Not for the first time, the Times columnist Janice Turner today weighs in on the subject of prostitution.
I think her overall position in past articles can be fairly summarised as that prostitution should be banned because it invariably involves abuse, coercion or desperation.
This is not a view that most men who have extensive experience of the oldest profession in the UK would share – although of course prostitution occasionally involves these things, just as the consumption of alcohol occasionally leads to violence.
Today’s article is pasted below. Of course few of us would be anything but appalled by the way aid workers, UN troops and others have exploited poor and vulnerable young women and girls in Third World countries.
However it is when Janice Turner homes in on Blighty that things get rather more controversial.
But research shows men who buy sex are more likely to rape: trading money for consent reduces empathy, makes a man believe only his pleasure counts and increases his likelihood of partner abuse.
Research shows this, does it? What research? It would be helpful if she provided a source.
Sarah Everard’s killer, Wayne Couzens, a prolific punter who paraded escorts to his police colleagues, tried to book a prostitute just after he’d disposed of Sarah’s body. Read any review on ‘punter’ websites where men rate women’s bodies, obedience and enthusiasm, marking them down if they balk at painful demands.
I have never seen a review on UKP where a punter has criticised a girl who “balked at painful demands” (!!!) – and indeed anyone who included anything like this in a UKP review would be drowned in hostile comments from other members, and probably be thrown off the site.
Vague, unsupported and unproven claims have no place in good journalism.
_________
Soldiers should not be buying sex anywhere
The MoD is right to ban troops from foreign brothels but using prostitutes at home or abroad is inherently abusive
For centuries brothels were part of military planning, prostitution seen as an auxiliary service, vital for the men’s morale. The French army had Bordels Militaires de Campagne, trailer trucks each containing ten women which followed battalions servicing, in order of rank, soldiers who’d line up with a ticket, a condom and a towel.
In France’s colonial campaigns these mobile units were staffed by young Algerian or Vietnamese women, sold by relatives into servitude. The Japanese imperial army rounded up “comfort women” in occupied Korea or China, local girls who believed they were to become nurses. Throughout the Second World War Germany had its official military brothels stocked with pretty Polish or Russian girls snatched off the street.
These women, who were brutalised, forced to have sex with 50 men a day, made pregnant and then ostracised by their families so they could never return home, are rarely mentioned in military histories. Their purpose was to keep the troops biddable. Besides, with a cadre of designated women to rape, it was hoped soldiers might leave civilians alone and not catch venereal disease.
The British Army approach was less formal: tolerate but don’t condone men who far from home might line up outside “red lamp” knocking shops in the Somme. Even in this decade, it turned a blind eye to hundreds of troops deployed to Kenya for hot weather training having sex with prostitutes through chain-link fences or taking a brace of girls off to £10-a-night hotels.
When Agnes Wanjiru, a hairdresser driven into sex work to feed her baby, was killed and stuffed into a septic tank, squaddies at a British base in Kenya covered up the death, then laughed about it on WhatsApp groups. The army washed its hands and the murder remains unsolved.
It took this scandal, brilliantly exposed by Sunday Times journalists, to bring the British military into the #MeToo era. The MoD has announced that from now on it will prohibit “all sexual activity which involves the abuse of power, including buying sex while abroad”.
This has been met with much derision: how can it be policed, why should “consensual” acts be subject to court martial, what about men’s sexual needs? But as the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, says: “Life has moved on, it is a different generation”.
Indeed it would be hypocritical for the government not to act. After Oxfam was involved in a series of sex abuse scandals following the 2010 Haitian earthquake, including trading sex for basic supplies and hiring locals for staff orgies, it was denied UK aid contracts. When further Oxfam scandals emerged in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) the ban remained. How can it be wrong for charity workers to exploit vulnerable women but fine for British soldiers?
The Oxfam scandal exposed the sexual impunity of staff at many NGOs operating in developing nations. There is something particularly grotesque about a western aid worker, high on his own virtue, bartering with a young mother after a natural disaster: sleep with me and here’s a box of baby milk. But is it any better if money is traded instead?
The United Nations classes such prostitution as exploitation. From Haiti to Sierra Leone, its peacekeeping forces have been implicated in sex scandals. In the 1990s blue helmets were found to frequent brothels in Bosnia and Kosovo staffed by trafficked women, and in Cambodia where girls were under age. Peacekeepers in the DRC were found to have bought sex with two eggs from their ration packs. In Liberia, a 2016 report found half of women in Monrovia had turned to prostitution, with 75 per cent of clients being peacekeepers. UN presence was debasing a whole community.
It is almost 20 years since the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan announced peacekeepers should be “discouraged” from engaging in sexual relations with locals they are supposed to be assisting, since there is an “inherently unequal power dynamic”. Not that Annan’s words stopped the abuse. But it is right that the British Army is now pledging the same.
Inherent in the tolerance of soldiers buying sex is the belief it prevents rape, as if prostitutes are a buffer zone, dehumanised to protect virtuous women. But research shows men who buy sex are more likely to rape: trading money for consent reduces empathy, makes a man believe only his pleasure counts and increases his likelihood of partner abuse.
Sarah Everard’s killer, Wayne Couzens, a prolific punter who paraded escorts to his police colleagues, tried to book a prostitute just after he’d disposed of Sarah’s body. Read any review on “punter” websites where men rate women’s bodies, obedience and enthusiasm, marking them down if they balk at painful demands.
The question is not why soldiers should be banned from foreign brothels, but why only abroad. What prostitution is not a “sexual activity that involves the abuse of power”? In Germany’s legalised super-brothels, women, many trafficked from Romania or Africa, must sleep with six men a night before they’ve even paid their brothel rent. It is not a “job like any other” if basic health and safety — from avoiding contact with bodily fluids, unwanted touching or even violence — cannot be enforced. The vast majority of prostitutes are not swinging Belle de Jours but were abused as children, lured in by pimp-boyfriends and muffle their pain with drugs or alcohol.
Ben Wallace is right: this is a new generation. It is time that the Nordic model, which decriminalises sex work but makes buying it a crime and has been adopted in France, Ireland and Sweden, is debated in parliament. No man should have impunity when buying a woman’s body, whether out on a stag night or serving his country.
