is limited, inconclusive or methodologically dodgy, with data plucked out of context and moulded to one agenda or another. The oft-cited Home Office statistic that more than half of prostitutes have been raped or seriously sexually assaulted is in fact taken from two relatively small sample studies of street workers...

So who do we mean when we speak about sex workers? A Europe free from prostitution, after all, means a Europe free from prostitutes. The collective imagination offers polar opposites: the highly educated, economically savvy Belle de Jour and the trafficked eastern European innocent, robbed of her passport and imprisoned in a brothel. Both of these are, to an extent, fantasies of what non-sex-workers would like a prostitute to look like. And they ignore the huge variety of women who want protection from exploitation without being treated like a disease to be wiped out in order to end the oppression of all women. Pity is seldom far away from contempt...

In July a report by the UN-backed Global Commission on HIV and the Law recommended that all countries decriminalise private and consensual adult sexual behaviours, including same-sex sexual acts and voluntary sex work. It specifically stated that this should also apply to the Swedish model, concluding that criminalising the buying of sex had actually worsened the working lives of prostitutes in that country. Decriminalisation, which is very different to legalisation, has been in place in New Zealand since 2003. Safety has improved, the segregation that occurs with tolerance zones has been avoided, and there has been no increase in prostitution.

In Brussels, the European Women's Lobby described prostitution as "a form of violence, an obstacle to equality, a violation of human dignity, and of human rights". And for too many women, it is. But that will not change until it is also accepted that prostitution is also, for some, the best economic choice."