The usually reliable Libby Purves weighs in to this debate in today’s Times.
Unsurprisingly she doesn’t approve of students selling sex. Not many people do.
However there are two assertions she makes which are unsupported by evidence – and which I find dubious.
The first is this: “Yet research across the world makes it clear that selling sex is not only an immediate risk but reduces the safety of all women. Men who buy it, whether online or physically, are significantly more likely than other men to rape or commit other violence against women.”
Does research make this clear? How reliable is this research? Who was surveyed? Is it, for example, the result of interviewing convicted rapists about their other sex habits? If so, hardly a representative sample of purchasers of sex.
Common sense (yes, I know!) would suggest that – while buying “online sex” might, I suppose, just possibly cause men to be more likely to make sexual attacks on women (as a result of frustration at not having any “real-world” sex) – buying sex “physically” surely provides an outlet that should diminish a potential rapist's desires?
Libby Purves’s second dubious assertion is this, with which she ends her article: “And to think that in 1869, those pioneers naively believed university education would help prevent women having to sell sexual services to more powerful men.”
The pioneers in question are those who facilitated university education for women. 1869 was exactly half-way through the reign of Queen Victoria. I hardly think that the “pioneers” in question saw themselves as being in the business of providing a university education for girls of the underclass who would otherwise have become prostitutes.
