Tim Barnett: Outmoded ethics let evil thrive

Parliament will decide today whether to introduce fundamental reform of our prostitution laws.

The issue is a moral hot potato, and the assumptions behind prostitution law tend to follow the dominant ethos of the day. That is why the debate is happening, and why the issue is a crucial test of MPs' vision.

Prostitution was criminalised during the 19th century as an expression of tight-lipped Victorian morality. During the 20th century, those laws have been made a little more realistic, effectively turning a blind eye to the act of prostitution but continuing to make illegal much of what happens around the act itself.

Generally, from the 1970s on, we have started to reject that approach to law-making, preferring instead to produce law that directly tackles proven harms.

Many of the changes of the 1980s associated with creating a realistic response to Aids/HIV, such as homosexual law reform and the establishment of needle exchanges, followed that model and have been outstanding successes.

Prostitution law reform was too hard an argument to win then, and so we have continued with anomalous law that ignores real harm and effectively protects criminal activity, while trumpeting outdated ethics around gender roles and sex activity.

Not for the first time, it has been the police who have led the way. The current law is impossible to police, and there are many other more serious policing priorities. So people as varied as sex workers, disability care workers and hotel receptionists are labelled by the law as criminal but know they have little chance of being caught unless they really frighten the horses.

Some people are happy to live with such nonsense, ignoring the repeated lesson of history that prohibition nurtures criminal and, particularly, gang activity, rather than tackle the resultant harm head-on.

The Prostitution Reform Bill is unashamedly a decriminalisation measure. It removes the blanket bans on activity around prostitution that is not of itself harmful (for example, brothel-keeping, or procuring), and replaces it with clearer and tougher law concerning the real evils (for example, sex with an under-age prostitute, or coercion of a sex worker).

It broadly follows the New South Wales law introduced eight years ago, and has benefited from some of the lessons learned there. Amendments made at the last parliamentary stage of the bill have given local bodies more power to influence the location of brothels, introduced a streamlined certification system for brothel operators, and ban people working on visas from involvement in the sex industry.

The opposition to the bill has been well-funded (mainly from United States-based fundamentalist movements), vocal and entirely illogical. Of course, we have seen them all before, albeit in another age and with some different names.

In 1986, they were carrying a petition up the steps of Parliament to the sound of patriotic tunes, demanding the rejection of homosexual law reform. In 1993, they were predicting the arrival of the devil were we to protect homosexuals and those with HIV or Aids from discrimination through the Human Rights Act.

And now they are predicting the reimposition of slavery on our women, a tsunami of sexually transmitted infections, brothel-keeping classes at schools, and street workers hanging around our front gates demanding to sell us their wares each time we pop down to the corner dairy.

It would be laughable if they were not so insistent, and if the implication of their succeeding was not so serious.

So how would the sex industry change if the bill does succeed? I would see the five major impacts being:

* A new focus on standards, including health, safety and employment conditions.

* Fewer barriers to exiting the industry (for example, no danger of criminal conviction for prostitution-related offences).

* Reorientation of police resources from registration systems (that is, a blanket approach) to genuine evils (for example, under-age sex, where the current defence available to the client of reasonably believing that the prostitute was over 18 is removed).

* Less visibility (since local bodies are given new powers to ban offensive signs).

* A move towards smaller, worker-run brothels, which are effectively rendered illegal by the current law but are actually the safest places for sex workers to operate.

The bill also includes a review committee, which will report to the Government in three to five years on how well the law is working and how best to improve services to discourage entry to, and encourage exiting from, the sex industry. Such an innovation is new in prostitution law reform, and should help focus debate after the passing of the new law.

The choice is a crucial one for Parliament, and a difficult one for many MPs. They should remember that at the next election, few people will mention prostitution reform or even remember it, and that those now opposing the bill will have moved on to other obsessions.

And 15 years on, the very thought that anyone could have opposed it will be considered a little odd.

* Labour MP Tim Barnett is the promoter of the Prostitution Reform Bill.