 Do pimps, johns and prostitutes deserve to go to jail? Or should all laws governing consensual sex work be repealed? A Monday, May 9th, writer and activist Julie Bindle debated Reason magazine senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown before a capacity crowd at the Sheen Center in downtown Manhattan. The event was hosted by the SOHO Forum, a monthly debate series sponsored by Reason. Bindle is the London-based author of The Pimping of Prostitution, abolishing the sex work myth. She opposes punishing women for the selling of sex, but wants their customers and pimps to face consequences for their actions. Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who's also the co-founder and president of Feminists for Liberty, took to position that all laws prohibiting consensual sex work should be abolished. Here is Julie Bindle versus Elizabeth Nolan Brown. SOHO Forum director Gene Epstein moderates. The resolution reads, a good society should criminalize the purchase of sex. A good society should criminalize the purchase of sex. Please vote yes, no, or undecided on the resolution. And now I bring to the stage the defender of the affirmative for that resolution, Julie Bindle. Julie, please take the stage. Taking the negative on that resolution, Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Elizabeth, please take the stage. Julie, you have 15 minutes to present your case. I think you want to take the podium. Yeah, okay. Please take the podium. Thanks. Hello, everyone. And thank you to the SOHO Forum, and in particular to Gene and Jane for their hospitality. And I very happily accepted this kind invitation to speak, because I wanted to hear the libertarian view on this crucial issue. And as I'm sure you appreciate, I'm not a libertarian. I understand that I'm on the back foot here. And that's absolutely fine. That's absolutely fine. I think bearing in mind this contentious issue, we should be able to speak openly and honestly about it, and approach it from an issue of, as far as I'm concerned, the human rights of women. And as a lifelong feminist, as a lesbian, as someone who campaigned for the rights of lesbians, for female sexual autonomy, female sexual pleasure. In fact, we argued very passionately throughout the 1980s that monogamy was for bores. And that it was really paramount that we got society to understand that women were being railroaded into what we called compulsory heterosexuality. And that this was not about female pleasure and not about autonomy. And it was those politics that led me to believe that something like the right to abortion, to free, safe and legal abortion, was the absolute polar opposite to the so-called right for women to prostitute. Because this isn't to say that I believe in any way at all that women should listen to me about the right that they have to do with their bodies what they wish. But I'm arguing today that this is in fact a smokescreen for what we're really talking about. The right for men to have sex with whom they want, when they want, as long as they pay. So when I began looking at prostitution in the 1990s, I was already by that time a seasoned campaigner against male violence. And in fact, I did wonder why it was different when feminists spoke about the harms intrinsic to the sex trade and that included pornography. And we were asked to prove our credentials. Well, we were asked, are you in prostitution? Are you a sex worker, which was the early days of the parlance that had been developed by the sex workers rights organizations that campaigned for full decriminalization? In fact, in those days, they argued and campaigned for full legalization. And there is a cigarette paper between the two, but we can talk more about that later. And I thought this is curious because when I volunteered for my local rape crisis center, I wasn't asked if I'd been raped. So why is identity politics so paramount when it comes to prostitution? And I was told that only sex workers could speak about sex workers rights. And yet those that were standing and telling us that at the time, had very limited experience of direct prostitution. For example, there were some women who had volunteered to interview women in prostitution as part of their studies. Others ran phone sex lines. For those of you that are younger than, you know, about 40, you won't remember that. This is so 1990s. Phone sex lines were a thing. And there were some women who were doing PhDs on this. And they would sit at the end saying, Oh, big boy, that you've got a big one. Yes, I'm getting my tits out. And there were some that were occasional strippers. And yes, fine, of course, speak about your experience in those areas. But this is a world apart from the majority of prostitution exchanges. So some of the people with direct experience were in fact at the pimping end of the operation. Some of them were running prostitution. And what many people didn't understand them was that for the sex workers rights activists, sex worker included the category of PIMP, although they, of course, would use different terminology, such as manager or facilitator or brothel owner. But what what I'm asking you to do is to, even though it's very likely that you disagree with my premise, with my views, with my conclusions, is to recognise that I do have a lot of experience, not directly in prostitution, but of the systems of prostitution and of the global sex trade internationally. Elizabeth and I both agree that criminalising the person that sells sex is abhorrent, is wrong, and counterproductive. And I think that we probably agree on more issues than that. The sticking point is, of course, what we do with the demand. And I'm speaking about women in prostitution this evening because although I recognise that there are, of course, men involved selling sex, this is a highly gendered issue that does affect women and girls. And in my view is a cause and a consequence of women's oppression. And if we saw an end to patriarchy, an old fashioned word again, if you're younger than 40, you might not know it, then the sex trade may be starved of oxygen. So in researching my book, which came out in 2017, The Pimping of Prostitution, I travelled, I clocked up the miles, 168,000 miles visiting countries in the global north, the global south. I can tell you every single airline meal on every flight, absolutely horrendous. I clocked them all up. I realised in the end you have to take sushi and fruit and that's the end of it. But I visited a village in India that was built on the sex trade where every single young man was raised to be a pimp and every single young woman was raised to sell sex. I visited brothels in legal, illegal and decriminalised regimes. I, in fact, was the first feminist journalist to research the issue of women paying for sex, of female sex tourists in Jamaica. And I wanted to do this because of course I knew of its existence. And I wanted to look at the dynamic, the similarities, the differences. And prior to my research in this area for a broad sheet national newspaper, the men and women were described as scum, they were dismissed, both parties were laughed at and the whole thing was trivialised. So I have actually interviewed and spent time with an awful lot of people in prostitution. Those who pay for sex, I've hung out with Johns in Nevada, legal Nevada brothels, in Sweden and Norway where the demand, the paying for sex is criminalised. And I've spoken to police officers of whom I'm highly critical. When feminists such as myself talk about criminalising paying for sex, the assumption is that we want to fill up the jails, throw these men into custody, put them in the stocks in the village square, humiliate them. Not at all. And speaking personally, and this actually I think reflects on many of my colleagues who work to abolish the systems of prostitution, is that we are not carceral feminists. I personally have been fighting to campaign for women in prison for decades. I set up the organisation justice for women. We want people out of prison, unless they are a danger to others, which of course we know is a particular issue when we come to violence against women and male patterned violence. Otherwise, we would empty the prisons of almost everyone. This isn't about punishment, it's about deterrence. I'm one of a group of feminists who in the UK took our government to court about the fact that those young women in prostitution below the age of 18, who had criminal records for prostitution, still had those records. Despite the fact that we no longer arrest prostituted children in our country. And in fact, we very rarely arrest any person selling sex in my country, thanks to feminist campaign is not the goodwill of the police. And we took the government to court in order to argue that those criminal records of those women who'd been prostituted should have them expunged, wiped, never have to disclose them again to an employer, or when they go for volunteer posts. And we were successful. I think it's worth saying here that Elizabeth and I clearly agree on the fact that the safety, wellbeing and dignity of women in prostitution is paramount and should be centre stage in this debate. And you might be surprised to hear that alongside Elizabeth, I'm deeply critical of those individuals and organisations that bandy statistics around about how many trafficking victims there are worldwide or in their own communities. These numbers are often plucked from the air and can be easily disproved and replaced with another set of unreliable figures. And in fact, I wrote a book, a big book, 120,000 words in which I didn't refer to trafficking one time, unless somebody I was interviewing referred to it, or I was writing about the law. Because I think this false distinction between trafficking bad, terrible, involves force, which isn't true. Legally, it does not have to involve force and sex work, good, agency choice. It's a ridiculous distinction. Not all women are trafficked, and not all women are choosing. And I refer to it as prostitution. But I don't refer to the women as prostitutes. This is something that women, yes, of course, there are examples of women choosing, of deciding that this would be a good job, a good way to make money. But we never make laws and policy based on the minority. And this is what I'm arguing is the scenario. I'm not saying she doesn't exist. I'm saying that she is presented as the poster girl for the sex trade. And she is a smokescreen for the men that wish to pay for sex and don't want to be called out for it or deterred. So why criminalise the demand? Well, we have to decriminalise those selling sex. It's an urgent policy and legislative issue worldwide. It's counterproductive. And it is a human rights violation of the highest order. But at the same time, what do we do about the sex trade? Because under decriminalisation, systems, legal prostitution and illegal prostitution has been seen to grow. And the morgues do not tell lies. Under legalised regimes such as Germany, the Netherlands, Nevada, in those counties where there are brothels, in some states in Australia and elsewhere, there are more murders and attempted murders of women in prostitution by Johns and by pimps than there are in those countries that have criminalised the demand. If you decriminalise the women, this is an open road to justice. We have to reform the police because the police are absolutely in your country, they're even worse than mine. But we campaign against police wrongful arrest and brutality. We campaign against the impunity with which police are treated when they commit acts of violence against the women. But decriminalising the women will be a start. The men have to be deterred because they have no right to pay for sex, whether they are disabled, veterans coming back from fighting a noble war, which is always the stereotype, the man who can't get a real date, disabled rights groups have gone berserk about that one and rightly so, or whether they say that this is something they have to do or, and I quote directly from Johns I've interviewed, that have to go out and rape a real woman. This is the bleakest picture of masculinity and of men I've ever heard in my life. All men are potential rapists is not a phrase or a belief that comes from feminists like me. It comes from the Johns. They've honestly convinced themselves that they can't keep it in their zipper and that their penis will drop off if they can't get access to a woman immediately. This is not the case. We know that this isn't what men are programmed to do and be like. And we also know that in a society where those in prostitution are overwhelmingly, multiply disadvantaged, they're women of color, they're black women, they're indigenous women, they're poor women. They've had histories of trauma and child abuse. What are we doing saying that some women should, and I quote directly from a sex trade survivor, I work with and I know, why should some women be a spittoon for men semen, women of all classes, and all cultures, races and positions in society deserve the dignity of not being bought and sold by the men who quite frankly, can keep it in their zipper. Thank you very much. This is Nolan Brown for the negative. Take it away, Elizabeth. Hi, everyone. As you all know, I'm taking the negative on the question should a good crime or society criminalize the purchase of sex. I think it's not only okay to decriminalize consensual sex work on both the sellers and the buyer's end, but also the good and just thing to do. Because criminalizing commercial sex is both a liberal and bad for everyone involved, in addition to having negative externalities. The case for decriminalization, full decriminalization, not the Nordic model that my opponent supports, or a legal system where selling sex outside of these very narrow government approved parameters is still illegal. The case for full decriminalization pans out whether we look at it from a right space, a consequentialist or an egalitarian perspective. So let's start with the right space argument. This case rests on the belief that in a good, just liberal democratic society, people have certain basic liberties, including things like privacy, bodily autonomy, private property, a right to free expression, free association, and a right to form personal and intimate relationships of their choosing. Many would also add to this economic liberty, which includes a right to choose one's occupation and exercise that choice without undue government interference, as well as to accept money for one's labor. Basic liberties exist, even if some social good could come from banning them. For instance, we don't support censorship against mean words because a ban on mean words would mean that maybe some people felt better about themselves or had, you know, collectively raised our self esteem. In the same way, even if banning sex accrued some positive social benefits, and I don't believe that it does or that the evidence bears that out. But even if it did, this alone would not justify infringing on people's basic liberties in this way. The rights argument also rests on the idea that people have a right to make their own decisions about whom to have sex with. And money doesn't change this. People are permitted to have sex for all sorts of reasons, including many that a lot of people would find immoral or just distasteful and gross. People have sex for selfish reasons. People have sex for personal advancement. We don't generally ban people having sex for personal gain or sex obtained through personal expenditure. Even if these actions are considered immoral or contrary to equality. Subcontin, that these rights based arguments don't apply to the Nordic model because selling sex is not criminalized only paying for it. But if it's illegal for people to pay you for sex, you don't really have a right to sell sex. You wouldn't say that abortion was legal if women could, you know, have an abortion at home if they did it themselves, but they weren't allowed to go to a doctor or a clinic or buy abortion pills. So I don't think that the argument that you know, this is a right, you have the right to sell sex exists. If your if your customers and anyone who is associated with you is still criminalized. In addition, people who want to pay for sex have basic liberties to and they should be able to exercise them. So on that note, I should probably do some throat clearing. When we're talking about decriminalizing sex work, we are not talking we're talking about consensual activities undertaken by adults. We are not talking about letting people pay for sex with minors. We are not talking about allowing arrangements in which someone is using force to get someone to sell sex or to have sex. Those things are defined as sex trafficking and sex trafficking would still be illegal. So would rape and robbery and stalking and harassment and all these other crimes. Anyone harmed in the course of doing sex work could still seek redress for that harm. The state could still prosecute those harms. But the underlying exchange of sex for money would not be prosecuted, which brings us to the second case for decrim and I think that this is perhaps the more convincing case. Decriminalization would have better outcomes for people in the sex business. Under a criminalized system, sex workers are often not able to go to police to report harms against them or against other members of their community. Under a criminalized system, they're afraid to go to cops and to go to law enforcement for fear that they themselves will be arrested for prostitution or that they will become on police's radar and maybe targeted in the future. This is not just a hypothetical. This is something that definitely happens in the United States. One of the worst cases I've seen recently is there was a woman who ran a massage parlor in Kansas City. She went by Kelly and she helped put a serial killer in jail. The serial killer, he was suspected of several murders spanning decades. He'd also been but never actually been able to make a case against him. He had been charged with assault and various other things. He had been harassing massage parlor workers, including the women at the place where she worked and he slashed their tires. And the owner Kelly and her workers, they testified against him. And thanks to their testimony, he was finally put away. The defense attorney, though, brought up during during the trial. You know, don't you allow prostitution on your premises and she said no, but he, you know, entered this idea that she did. So after helping put this man away, the FBI then decided to go after her in a sting operation. And they pretended to be a person who knew someone, one of her employees and wanted to go from California to Kansas City to work for her. And they said, you know, I'll do full service sex work. And she said, no, no, no, no, no, we don't allow that. And they kept pressing and she was like, you know, you can you can do hand jobs or paid extras on your own time. I'll look the other way. But I'm not, I don't, you know, make people do that. And I don't want to condone that. So she offered the job and the woman flew in and the woman, of course, was an undercover FBI agent. And as soon as Kelly went to the airport to pick her up, they charged her as a sex trafficker on federal charges. In New Zealand, where sex work is decriminalized, sex workers say they've actually been able to go to the police to report sex work against them, or sorry, to report violence against them and not be arrested for prostitution. They also say that they have experienced less police harassment, especially street based sex workers have experienced less police harassment. And this is another important part. It's not just that Decrim would let sex workers go to police when other people wrong them, but that they would be protected from police. Because it's all too often that people in positions of power use the criminalized status of sex work to exploit and assault sex workers. Under Decrim, sex workers could also take steps to proactively protect themselves from violence and exploitation. This is, I think, one of the major ways that the Nordic model re-criminalized the buyers of sex but not the sellers. This is one of the major ways that I think it fails because, okay, police, you know, they can go to police if not for arrest or prostitution, but the overall illegal status of the industry still means that they can't take these proactive steps that would be protective. Under Decriminalized System, however, they can advertise openly, which makes them less likely to have to work the streets or walk, you know, bars or casinos or whatever in order to find clients, which can be much more dangerous, or to rely on potentially dangerous middlemen, the people that, you know, are called pimps and traffickers, to find them customers. They could institute better methods to screen clients informally and individually or through tech solutions, like, you know, a client rating that you get on Uber, that kind of thing could prevent people from having to see bad clients. They could also share information openly about bad clients so that people know who to avoid. They could screen clients more easily, too, because customers would not be afraid of being arrested, so they would be more likely to give references and show their real IDs and things like that. Sex workers under Decram could work together without being fear of busted as a brothel or for sex trafficking. They're colleagues, which is also something that happens here. If sex workers are working together, maybe one of them posts the ad for both of them or it's one of them's house and both of them are working out of them, they'll be charged with sex trafficking or with permitting prostitution or with pimping, even though they're working together with their colleagues. And under decriminalization, full decriminalization, not a system where customers and anyone working with sex workers is criminalized. Sex workers could employ or utilize third parties to help their job be safer. They could have a bouncer. They could have a driver. They could use a third party system that screened clients for them. They could choose to work for a legal brothel with security or an escort agency in places where those were permitted. All of these things give sex workers more power to demand condom use and not have to worry that carrying around condoms will be used as evidence of a crime, which is currently the case in many places, including parts of the United States. And all of this works, of course, in reverse as well. Customers would also be better protected and safer under Decram. Ample research has shown that decriminalization to a lesser extent legalization and deregulation of the sex industry leads to things like higher rates of condom use and lower rates of HIV and sexually transmitted of infections and sexual assaults, not just among sex workers, but among the whole population. When Rhode Island decriminalized indoor prostitution, sexual assault and rates of gonorrhea across the state went down. In a meta analysis of 11 studies with over 12,000 participants, they found that more repressive policing of sex was in turn associated with higher rates of HIV and sexually transmitted infections. This is why many public health agencies, in addition to civil rights organizations and human rights organizations, support the decriminalization of sex work. This includes groups such as the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the ACLU, just to name a few. Last year, several hundred academics and scientists in the United States wrote to the Biden administration asking for more sex worker-friendly policies, saying a wealth of empirical data unequivocally shows that criminalization causes severe harms and does not prevent human trafficking and these harms fall hardest on marginalized people, enforcing systemic inequalities. Perhaps most importantly, this is what sex workers themselves say they want, again and again and again. There are major sex worker rights movements in the UK, India, Korea, the US, South Africa and so many places around the globe. I've talked to and listened to and communicated with hundreds of sex workers and they all emphasize that they want decrim. They say that they are positive parts of their jobs. They also say that there are many negative parts of their jobs, but these negative parts would not be remedied by criminalizing either them or their customers. Sex work is work and they need labor protections, not missionaries and the FBI. They want rights, not rescue. So, I'm going short on time and I want to make sure I emphasize a few more things. First, with consensual commercial sex decriminalized, law enforcement would be free to spend more time going after actual bad stuff using their finite resources to go after sex trafficking and sexual assault and child abuse instead of devising these elaborate schemes to catch people having commercial sex in ways that they don't like. Second, it would stop giving the state another reason to play big brother. Right now, a lot of surveillance and censorship is justified by targeting sex work and just as with prohibition and the war on drugs, a lot of bad authoritarian policy slips by in the name of ending sex work. Third, criminalization is the opposite of egalitarian. The effects of enforcement fall way harder on women, poor people, people of color and gay and trans people because cops with existing prejudices and biases are the ones enforcing this. Prosecutors and public officials with existing prejudices and biases are the ones enforcing this. And people with fewer resources or less power are less able to avoid detection in the first place and less able to weather the consequences or to avoid the worst consequences entirely if they are caught than people who have more power and social status. It's also strange to me to act like limiting women's options is the feminist thing to do. Instead of looking at all women selling sex as victims and effectively telling them that their own experiences and emotions don't matter, we say we recognize that sexual labor is more valuable to your average woman perhaps than your average man since it's harder for single men to find women unpaid to have sex worth and vice versa. It's sexist and paternalistic to say this area where women have a marketplace advantage should be banned and women who want to use their sexuality in unapproved ways must be subjugated and protected from their own actions. To say that this women have historically been told sex is a thing they must do or withhold for the benefit of men that say that they can't do this for their own benefit. They can't use their sexuality to their own ends. They can't declare themselves the highest authority on their own sexuality and bodies or minds. This seems anti-feminist to me. The Nordic model is especially weird in this regard because it says that sex for money is a crime but sex workers who are not all women of course but who are overwhelmingly women aren't culpable for their pardonate. Customers who are overwhelmingly men are culpable. Men have agency conceptually and under the law but women are essentially treated legally and morally like children who can't be held responsible for their actions and can't offer meaningful consent. I think the bottom line is that if you ban prostitution and the Nordic model is banning prostitution no matter how people dress it up. This doesn't magically make us live in a society where people are less sexist or where people only have sex for good reasons. It doesn't mean that sex workers have more opportunities all of a sudden or that no one involved in sex work is ever harmed. It doesn't somehow mean that anyone who wants to be a sex work wouldn't rather be a rock star or a scientist or a stay at home mom or anything. It just makes sex work more difficult and less safe. What decriminalization does it says no matter why someone consents to sex it is not the state's business and no matter why someone is selling sexual services they will be permitted to do so in a way that is as safe as possible for them, that is most conducive to their well-being and least likely to span negative social costs. Thank you. Five minutes to report. Oh, Julie, you can take the podium if you'd like. I think some of the problem with Elizabeth's arguments is that you were talking about the problems of criminalizing the women rather than addressing criminalizing the demand side which is overwhelmingly the men and of course it's abhorrent to arrest women, to arrest them in stings. I've been to the Queen's district court that deals with trafficking cases and I've seen the pimps waiting outside and I've seen the way that the judges are constrained by the law the fact that these women are criminalized. We all want an end to that. I just want to address the issue about human rights organizations taking up the decriminalization mantle. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, World Health Organization all have nailed their colors to the decriminalization mast and we need to look at the history of how that happened and this goes back to 2014 the Lancet special edition on HIV and sex work and this was funded by Bill and Melinda Gates on the issue of HIV reduction and prevention and the claims were extraordinary by these scientists that put together this special edition. They actually claimed that decriminalizing sex work globally would cut HIV infections by a third this was the top line it went global and in fact the Lancet special edition then lobbied Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and others to say adopt this policy we found that this is basically the cure for HIV when you look at what they were claiming they had just put together this absolutely ridiculous fallacy of blanket decriminalization as opposed to simply decriminalizing the women so that the police cannot harass them would result in pretty much 100% condom use pretty much 100% attendance at health clinics and the women and zero violence it was just a projection there was no science involved and of course where we have countries that have already decriminalized prostitution we have seen no decrease in HIV but we have seen an increase in New Zealand that Elizabeth referred to of the women being compelled to use PrEP and no condoms where I've been in legal brothels in Nevada and Germany the punters the Johns and the pimps told me slyly thinking it was funny that unless somebody followed them into the room where they were having sex with the woman and put the condom on their dick how the hell could they enforce that and in Nevada for example the women are responsible for their own health and safety there is no imperative for the men to use condoms New Zealand is a really interesting gold standard model that is you know supposedly this best practice when we look at how to deal with the harms inherent to prostitution but let's have a look at their health and safety guide this was written in 2004 a year after after decriminalization voted in by one member of parliament who has now gone on the record and says she regrets it it was published in 2004 by the New Zealand Department of Labor and it's on the New Zealand prostitutes collective website in the section business matters information for brothel operators it addresses issues such as condom breakage repetitive strain injury violence from johns and rape described in the document as unfortunately incidents occur where workers are forced by clients to have sex without a condom against their will we used to call that rape and in fact the document outlines a number of life threatening occupational hazards in a way that makes clear these are common occurrences there is no further safety I went to New Zealand I visited the brothels I talked to the johns I talked to the women who used to be in those brothels including those that have campaigned for decriminalization brothel inspections were promised by the government when they voted in decriminalization and this was supposed to be a safety measure for the women and to make sure that they picked up the men that were still demanding sex with underage children because guess what pimps don't want to lose profit even under decriminalization they're still the scumbag pimps guess how many brothel inspections there has been since the flurry of 12 of them across the entire country when the law was introduced 11 11 up until 2015 and these figures come from freedom of information requests so they're government official figures and all of these complaints all of these inspections rather were led by complaints from the public and concern about the violence going on in those premises five minutes of rebuttal Elizabeth so in the 1980s and 1990s there was this campaign to end demand for drugs Reagan even said that we had at one point that we had in fact ended demand for drugs because we were not just targeting the sellers of drugs but the buyers and this is why we needed to do that because we were going to end demand for drugs and in fact we were just around the corner from doing that we all I think probably know how well that went the fact is you can't end demand for things through criminalization the idea that we are going to end demand for sex by banning for sex work by banning buyers is just it's not realistic whatsoever so when you know Julie says that I didn't I'm glad that she agrees that the women shouldn't be criminalized and I did talk about the harms to women that are being criminalized for selling sex but I think that most of these same harms are still recreated in the Nordic model or the end demand model because like I said before when you are criminalizing an industry you are driving it underground and when you are driving it underground you accrue all of these harms that wouldn't happen if it was above ground industry to the point that sometimes women in brothels are not being protected and things like that I think this is another reason though that speaks towards legalization in a system where you don't just sorry speaks toward decriminalization in a system where it's not just legalized in certain cases but in all different sorts of ways then people have people can find their places where they can work the most safely and we will see more and more resources being developed to help them work safely as it stands you know yes it may not be perfect from the beginning but there will be more and more ways that sex workers find to protect themselves and to demand bosses treat them equitably to demand labor protections and things like that so I think that we can't consider how things are now as you know the violence against women and things that they experience now as how it would be under a decriminalized system and I think that's thanks to you both we now get to the Q&A portion of the evening there is we do have mics up over there a mic over there and a mic on the balcony I believe we should so that people can ask questions and I want to begin so there's a mic there line up and a mic over there I want to begin with moderator's prerogative just to start the board rolling with a question first for you Elizabeth as you know there's always a lot of concern that people feel when you legalize something that it implies a kind of approval of the activity and there's a the feeling that in the world that you'd want to create there would be implicit approval in an activity that many people most people say I wouldn't want my son or daughter to be in that profession and the idea that it's illegal makes it seem respectable so what do you have to say to that objection I think that the important thing to keep in mind is while a lot of my microphone okay while a lot of people do say that and do say you know they wouldn't want to be doing sex work themselves or they wouldn't want their son or daughter to that that trope I think most of these people would also agree though that they don't want sex workers to have to suffer just because they've made a choice that maybe they wouldn't make or maybe wouldn't want for someone in their family and that's what this comes down to decriminalization does not mean that everyone has to love sex work or everyone has to think that it's you know super feminist and that you know we people can still be campaigning against it and trying to get people to leave to stop doing it trying people to not get people to not pay for sex but in the meantime as long as it exists the people who are engaged in it would not be suffering these consequences that they are now and would be much more protected from violence and sexual assault and I don't think anyone no matter you know what their personal feelings about sex work are wants to see more people sexually assaulted any comment from you Julie about that question about the answer no comment I never argue it from that point I don't say I don't want my son or daughter to be in prostitution I might persuade them not to be in journalism if I had any but but no I don't use that in the same way that I don't really appreciate it if men say you know I have a daughter I don't like rape you should actually think about what kind of society we want to live in where a human body is a commodity is commodified and we know that this is gendered we know that this is driven by the demand I also know of course that there are those women that argue that they are choosing to do prostitution that this is what they prefer and I have no right to tell them not to do it which is why I don't and I think it's why we need to look at this as a root and branch issue as to what it says about women's status in society and when this inevitability argument pops up it's the oldest profession it will always be there it always has been it always will I mean what's wrong with us we don't actually as decent liberals or people on the left or whoever we don't say that about child poverty racism other issues of structural inequality but when it comes to prostitution all of a sudden it's people are astonished when you say imagine a world without it as though it's somehow ingrained into our DNA Thanks I have a question for you Julie could you get into the nuts and bolts criminalizing for the john and for the pimp and then then there's you know what we see in the movies is the madame is the madame a pimp and what kind of criminal penalties would they suffer if they're if they have two or three time offenders what would be their punishment and then just to bring in the other aspect of the question as you've said and as your opponent agrees it's mainly women selling sex to men but is there any issue you have when it comes to men selling sex to women or men selling sex to men or women selling sex to women is that different in your mind when it comes to punishment the law is the law I mean I'm not a legislator so I can't tell you about sentences I actually would keep as I say most people out of prison unless they absolutely had to be kept away because they're a danger I think the law should be a deterrent and you know we can we can look at analogies for that we can look at smoking in public buildings in my country when the law came in that already been a big government funded disseminated education program that showed why this was a danger to other people that you can make your own choices get lung cancer die but why should people be dying of secondary lung cancer and so it was recognized that's why there weren't riots when we criminalized smoking in public buildings same with smacking children same with drunk driving of course it would be the same for female sex buyers paying for sex with men the law is the law it shouldn't be sex specific but we know we know that the sex trade is driven by male demand and if there are exceptions to that then of course female buyers should come in for for the same penalties but you would not then want to send johns or pimps to prison you would not want a situation which they go to prison I wouldn't send anyone to prison unless they're a danger to others and unless they are repeat offenders that are known to be sexual predators and my work with the johns my conversations with them I even ran a john school in the UK where we talked to men for a day who opted to come to our john school rather than going to court some of them changed their mind at the end of it but that's another matter and you know what we found was that there were it's very actually for most johns it's very easy to deter men from paying for sex most of it is normalized and peer pressurized and I think that for those men many of them were very ambivalent about having paid for sex and we're quite happy to be told if you do it again you know you could be picked up by the police thanks comment from you Elizabeth on that question or I think when we talk about things like decriminalizing pimps people think you know you're meaning that people should be able to use force and violence against sex workers and as I mentioned before it's very often sex workers themselves that are getting charged with things like pandering and pimping and because they are working together with other sex workers all pimping means under the law actually is that you are somehow deriving some sort of benefit or profit from sex workers so if you're providing them a service and it's all consensual between you and you have a contract you could still be guilty of pimping and things like that so I think that's one of the reasons why you know when we talk about this we should keep that in mind and also realize that under the Nordic model sex workers very often are arrested still even though they won't be arrested directly for selling sex they can be arrested for these ancillary things that they do because they still fell under these laws against other parts of sex work and third parties in sex work you had a comment about that you want to comment about that that's I mean I've been to these countries I've met with the police of whom I am very critical even those that are policing the demand side there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that women are arrested for prostitution issues under the abolitionist model whatever you want to call it but the police and this is a problem with immigration law and it's a problem with the laws that dictate how we treat those without proper papers to be in the country that of course there are women who are arrested for those issues and I totally am against that but to say that these women are arrested for prostitution related defences is not the case it's an impossibility because it's not on the statute okay a question there please please phrase your question as a question thank you this is for Julie Mendel following on what Jean said understand then you would arrest a woman who paid a man for sex well I personally wouldn't but I would definitely you would make that you would criminalize that absolutely if we're criminalizing demand and it's used as a deterrent and what we're trying to do is we're trying to re-educate a society about what harm actually means with the commodification of the human body then yes why would it be that only men who pay for sex would be criminalized of course it should go across the board I think we all know what will happen I think we all know the majority of those paying for sex are men yes but sometimes women pay and then of course the law should definitely apply to and if a woman paid another woman that would be criminal too yes never seen in the history of the universe but absolutely do I see do I see a question over the balcony is there a question over the balcony no no go ahead go ahead yes hi my question is for Julie you referred to prostitutes as batoons for men semen which is very creative language my question is and you also talked I didn't actually you didn't no I've very very specifically said to quote a sex trade survivor as to how she felt she was used by men I would never refer to a woman in that way she told me about how she felt the men saw her I was very clear about that okay I misunderstood so my question is relates more to men with disabilities and you talked a little bit about how men should just keep it in their pants don't you have some compassion for someone who's severely disabled you know we have a mental health crisis in this country I think that there is a bit of sexual frustration that's that underlies a lot of that and for someone who's severely disabled who can't get a date or what have you there might be some benefit if a woman feels compassionate to give her body in that way for money shouldn't that be allowed first of all yes I feel absolutely compassionate towards anyone with serious disabilities are you honestly suggesting that women should be sympathetic to disabled men and go and offer sex because he can't use his right hand or left hand I don't mean to be discriminatory sorry absolutely unbelievable that we that we do not speak about disabled women having hot hunks delivered to her door like meals on wheels when I was in Italy doing a book tour for my prostitution book and I was on lots of national TV and so people saw and thought they'd get in touch and there was one man who rang me up and he said to me I want to suggest a solution you say that it's wrong to pay for sex and if it's disabled men he said personally I'm quite an unpleasant looking man so I can't get a date and women seem not to like my personality but I feel I have a right to sex so what am I going to do he said here's my solution instead of paying women for sex we have banks of volunteers women that go around and have sex with jerks that can't get a real date because they're jerks please so in answer to your question no do you want to comment on that that's a tough act to follow we want to comment on that question on that answer I'll just say that I mean I think people should be allowed like I said before I think people should be allowed to consent to one another for whatever reasons they choose and earlier Julia said you know a liberal society doesn't say we can't you know we can't end poverty or we can't end these other bad things but I think a liberal society also doesn't say that people can't make their own private sexual decisions and that people can't exercise sexual autonomy however they see fit question this question is also for Julie you said that one of your interests in traveling to different places around the world and seeing how sex work worked there was to compare and contrast some of and I was wondering if you as I know it's probably a big question but do you have any insights about how maybe a different cultures influenced the the differences in the trades yes thank you for your question the most interesting insight I had to culture which to be honest with you I think the only one relevant in this discussion is patriarchy that old-fashioned word again was when I was on a long and delayed flight to the US unfortunate enough to get a middle seat because I was late to the airport and I was sitting in the middle of these two men who were definitely more unfortunate than me one of them was from Sweden and the other was from Holland and of course Sweden was the first country in 1999 to criminalize the purchase of sex and to frame it within human rights violence against women package so not moralistic not anti-sex et cetera and of course Holland did the opposite in 2000 it legalized all of its brothels and set up street managed zones so that it's very visible to everyone and the women are in I'm sure some of you have seen it on TV or you might have visited De Wallen in Amsterdam where the women are displayed like carcasses of meat in the window and jeered up by male tourists from my country and from from elsewhere and they asked me what I was doing and I started having a conversation with them both and the attitudes to prostitution were like night and day they were both really nice decent men but the Dutch man was well it's just like if I go out and spend money on a burger and well why wouldn't I pay for sex with a woman I mean if I want sex on a date I'd have to buy dinner for her we may as well just cut to the chase and he told me that he pays for sex not because he can't get a date in a kind of bar but because he wants to pay for what he wants to do to her in other words stuff that his date might tell him no she doesn't want that the man from Sweden he'd been raised during you know since the law was was changed and he was horrified the Dutch guy he was saying but it's abuse of women but how can you how can you possibly pay for access to the inside of someone's body knowing that they don't want to have sex with you isn't it a turn off but what about the harm to that woman what about the way women are viewed in society and it was it was fascinating and so I hope that answers your question but I think that one of the things I'm really struck on in terms of the the law that criminalizes demand and decriminalizes the women is the normative effect on how young people are growing up and the messages that they've been given about women and our status and our sexuality I'll come in on that question and answer just with what you want to say I'll just say I don't I don't really see a problem with most of that mount statements I mean if you can easily purchase sex I don't see why that's necessarily a problem if you're purchasing sex because you have specific tastes and you want to pay someone and they agree and they consent to want to do that with you because you are paying them I don't understand why that's a problem people have sex for you know people you may have heard of BDSM some people like to be degraded during sex some people are into many things that other people wouldn't understand if they're not into that thing but that doesn't mean that the way that they are having sex should be illegal so I think that there's too much stock in this idea that like oh no men you know are having sex for for their own personal reasons well women are selling sex for their own personal reasons as long as there is consent between them I just I don't see the issue question okay my question is to Julie we know that the PhD candidate that you mentioned is the minority on the sexline call women with access to education or raised at least in a middle-class family do not get this this path so why not addressing policies to take women out of poverty instead of criminalize the chain even on the demand side and then I want to ask a question to Elizabeth too we know even though I agree with you it shouldn't be a crime to pay for sex we know it's a sad choice women who does this they don't have any other options so how we as a society can address we felt the government involved these women to get a better option let Elizabeth go first because it's always been a different order but you'll go second you want to address the question you understood the drift of the question yeah I think we should treat the idea of women who don't have any better options separately from sex work as a whole because I would disagree that it is always women who are doing this out of you know absolute desperation and not having any other options like I've talked to so many sex workers who do it for for any number of reasons but because you know they find the work interesting because they like the flexibility because they enjoy the creative expression of it I mean there are lots of reasons why people do choose to do this and these are often women who could do lots of other things and this is what they choose to do because of the benefits involved so I think we shouldn't assume that that people are only doing it because they have no better options as to people who are sometimes you know sometimes even that there are other options but even though this might not be a thing they love it's still the best option in their circumstances but also I think you know we should we should do what you said in the first part of your question which is we address the underlying harms we make sure that we're offering social services to people we make sure that there are groups that are doing outreach to them and that are helping women who are doing this and don't want to be doing it to get out of it and we take these as two sort of separate things Julie, come in Yes, thank you for your question I think that we should do both and I'm personally invested in doing both I think knowing that poverty affects women more than it does men knowing that the women who are impoverished are much much much more likely to be involved in prostitution than our men tells us something about patriarchy men and women as opposed to just poverty otherwise equal numbers of impoverished men would be doing it but as Rachel Moran said who's author of paid for and she's a sex trade survivor from Ireland she said to one human rights expert a very wealthy white man who said why should we remove the option from poor women to do sex work she said the thing is that when a woman is hungry we should be putting food in her mouth and not your cock okay it's almost as good as hunks on wheels but I do want to apologize for being remiss as moderator and not saying that the outset that one of you Julie or Elizabeth can ask the other person a question at any time although we do see a lot of eager people from the audience eager to ask you questions so I recommend that you let them ask the questions unless you want to exercise that option just want that recorded for the record take it away young lady all right on that note my questions for Julie since you're so popular tonight everyone has questions for you so a woman has sex with a man for this she is paid this is actually legal in the United States when there's a camera in the room this is known as porn so with that in mind my question is to you what's the difference between this and prostitution and do you support banning porn thank you for your question I never talk about banning anything I don't believe that the state should be a censor and I don't trust our respective governments certainly not right now to do any banning I think that we should have feminist and human rights legislators looking at solutions which would also involve civil remedies for those harmed in systems of prostitution and yes you're absolutely right porn is prostitution with a camera and I think that we need to look at the generation of young men and young women that are currently getting their sex education from pornography often from sadistic violent misogynistic pornography and see that as a real problem in our schools and ask why because your society obviously is deeply amoralistic and hypocritical and mine isn't that far behind and we don't have decent sex education which I think is a real problem I think may I just emphasize I think the drift to the question was that a woman is being paid to have sex in front of the camera so I would imagine the counterpart of the pimp in that case is the person who's producing the film so would the producer of that film be subject to criminal penalties according to the same set of assumptions you've applied well and yes and a number of pornographers are breaking the law in many ways and there's a fallacy about again full condom use and health checks on porn sets but evidence of physical injuries and women who've come out of the porn trade and maybe starting to tell us something differently comment from you Elizabeth on the question the answer no okay next question hi Julie hi Elizabeth my name is Santiago and I have one question for each of you so I have one question first for Julie so actually no sorry first for Elizabeth so you said that in your model right you mentioned that violence and other negative ramifications for sex workers would go down because of the safety is provided through your model however Julie did provide concrete evidence in countries where sex work is decriminalized she did provide models on how violence is more extreme against sex workers in those countries than in countries where sex work is criminalized so I want to ask you what do you have to say in regards to that well maybe you told you a question that so Julie answer I'm sorry Elizabeth and could you address the question yeah I'm not sure what evidence you're talking about because there are not very many countries where sex workers criminalized and the evidence from New Zealand finds that there is no increase in violence against sex workers there is no increase in prostitution overall and there is no increase in human trafficking I think that when you look around the world there are many different legal systems and you could find all sorts of stats depending on the way you slice it and you know what particular thing you're looking at and who is doing the research that will say one thing or another but I don't think that there's at all anything like actual concrete evidence that shows that decriminalizing prostitution is actually increasing violence against women yeah thank you come in Julie and that yeah yes I mean that there are there are hard statistics and I have not mentioned statistics or any figures during this whole event this evening because as I said it's easy to skew from both sides and we clutch them from the air and what do they tell us well they tell us something really interesting when we look at murder and attempted murder rates which have increased in Germany since 2002 when prostitution was liberalized further it's the same in the Netherlands and I'm talking about murders and attempted murders by pimps and johns and in New Zealand it's interesting because violence against women in the brothels has been reframed as an employment issue now so you see women going to an employment tribunal which used to be which which would in a non-prostitution setting be about workplace bullying or not recognizing that you have a disability and there's been no adjustments reasonable adjustments made for you or a colleague who you find problematic or your workload is too much and you've been you've been harassed for it and constructive dismissal whereas women have been taking cases to the tribunal because they have been sexually assaulted seriously sexually assaulted by the manager who's now of course a bony fighting manager when he's just the same old pimp that he was before decriminalization so question okay for uh yeah thank you just one more question and it's for Julie you and your model you talked about how you would criminalize the consumption but not the the sex worker and my question is where would the income for the sex worker come from because wouldn't they be economically devastated because of that which is why the the model that I would support and that operates better in some countries where it's implemented than others there should be provision for women including safe housing and if they choose to leave the sex trade which not surprisingly most of them do then those provisions are provided by the state on her terms and that's really important exiting strategies should be available but nobody should be in a position where if their income stops income that has been provided through abuse and harm that that means that we just say carry on with the abuse and harm thank you uh coming from you on the question or answer Elizabeth no okay I I think yeah okay question please you know I'm really I've missed this evening information about research and I'm sure there's research and important research that's happened in this area that's taken place what research if any exists about people men in particular who purchase sex what do we know about their attitudes what do we know about their actions and what research if any exists about the impact of being in situations of sex work prostitution in terms of trauma in particular on people who were are called we might call them sex workers or we might call them people in prostitution what do we know about those two things if anything from credible research that's been done and this question is being directed against both of our presenters well there's one that I try and answer that question yeah I would say that it depends on where you look and who is funding the research there is such there is a wealth of research out there on the motivations of people who pay for sex and on the experiences of sex workers and you can find a lot of research funded by anti prostitution groups and by people who are very motivated to find these negative things of that you can also find a lot of information from groups that show that like the man mentioned up there that people are paying for sex because they have disabilities that people are paying for sex because they want because they are lonely and because they want compassion and you can find very many sex workers saying that about their clients that these are not all monsters who are you know in there because they really want to abuse and use women these are people who have been closed off from other avenues of sex a lot of times and just want someone to feel to feel like they are wanted by someone so I think that it's it's very much a mixed bag but there's nothing to support the idea that all all Johns are months as Julie would call them all these you know people who are paying for sex are monsters or that they all are motivated by the same thing I think people that are motivated by all sorts of different reasons as much as they would be for having sex without money being involved Julie we're running back on time I just want unfortunately we've actually have no more time for questions but could you ask your question and then either speaker could address it in the summary what is your question sure it's for both do you see pregnancy surrogacy so surrogates as sex workers and also what are your thoughts on professional boxing or kickboxing or MMA do you have a question so my question is so we can all agree that we want the best for those that participate in or impacted by the sex trade legal or not so I have questions for both speakers to Julie Bindle would you one change your opinion about sex work if there was a way to guarantee enough in the way of resourcing for protection of those working in the sex trade as well as cultural externalities and then two do you believe getting to that level of resourcing as possible and then to Elizabeth Nolan Brown would you change your opinion if there was evidence showing that the level of resourcing necessary to prevent broad harm to sex workers was impossible okay we are going to have to address those questions in the summations so will you each have five minutes of summary you can check the podium Julie if you'd like for the summary thank you so first of all I'd like to address the question about the men about the demand about what do we know and of course Elizabeth's right it could be that some people would talk about the men as sweet smelling clients who brings flowers every week and who is more respectful than any date she's ever had and others might moisturize them I said very clearly during my first 15 minutes that that isn't my experience of the Johns that they're not I don't believe in monsters I believe in some men that choose to do very harmful things to women and get away with it and some men were very ambivalent I said this about paying for sex some of it was peer pressure there were all kinds of reasons I met a young man in Amsterdam when I was interviewing Johns in the red light area and he agreed to talk to me he was standing outside the window brothel smoking a cigarette waiting for his friend who was inside paying for sex with one of the women and he was in his early 20s and I asked him what he thought and he said my dad took me to pay for sex when I was 12 and it's legal in my country so you can't say anything about it and I just thought to myself who's being abused here because he was 12 and the woman that he was taken to pay for by his father you know she was not likely to be an emancipated Dutch woman there are very very few Dutch women in the sex trade in Holland the women come from other countries of hardship often war and the like and who knows whether they're forced or not force is such a low bar it would flummox a world champion limbo dancer if we all had to prove force to decide that some situations are terrible for women who've been coerced or who felt they've got no other choice and so I do think that there's interesting research about the Johns if we look it's their words if you're worried about those of us that are anti prostitution skewing the data or putting words in these men's mouths look at the invisible man project you can find it online it's the Johns words they're found from Pontonet from other sites where they review the prostituted women and some of them come out with the most gross misogyny I have ever heard in my life and some of the Johns I've interviewed and there've been many have come out with comments about women that make my blood run cold and I don't mean that they call them filthy whores and they'd like to punch them in the face although some certainly say that the one that sticks in my mind was a young man who when I asked him during the interview did he think that the woman the women that he pays for enjoy sex because the Johns often have this idea that the women are having multiple orgasms and he looked at me straight in the eye and said I don't want them to enjoy it I'm paying for it that would be taking my enjoyment away and I thought what are we growing here and the thing that I'd really like to finish on I think is the way that the woman in prostitution is held up as this smokescreen when in fact what we should be talking about is the right of the man to pay for sex with a woman who does not want to have sex with him otherwise cash would be involved the word consent when applied to sex I always think is a really odd one anyway because if I consent to lending you ten dollars it's slightly grudging it's not enthusiastic participation so the notion that then we've set that bar so low that not only does a woman have to be forced for some people to think that she's having a hard time in prostitution and then we say well she's consenting because she's literally not being chained to a radiator with a gun held to her head is an abhorrence it's anti-feminist it's anti-woman and it's anti-liberal because what it does is it suggests that there are some women to whom this should happen and that men should be given the right to do what they wish with women's bodies I'm not here to argue to take away the rights of any women as I said before this issue is the opposite of the right to a safe free and legal abortion this is something that's done to women under systems of male violence and it should end Elizabeth, five minutes of summation Okay, I just want to start by we hear this a lot about enthusiastic consent or they wouldn't do this if cash wasn't involved but this is not a standard we apply to other industries most people would not be doing the jobs that they are doing if it were not for the cash that is why they are doing these jobs we don't say that people should be banned just because someone wouldn't be doing something if they weren't getting paid for it we don't apply this standard to any other work we don't say that a retail cashier has to be giving enthusiastic consent to be giving your change in order for that to be a legal profession so I think that's just a very strange way to look at it I don't doubt that there are people who are not that are doing sex work who are not 100% thrilled with it all of the time I don't doubt that there are people out there who are paying for sex who have attitudes that we do not people would not want to identify with there are people out there who are having sex who are not paying for it who say horrible things about women there are people out there in any profession who sometimes don't like their job or are frustrated with certain aspects of their job or want to change certain aspects of their job but we do not ban these things just based on that and it's very strange when people talk about sex work that they would apply this standard that we don't apply to any other places I think the bottom line and Julie said it's not about the women but I mean it's not about taking away women's rights but it really is because just there's no getting over the fact that you don't actually have a right to provide a service if anyone who purchases your service is criminalized and I think that a big phrase in the past few years has been to believe women I think we need to believe women when they say that they are doing this because they want to or because it is the best option or because it is the best for them in their circumstances and that decriminalization is what they want we need to believe women who say decriminalization is the only way that would actually help them to have more equal footing to have more power to have safer conditions not the Nordic model or the end-demand model or whatever you want to call it those models are just ways of sort of twisting criminalization in different ways but they create the same harms and you can see this in all of the Nordic model countries there's no evidence like I said earlier that the Nordic model has decreased demand there is no evidence that it has decreased sexual assault or decreased human trafficking so we are basically just seeing the same sort of system that the same sort of black market system that exists because sex workers cannot do their jobs legally and if sex workers could do their jobs out in the open they could take so many steps to make things safer for both themselves and their customers and also just to finish back on the rights thing like I said I think that the that the consequentialist argument the harm reduction argument is our strongest here but I think it's important not to forget that people do have a right to bodily autonomy they do have a right to sexual privacy and it's important that we let people exercise those rights whether they are buying or selling sex okay I have in my hand the celliform touchy roll which goes to whoever moved the voting in her favor in this case and so please vote yes, no or undecided on the resolution a good society should criminalize the purchase of sex all right drumroll please the resolution read a good society should criminalize the purchase of sex the yes vote went from 19.18.9% to 27.9% it picked up nine points that's the yes vote so that's the number to beat picked up nine points the no vote went from 62 to 66% it picked up four and a half points so the yes vote wins the tootsie roll congratulations