  she's not my mentor, but i do believe she has intelligent things to say once in a while... another excerpt from the london prostitute i have linked in my sidebar. if i could stand fucking men, she may be more than a curiosity. _______________________________________ Last year I was asked to contribute an article to the Labour Tribune on the subject of prostitution.
What I thought of the laws as they stand, where I thought they should go, and so on. I won't retype that here. But I did think it needful to mention the proposed changes in legislation, if only in passing. The idea of tolerance zones in cities where street soliciting will not be prosecuted sounds compassionate on its face, but is ultimately misguided and unsafe. Driving vulnerable women out into the light industrial areas on the outskirts of a city is potentially very dangerous to them.
By caving to the NIMBY brigade and pressure from homeowners who do not want to see their property vales drop (because that, it seems, is all we care about in the UK in the 21st century - property prices), girls who are already potentially abused in large numbers will be put in a situation where they have less recourse to protection, not more.
And not forgetting, street soliciting is only a fraction of the sex business. You probably have already guessed: I think brothels should be legal. I think there should be a chain like Spearmint Rhino for working girls. I think what consenting adults want to do should be their business, and the way to crack down on traffickers, pimps and abusers is not to put the girls out of sight of the public. The suburbanites who imagine moving trade elsewhere will slow the flow of business are wrong. The people who think criminal charges for buying sex will stop the punters are wrong.
Those who believe there is any one story of prostitution, that a 16-year-old heroin addict on the street, or a posh hooker writhing on the sheets in Claridge's, is the representative of all working girls and that everyone just needs a little self-esteem workshop and some useful pamphlets on the dangers of drug use, are wrong.
If people are indeed being trafficked into the country for sex work, then surely the solution is better passport control - not putting the girls in harm's way. It's the world's oldest profession. It won't go away. But we can be sensible about the approaches to managing it, instead of consigning girls to a makeshift flesh zoo. A few thoughts. Nothing like a cohesive statement. I'm not certain 'spokeswoman' suits me. // posted by belle @ 10:26 AM Belle de Jour (http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/) 
