A Fresh Approach? A Critique of the Criminal Law Revision Committee's Working Paper on Offences Relating to Prostitution and Allied Offences

Abstract

It is only fair to begin this critique by setting out the perspective from which it is written. The author's membership of P.R.O.S. - Programme for Reform of the Law on Soliciting - with its primary aim of the abolition of imprisonment for offences of soliciting and loitering for the purposes of prostitution, and her research into prostitutes' working conditions,[2] have led her to the following conclusions argued in detail elsewhere:[3] Heterosexual prostitution is a sad reflection on our society. Its roots lie in women and men's social relations. Women are mainly attracted to working as prostitutes because of the better earnings it offers compared to those commonly available to them from other sources. Part-time or casual prostitution which represents the way in which many women work as prostitutes is also seen by them as compatible with domestic and childcare responsibilities. These are still generally viewed as primarily women's concern. Once engaged in prostitution, women may be able to exert some control over their working conditions but in the main men control their work through their purchasing power as customers, the greater capital at their disposal to be entrepreneurs such as bent sauna owners and through the institution of poncing resting on violence, the idea that women need men and on the acceptability of men's expropriation of the cash value of women's work. While working as prostitutes, women are also at risk of physical violence from their male customers, mirroring women's more general vulnerability to male violence. The circumstances in which men go to prostitutes both reflect men's dominant position in society and the way in which their sexuality and emotions are cramped and distorted by existing social conditions. Men turn to prostitutes in vastly greater numbers than women do. This is on the basis that it is right or natural that the satisfaction of men's sexual urges should take pride of place, that men have the money to spend on themselves in this way and that it is appropriate to obtain women's sexual services in return for the outlay of money or goods. On the other hand, the majority of prostitutes' clients are married men who are going to prostitutes usually in conditions of secrecy, because they see marriage as failing to meet their sexual and emotional needs but want to cling to the various forms of security it provides. Meanwhile a substantial number of prostitutes' clients