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Burning issue: Should paying for sex be outlawed in this country?



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Published Date: 04 March 2008
By Fiona Mactaggart and Professor Julia O'Connell Davidson
YES
Fiona Mactaggart, Labour MP for Slough
Prostituted women are 40 times more likely to die violent deaths than other women. Home Office figures suggest that 70 per cent of prostitutes spent part of their childhoods in care; 85 per cent report physical abuse within their families and up to 9...



The full article contains 586 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
Page 1 of 1

  • Last Updated: 03 March 2008 10:11 PM
  • Source: The Scotsman
  • Location: Edinburgh
  • Related Topics: Prostitution
 
1

WJohn,

Linlithgow 04/03/2008 10:10:34
Oh! Come on. What's wrong with marriage?
2

Urban Guerrilla,

Edinburgh 04/03/2008 13:14:41
What's wrong with selling or buying sex? Why is it different from anything else you might buy or sell?
3

I'mallymax,

Orwell's front room. 04/03/2008 17:01:33
Legalise the industry where it can be checked for standards and risk management. It's not right people are dying because of moralised views from politicians and women's groups. Prostitution is the oldest profession in history, do these politicians and women's groups really think they can make laws for or against a person selling their own sex?

Legalise the industry then it is not criminalised to have sex or to give sex.
4

I'mallymax,

Orwell's front room. 04/03/2008 17:06:16
Also, Mr MacAskill's moralising rant on rape yesterday sounds very much like Bliar and the Bliarites.
"Similarly, people who believe that a woman can't be raped by her husband, or someone else she knows, are wrong." Kenny, it's not good policy to invade the privacy of family life with these spurious statements! Is angiolini cutting a deal for you saying this?

It's not wise to dictate to husbands and wives their behaviour must meet politicians morals; oxymoron.

In marriage many unusual things happen; keep oot!
5

truthsleuth,

04/03/2008 17:09:57
Marriage would of course fall foul of the law in such circumstances.
6

Toast,

04/03/2008 19:10:55
We all pay for sex in one way or another,at least cash has a certain honesty about it.
7

Viktor Smirnoff,

Coplwyn Bay 16/04/2008 01:37:01
The first two words of Fiona Mactaggart's rant -"Prostituted women" - is a sign of things to come already. Notice the inference in the wording that prostitution is a process through which women are put, a bit like "pickled eggs". Does a bloke who works in a butchers' shop become a "butchered man," then?

Well, that's abolitionists for you, always trying to change women into objects.

Let's move on. Having gone through whatever machine prostitutes them, they are now 40 times more likely to die violent deaths than what we'll have to assume is average UK women. Already my suspicions are that this may hail from studies of street as distinct from indoor prostitutes (ie the minority). I'll let that pass for the moment but it would be really interesting to know from where these figures arise.

To make sense of this bullet-point, we need to look at lots of figures and ask for definitions. "Violent death," for example, could be at the hands of a Steve Wright or a James Sutcliffe, but could also be a heroin or cocaine addict who waltzed out of a fifth floor window and failed to remain high as a kite, someone who was run over by a lorry, or a suicide.

The first set of figures I'd call for would be the mortality figures for the neighbourhoods in which the prostitutes lived, alongside their own causes of death. We`d then have a much better picture of
how much, if at all, the quality of their being prostitutes is likely to cause violent death, which is the inference of the bullet point.

For a more complete picture, though, we'd have to look at common causes, the most obvious being a drug addiction leading to both prostitution and a violent death, but with no guarantee that if the prostitution hadn't been there, the violent death wouldn't have
occurred.

We move on: "Home Office figures suggest that 70 per cent of prostitutes spent part of their childhoods in care; 85 per cent report physical abuse within their families and up to 9..."

Well, we've no idea what

 

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