What is in Kelvin's Head?

Making Scotland’s Sex Trade Safer

26/11/2015

The recent death of Cynthia Payne provides a helpful reminder of the two-faced attitude to prostitution that we often hold. Ms Payne managed to cultivate a populist and almost comic Carry on Whoring image. She invited the great and the good to her home in Streatham and offered sandwiches and “services” merely in exchange for luncheon vouchers. In her day, she never seemed to be out of the public eye. However on the other hand, public opinion also holds prostitution to be a rather sordid transaction that needs to be heavily legislated against and which doesn’t bear thinking about.

I happen to believe that there is no law which is going to completely remove prostitution from society. Given that view, it seems reasonable to expect the law to protect those who are vulnerable. If some modest reforms of the law can help make the lives of those who are vulnerable a bit safer then our politicians should not be squeamish about making change happen.

One of our own MSPs, Jean Urquhart is doing precisely that at the moment by promoting a consultation on several possible changes to the law around prostitution. I have little doubt that she will get some abuse for her efforts. There are few votes in offering favours to sex-workers. The trouble is, Jean Urquhart is at least partly right.

At the moment, it is perfectly legal for someone to sell sex from a flat or house provided they act alone. Once anyone else gets involved, so does the law. Should two women operate from one dwelling then they can both be prosecuted as brothel keepers. Is this really right and just? Wouldn’t those two women be safer working in partnership or as a collective with a couple of others, any of whom would know that someone was on hand, if a client turned nasty?

After all no-one is going to call the police to deal with a client if they think that they themselves are likely to be arrested too.

Jean Urquhart’s proposals would lead to further decriminalisation of prostitution. It is easy to see why there might be a law to prevent “living off the avails of prostitution”. The idea is to stop people making money from the sex lives of the vulnerable. However it is less easy to see why the child of a sex-worker should themselves be guilty of a crime for accepting money from their parent to enable them to go to college.

Jean Urquhart’s proposals will not become law in this parliamentary session and she standing down as an MSP next year. Her legacy should be a parliamentary review of the law surrounding prostitution which seeks to target coercion rather than transaction. I don’t expect to see political manifestos next year make many promises to help those in the sex trade. However, that should not prevent progressive people from all shades of political opinion from raising these issues with those standing for parliament next year.

Those who see prostitution as a scourge in society need to come up with their own ways of diminishing the amount of prostitution that takes place. I believe that the best way of doing this is to tackle poor employment options for women, ensure access to adequate affordable housing, remove the wickedness of benefit sanctions, tackle student poverty and heavily legislate against those who offer at an absurdly high rate of interest, credit to those who cannot afford it. And everyone would benefit from much better sex education in schools that doesn’t just treat the sex lives of young people as a problem.

Locking up women (or men) who are engaged in buying or selling sex should come a long way down the list.

Alongside reviewing the law, there needs to be a review of sentencing guidelines and police policy. Recent heavy-handed raids against saunas in Edinburgh by Police Scotland seem to be an argument in favour of local rather than national policing policy rather than a responsible policy on how to deal with sex-work in Scotland.

I happen to be unconvinced that prostitution is a legitimate career choice. I’d prefer a society in which there was less of a sex trade rather than more of it. However, there are people who are involved in that trade currently and those who will be involved in it in the future. Where the law can be changed to make them safer and less vulnerable then politicians should be fearless in bringing change about.

decriminalization, prostitution, Scotland, sex trade

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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