Making Scotland’s Sex Trade Safer

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.

A moratorium on mission?

communicants roll

My introduction to irony came when I was but 7 years old, in the form of the title of the television programme. It was called: Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead?

It seems to me that this title allows us a way in to thinking about something that’s quite difficult to talk about in many denominations including my own.

Here in this little corner of God’s vineyard we had a diocesan synod recently and in the company of others around the Scottish Episcopal Church we were asked to reflect on the diocesan statistics and to say something about what we thought that they meant.

It was obvious fairly quickly that few people wanted to get up and talk about what is very obviously not terribly good news.

Predictably, someone said that if we changed the way we measure the stats then maybe they would show that we are engaged with more people. Well, that’s true. However it is not really dealing with the question at hand. Some of the statistical records that we have got back over decades and are reasonably accurate. Indeed, I suspect the count we keep of how many communions each church has served is very accurate indeed. It is quite important, I think, to keep on recording the same statistics, even if in time, we decide that we want to know more in order to add something to our knowledge of what’s happening.

The plain fact is that like a lot of mainstream denominations, our stats are going down. It is also plain that this is not a universal reality. Some dioceses appear to be doing a bit better. And within dioceses, some congregations seem to be doing better whilst others are doing worse.

The whole point of gathering church stats is surely to try to understand the overall picture and see whether anything can be learned from them that will help people to plan for the future and make tweeks in our common life that might lead to growth – or at least starting to stem the decline. It is obvious that in this diocese at least, little that we’ve done in the last 30 years has made very much difference. We’ve had plenty of mission plans and plenty of decline.

One interesting observation that I’m looking at right now is at least worthy of investigation. It appears that those dioceses which are engaged in Mission Action Planning are declining at a faster rate than those who are not engaged in that exercise in Scotland.

Now, understanding why this might be so is rather important.

Here are some possibilities:

  1. Perhaps it is the case that dioceses that are facing a more challenging situation are more likely to engage in Mission Action Planning.
  2. Perhaps it is the case that the priorities set by dioceses in their Mission Action Planning are the wrong priorities.
  3. Perhaps it is the case that Mission Action Planning just doesn’t work and is in fact displacement activity that people engage in because it is easier than tackling the situations which lead to decline – something which is a very difficult thing to do.

The graph that I’ve posted at the top of this post is one that is causing considerable reflection here in the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway. It shows fairly consistent decline over decades. The only particularly significant interruption to a fairly constant pattern is a significant drop in the first couple of  years of this century. This could be because that period was just after the collapse of the Mission 21 initiative through lack of funds. It could be because this period also saw the retirement of Richard Holloway who had given the Scottish Episcopal Church a significant profile that has never been recovered since. And it could be for neither of those reasons, for some other reason or it could just be one of those things we can’t explain.

However it is also fairly easy to see that big changes in mission policy in the Scottish Episcopal Church have made little impact here in this diocese. We’ve tried to change the church so that the diocese is the focus of mission rather than having a Scotland wide policy and each local bishop is now thought of as the leader of mission in their dioceses. I’ve opposed that policy shift. Others have thought it was a good thing. Whether good or bad, there’s no sign in the numbers that it has made the slightest difference whatsoever. Similarly with the Diocesan Growth Strategy that a lot of effort has gone into here. Again, I’ve struggled with it as I’ve always thought the priorities were the wrong priorities. However my own views don’t really matter right now. It isn’t working regardless of what anyone thinks about it.

To some extent, we should expect the stats for this diocese to have declined anyway just through demographics. Glasgow is depopulating and the population of Scotland is moving East. We should probably expect to see a small rise in the stats for Edinburgh diocese that reflect this. It is also the case that we may be doing less badly than some of our ecumenical friends.

My questions at the moment are these:

  1. What lessons can be learned from churches which have been growing through this period against the trend? Are their priorities different to the priorities promoted through the mission planning tools that are often used?  (No-one ever asks me why we’ve grown here at St Mary’s).
  2. Why do we think anyone might want to join a Scottish Episcopal congregation and how do we communicate that?
  3. How do we develop a new ecumenism that allows us to ask openly:
    Who are the most likely people to come to repopulate Episcopal churches and what specific strategies do we have to attract and retain them?

  4. Should we be interested in thinking about the “market share” of those who go to church and how should we measure this?

My suspicion is that growing churches tend to have good music, good websites, interesting worship and look somehow out beyond themselves – so I find myself asking whether we could be learning something from that.

In other words, Why Don’t We Just Switch Off Our Mission Planning Schemes and Go Out and Make Our Churches More Interesting Instead?

Do we need a moratorium on mission for 10 years until we’ve done that?

Thoughts?