The Suffolk Strangler: same old

This article by Julie Bindel, written during the earlier part of the investigation, is worth a read. She compares the police investigation with that of the so-called Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliffe). So little has changed.

Five years after the Ripper's first murder, the only solution the police had come up with was to impose a curfew on women. We were urged to "stay indoors" and told, "Do not go out at night unless absolutely necessary, and only if accompanied by a man you know." (Sutcliffe himself gave the same advice to his sister.)

The women's movement responded by posting the following notice all over town:
"Attention all men in West Yorkshire, there is a serial killer on the loose in the area. Out of consideration for the safety of women, please ensure you are indoors by 8pm each evening, so that women can go about their business without the fear you may provoke." The cops tore the notices down and, in Ipswich last month, they adopted the same policy of a curfew on women. As Julie Bindel observes:

Police have not thought to advise men not to go out to buy sex in Ipswich, but they should have done, just as the police during the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry should have. Men need to be told that their presence can mask and protect men who go out in order to harm and kill.

The sex industry is in the news again

The mayor of Amsterdam has once again proposed the closure of the city's windows district on account of the rise of organized crime linked to prostitution. This news surprised me, because I thought legalised prostitution was supposed to reduce the involvement of criminals and improve the conditions of working women. Certainly that was always the intention of legalisation. Then there is the case of the 5 murdered women in Suffolk. What surprised me in that case was the public outpouring of sympathy for the women - plus the fact that people immediately assumed that vulnerability extended to all women in the area, not only prostitutes.

Most Australian states have legalized or at least decriminalized prostitution at some stage in the 1980s and '90s and, as in the Netherlands, the results are quite remote from the intentions. It is true that public attitudes have changed a lot. In Holland, for example, a large majority of the population regard prostitution a legal economic sector and approve of efforts to improve the position of prostitutes, though prostitution is not accepted as a worthwhile profession. The sex industry (broadly defined - e.g. including escort services, lap dancers, strippers etc.) reportedly accounts for 5% of Dutch GDP! In Victoria, Australia, it's much the same. The Age (Melbourne) reported in 1996, two years after more or less full legalization: 'sexually explicit entertainment and prostitution are becoming just another service industry'. 'Like it or not, sex work is entering the mainstream'. 'In January's edition of the tourist guide This Week in Melbourne ... there were ... three pages of advertisements for prostitution services. Bank managers can claim visits to a table-top dancing club as a business expense.' (3 Feb 1996: 1)

On the other hand, a paper by Arnot (2002) said that most sex workers in Melbourne couldn't be open about their work on account of the stigma - attitudes to the industry have changed, but not to the people who work in it. Bindel and Kelly (2003) note that "in the few surveys which ask the opinion of those currently involved in prostitution, few support legalisation. The extent to which they also view violence as an 'occupational hazard', raises serious questions, on this ground alone, whether prostitution can ever be considered as 'just another form of employment'." The research in this report isn't is a bit too anecdotal for my liking and insufficiently informed by comparisons with other forms of female-dominated employment, but it raises very interesting questions that demand something better. Moreover, it belongs to a preciously small body of work on the subject. Some of its findings:

1. On choice of profession
In Victoria in 1996, 64% of women in brothel and street prostitution wanted to leave the sex industry, and 57% were actively looking for other work. All the women in street prostitution surveyed wanted to leave, but faced great barriers: homelessness, drug addiction, and a cycle of being fined for prostitution, doing prostitution to pay for the fines, and imprisonment (Noske & Deacon 1996). In the Netherlands one study found that "79 percent of women in prostitution gave an indication that they were in prostitution due to some degree of force". Further: "Bullens and Van Horn (2002) analysed police records of 16 young prostitutes. Results show that the girls were recruited by so-called 'lover boys' who applied various seduction techniques to make the girls fall in love with the pimps. In general, the girls were procured into prostitution by means of physical violence. To protect and secure their income and organisation, the pimps used a wide range of techniques of which the use of physical violence can be considered the most effective."

70% of prostitutes in Holland are of non-EU origin, which means that they need a work permit to work legally in Holland and sex work is the only area in which you absolutely cannot get a work permit.

Most don't want to get onto any government-related record (which might afford them better protection) because they don't want to be tagged forever as having been a sex worker.

2. On the 'harm minimization' goals of the legislation.
According to the Prostitutes Co-operative of Victoria (PCV), while women in the sex industry consistently asserted to customers that condoms were essential, one in five customers still requested unsafe sex. Not all legal brothels insisted on condom use (TA 28 Feb 1999: 19). The PCV research found that youth, inexperience and drug use made it more difficult for women to enforce condom use, even in legal brothels (Pyett & Warr 1999: 183). In 2000, WorkCover [Australian federal government agency] and police began raiding brothels because of complaints about women being forced to have unprotected sex. It was discovered that women were being pressured to have full sex without condoms in unhygienic and often unsafe conditions (TA 13 Aug 2000: 3). Though research on the health of women in the sex industry has tended to focus on STDs and condom use, none of the research in this period assessed actual rates of STDs among women in the sex industry (Pyett & Warr 1999: 189).

Research in 1996 with 23 street workers found that all had been raped, bashed or robbed by a customer and all had been forced to have sex without a condom (TA 4 Sep 1996: 5). Women tended to blame themselves for violence and did not report it to police (Pyett & Warr 1999: 188).

Street workers are more vulnerable, but a fragment of a paper available here reports the following in relation to all prostitutes:

Perkins (1991) reported that 20 per cent (26 of 128) of respondents to a survey of New South Wales prostitutes had been raped in the course of their work, half of these more than once. However, the same study reported a much higher incidence of rape outside of work: almost half of the 128 women had been raped while not working, with 95 per cent of these assaults perpetrated by a husband, lover or acquaintance.

In both work and non-work environments, these are much higher percentages than for the female population as a whole, especially the employed population. Further: sexual violence against sex industry workers is more likely to be accompanied by physical injury, more frequently necessitating hospitalization, than in other cases. This makes it a particularly hazardous industry to work in. Again, however, it fits with historical patterns of treating female victims as 'asking for it'. Sex workers, in particular, don't 'ask for it'. They are engaged in the sale of a specified service for which there is an agreed price as for any other service. There is no ambiguity. Because it is a commercial transaction there are none of the ambivalences about the meaning of 'no'. Sexual assault of sex workers by their partners reminds me of the incredulous attitude with which many men back in the 1970s greeted the South Australian legislation against rape within marriage - as if signing a marriage contract meant that you handed your husband a permanent 24/7 entitlement to do whatever he wanted with you.


3. Criminal organizations and trafficking
Since you can only get a brothel licence in Victoria if you have no criminal record, the industry is riddled with front men and women acting on behalf of criminal gangs who use the legal (licensed) part of the industry to launder funds. Trafficking has increased as legalization has increased demand. Project Respect estimates that there are up to 200 women under `contract' in Victoria at any one time, and that at least seven licensed brothels in Victoria used trafficked women in 2002. Trafficked women commonly pay off debts between $30,000 and $50,000, experience significant physical and sexual violence, and are frequently deported. In July 2003, four people in Victoria were charged with sexual slavery. I haven't found the results, but prior to that there had been no successful prosecutions. The sexual slavery act came 5 years after the full legalization in Victoria - note that Victoria did not have such an act - and was a response to the rapid rise in trafficking after legalization. In 2000 the police estimated that 500 trafficked women were working in Sydney.

Trafficking is far worse in Holland where the illegality of non-EU workers is a the dominant feature of the industry. While most Dutch people support equal rights for these women with locals, the reality is something different.

4. Supply
In Victoria, on 1 July 1983 there were 149 brothels known to the police. All of them were illegal. In June 2003 there were 95 legal brothels and 400 illegal ones known to police and 1688 brothels exempt from the licensing requirement because they operated with not more than 2 prostitutes. In addition, there were 37 escort agencies in 1985 when they were still unregulated, 39 in 2003 plus a further 91 that operated as both brothels and escort agencies.

In 1985 there were 3-4000 prostitutes working in Victoria and 6000 in 1991. Since then there appear to be no data. However, the number of women working in escort agencies rose from 300-500 in 1985 to 5000 in 1994. The number of street workers has risen from 200 in 1985 to 400 in 2003.

There are some complaints that it is an industry controlled by big business. In the brothels, there are 'menus' and women cannot chose which items they will suppy or not. They get told how to dress, etc - which of course is no different from any other industry that employs either men or women.

5. Demand
In 1985, the Neave Report (which prepared the way for legalization) estimated that there were 45,000 visits to prostitutes each week in Victoria. By February 1999, the estimate had risen to 61,000 visits a week. That is about a 2.2% annual growth rate. Since the average annual population growth rate of Victoria is 1.2%, this implies either an increase in the proportion of men using prostitutes or an increase in their frequency of use.

A study published in the British Medical Journal in 2005 found that the proportion of British men who reported paying for heterosexual sex had increased from 5.6 per cent in 1990 to 9 per cent in 2000. An article in The Times begins to suggest an answer: while in the west free sex is more easily obtained than ever, western women demand something in return. The prostitute, on the other hand, offers an obligation free transaction. Basically, a man has an itch that has to be relieved and if he is in danger of acquiring an obligation - or even just a vague feeling of guilt that he might be skipping some unspecified obligation - he might as well pay for it.

But wait a minute! An itch can be relieved by masturbation (no guilt, not even any money). So what's with the need to pay women for the service?

Sweden
Sweden became the first country in the world to make the purchase of sexual services a criminal offence on 1 January 1999. This was one element in a comprehensive Violence Against Women Bill (Swedish Government Offices, 1998) in which prostitution was defined as a form of male violence against women. Sweden is thus one of the few signatories to fulfil Article 9.5 of the UN Optional Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2001) supplementing the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. This article states that signatories must put into place measures to discourage demand.

In Sweden prostitution... is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children... which is harmful not only to the individual prostituted person but also to society at large… This objective is central to Sweden’s goal of achieving equality between women and men at the national level as well as the international. However, gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them... Prostituted persons are considered as the weaker party, exploited by both the procurers and the buyers. It is important to motivate persons in prostitution to attempt to exit without risk of punishment. By adopting the legislation Sweden has given notice to the world that it regards prostitution as a serious form of oppression of women and children and that efforts must be made to combat it. (Ministry of Industry, Employment and Communications, 2003, p. 1)

When I originally read the Bindel and Kelly paper, I wondered why they used the term 'prostituted women' instead of 'sex workers'. The meaning of the language is pretty clear. It denies the 'agency' of the women. Well, no actually. The Swedish law says that prostitution is an expression of the unequal power between men and women. Any 'agency' that the women have is confined to a realm defined by the power relation in which they find themselves. The Swedish government, alone in the world, has decided that this relation must be equalized. It has therefore completely decriminalized the provision of sexual services and criminalized the purchase of them. The Swedish approach locates the cause of prostitution in the arena of demand – whatever women’s social circumstances they would not and could not sell sex if there were no one willing to pay for it. The underlying reason for the existence of prostitution is the continued inequality between women and men, and men’s sense of (obligation-free) entitlement to sex. Prostitution is regarded as a form of sexual violence. In terms of the wider social effects prostitution contributes to the inferior status of all women and girls - and this links back very neatly to the fear induced in all young women by the murders in Suffolk.

I like the Swedish argument. While legalization of prostitution has brought about (or resulted from) a significant change in social attitudes, in the sense that prostitutes are no longer blamed for their condition, we need to go a step further. The reason prostitutes remain at the bottom of the social ladder is that men can simply commodify something that would otherwise have to be negotiated as part of a human-to-human relationship (however fleeting). Legality reinforces the commodification and presents the delusion of an equal exchange.