Our next agenda item is an evidence session on the Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill from the member in charge of the bill, Ash Regan. We are also joined by Rachael Hamilton. I welcome Ash Regan to today’s meeting. She is accompanied by Maren Schroeder, senior researcher, and Anna MacLeod, parliamentary assistant, who are both from her office.
10:45The purpose of today’s evidence session is to inform the committee’s understanding of what the bill proposes. As with the previous session, this is an initial evidence session, and the committee will make a decision at a meeting in September on future evidence taking from other witnesses. I refer members to paper 1 and the letter from the Scottish Government giving its view on the bill. I will allow about 60 minutes for the session.
I invite Ash Regan to make an opening statement, for about five minutes.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee and discuss what is in the bill. As is probably evident from who has come with me to support me this morning, I have done this bill by myself, with my staff team. I have not been supported by the non-Government bills unit. You will also know that there is nobody from the legal side of things here, so we will not be able to answer any technical questions on drafting. However, we could take those away and come back to the committee on them. With that said, I move on to my opening remarks.
Prostitution is not a theoretical debate. It is not an abstract discussion about frameworks or personal liberty. It is happening right now in our cities and towns to real women—women who are poor, addicted, traumatised and trafficked. We should not look away from that. Last October, I met a Canadian survivor, Valérie Pelletier, who told me that disassociation is not a work skill, but it is required in prostitution. That is not a job; it is the paid performance of compliance. It demands that women fake arousal, endure unwanted penetration and shut down their pain so that men can forget that they are doing harm.
This is not about sex; this is about male entitlement—the belief that sexual urges deserve infrastructure, tolerance and access to women’s bodies. That belief harms not only the women in prostitution but all women. As Andrea Dworkin said,
“The difference between women in prostitution and all other women ... is merely one of degree. Because as long as some women are for sale, all women are buyable”
and, when women are for sale or buyable, equality is impossible.
The Scottish Government’s equally safe strategy says that prostitution is a form of “commercial sexual exploitation”, and that it has no place in modern Scotland. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women urges states to reduce demand, and the Council of Europe says that prostitution is incompatible with gender equality.
Front-line services such as the Encompass Network and Routes Out in Glasgow confirm the harm. They say that it is not a choice; it is survival. However, our laws have not kept up. Prostitution is no longer happening only on street corners and in brothels; it is on smartphones, online and streamlined. Women are sold and reviewed like takeaway meals.
The current law, which covers soliciting, kerb crawling and brothel keeping, targets only yesterday’s industry. Today, exploiters operate behind screens. The victims are still unsupported; they are hidden in plain sight—often we do not see them.
While the harm continues, we face a well-funded, globally connected lobby that markets prostitution as “sex work”. It reframes abuse as empowerment, poverty as consent and violence as a career path, but it never explains whose daughter this is a job for. Should prostitution be in schools’ career advice? Should it be in the Department for Work and Pension’s back-to-work scheme? What does the Health and Safety Executive consider a safe working environment in prostitution? When a punter violates terms during the act, who manages the employment dispute? Those are not rhetorical questions; they are the logical consequences of pretending that commercial sexual exploitation is just another industry and that prostitution is just another job.
The law already knows the truth. In Smart v HM Advocate in 1975, the High Court said that a person is not entitled to consent to their own injury. Payment does not make abuse legal. Tolerating abuse is not neutrality—it is complicity. States must never legitimise violence against women.
UK Feminista’s Kat Banyard, who is on the secretariat of Westminster’s all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation, said that the definition of a “pimp state” includes those in which Governments enable and take a cut from the commercial sex industry by licensing brothels operating in plain sight in our capital city or by taxing the owners. Local authorities have to pick up the cost of supporting those who are broken by an industry that commodifies women’s and girls’ bodies.
My bill adopts the Nordic model; it would criminalise the buyer and not those who are exploited; it would give women a statutory right to support to exit the industry; and it says clearly that, in Scotland, sex is not for sale. Sweden, France, Ireland, Norway, Northern Ireland and other countries support that, so why not Scotland? This is not a tidy policy issue. It is the raw reality of being raped for money over and over again.
Scotland already recognises in four other acts that prostitution is harmful. My bill provides the final piece to complete the jigsaw on prostitution law in 2025 by making a clear legal distinction between exploiters and those who are exploited, and by reframing the criminality and shame of commercial sexual exploitation.
As I said at the outset of our previous session with Pam Gosal, the Criminal Justice Committee regularly considers the issue of tackling violence against women and girls, which we take extremely seriously, as I am sure you know.
I will start with a general opening question, before bringing in Liam Kerr. As you will be aware, the minister said in a letter to the committee that
“There remain significant questions and concerns regarding the measures within the Bill and how they would work in practice, the extent to which they would deliver on the policy intent, and the associated financial implications.”
It is quite a broad question, but could you respond to those comments?
The Scottish Government has a current strategy for prostitution. I am sure that the committee has probably looked at that during the past year or so. My view is that the Scottish Government’s strategy supports the bill’s core aims. As I set out in my opening statement, my bill is about taking further action to close the gap and bring it all together.
The Scottish Government’s equally safe strategy, which is a joint strategy with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, recognises prostitution as violence against women. If we recognise prostitution as violence against women, I believe that the onus is on the Parliament or the Government—and, unfortunately, progress on the issue has been too slow—to update the law to reflect the fact that the reality of prostitution has changed, as I set out in my opening statement.
Police Scotland is able to use laws to combat prostitution, and it does. The committee will no doubt be aware of operation begonia. Although that is quite an old operation that has been going for some years now, the Government has reinvigorated it recently, and it is very effective—the law on kerb crawling is effective.
I fully admit that the data on this is sketchy. Most of us around this table are old enough to remember when most prostitution was on the street and was very visible. We still have on-street prostitution, which operation begonia can target—and rightfully does target—but most estimates say that 90 per cent of prostitution is now indoors. My suggestion is that we update the law to give the police the tools that they need to target that, and to send the message that that type of exploitation is not appropriate in Scotland.
I think that you had a further question about support services.
Yes. It was more about the extent to which the bill would deliver on the policy intent and about cost implications, which I am interested in.
On the policy intent, we recognise that prostitution is violence against women and that prostitution is the market for trafficking. The UK as a state, and Scotland as part of that, has various international legal obligations to reduce prostitution and to make our country hostile to sex traffickers, and we should remember that most trafficking is of women and girls for sexual purposes. People who are trafficked and coerced into prostitution live some of the most degrading existences possible.
I have a very good report here, which I can share with the committee in a moment, about the tactics that are used by pimps against women who are controlled in prostitution and how prostitution amounts to, in the words of Reem Alsalem in her recent research, “degrading treatment”, which is obviously contrary to the women’s human rights. It also constitutes, in many and most cases, actual torture.
We cannot look away from this. I am establishing that there is a problem here. There are something like 6,000 to 8,000 women working in prostitution in Scotland, which is a significant number. We have a really significant problem in Scotland.
The policy approach and legislative framework that I am suggesting to you is not much of a change from the existing law. We already have laws on prostitution and kerb crawling, so we can already arrest sex buyers; the bill would allow us to arrest them in all contexts and not just in public places. It would decriminalise the victim, as we would now conceptualise them, and would offer them a legal right to support.
The framework is not new. It is most often referred to as the Nordic model, and some countries refer to it as the equality model. It has been used in a number of countries around the world, mostly in Europe but not exclusively, because Canada is one of those countries. The first country to use it, in 1999, was Sweden, which has a lot of data, which I am sure the committee will want to look at to see how the model has worked. Sweden was followed by a number of countries; Northern Ireland, which is obviously part of the UK, has a very similar law, as do France, Ireland and Norway. Quite a lot of countries that are close to us have followed the approach.
In the countries that have taken that policy approach, you can clearly see that the intention has reduced the market for prostitution: in Sweden, on-street prostitution dropped immediately by 40 per cent and has not gone back up, and trafficking inflows into the country are much lower. There is a report with data from more than 150 countries that clearly shows that. Maren Schroeder can come in on that in a minute.
The framework also creates a hostile environment for serious organised crime. It creates a hostile legislative framework for traffickers, which is what we want—we want to disrupt them as much as possible. It also decriminalises those who are selling. Those people are often traumatised and need specialist counselling and support. It is a difficult industry to leave, especially if someone has been trafficked; they might not even know which country they are in, might not speak the language and might not have access to their identity documents, for instance.
We should be looking at this issue. I certainly pursued it when I was in government. When I left, the bill was a year 3 or year 4 bill that the Government was going to pursue, although I admit that that is a few years ago now.
I will ask Maren Schroeder to discuss the costs.
I will first pick up on one point from the Minister for Victims and Community Safety’s letter on the cost of quashing convictions. I want to clarify that the costs that were put into the financial memorandum are based on an estimate that we received from the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service. It based that on the total number of convictions—approximately 10,500—under section 46 of the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 since the act came into force. We have since had clarification from Police Scotland that only 2,773 records are still in existence, and, therefore, the cost estimate that we received from the SCTS would most likely be an overestimate.
11:00In her letter, the minister referred to the Horizon—what was it called? Was it the Horizon Post Office systems bill? Pardon me for getting that wrong.
It was called the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act 2024.
Yes, that act presented a few difficulties, because the people in question were convicted for a number of offences. Section 46 of the 1982 act is associated with one crime code in the police database and one offence only. There are no victims in the offence, but the women who were treated as the offenders, for the purposes of being interviewed or anything like that, were arrested on the spot on the street and taken to court. Usually, they did not contest the charge.
Often, there is no written judgment for such convictions, which is why we set out that, in quashing the convictions, no review whatsoever would be necessary and that, for the reasons of trauma-informed practice, we would not seek to identify the women and inform them of that; it would not be appropriate, out of the blue, to send women who have successfully exited prostitution a letter informing them that their conviction has been quashed. That is why we believe that the cost estimate in the financial memorandum is reasonable. It is not possible to say whether it is accurate until we get to the actual process.
You have focused on one specific aspect, but can you provide more detail on the wider cost implications?
The wider cost implications are for the new offence. We think that it is reasonable to expect a number of additional cases over and above the current workload from the law on kerb crawling. In the financial memorandum, we set out low, medium and high estimates. I believe that the high estimate expects an additional 150 cases, and the policing costs are based on existing financial memoranda and on data that has come directly from the SCTS on the costs of cases that are being tried in the courts.
It is impossible for us to predict how many cases there would be. We definitely expect that there would be more cases arising from operation begonia than from just the original legislation on kerb crawling—additional cases in which the police would arrest buyers for indoor prostitution offences.
Do you have those figures to hand?
Do committee members have the financial memorandum in front of them? The table detailing the costs is on page 21. Do you want me to read out the table?
Yes, that would be helpful—thank you.
There would be recurring and one-off costs. We have estimated the cost to Police Scotland, in relation to additional crimes and cases proceeded with, to be between £33,000 and £100,000. We have estimated the cost to the Crown Office and the SCTS of the cases being brought to be between £84,000 and £218,000. We have also added in the cost of what we consider to be the fairly unlikely event of anyone being sent to prison for this offence—the offence of the purchase of sex—of around £48,000. Similarly, we do not imagine that community payback orders would be used extensively. We imagine that most people would receive a fine, but we have estimated the cost of those to be between £2,200 to £6,600.
The largest cost would be for the support services element, because the bill would make what I would describe as a bold move, which is to create the legal right to support for victims who have been in prostitution. It is fairly difficult to estimate what would be needed in that regard. The bill, as drafted, hands that over to the Government, because I accept that it would be the Government that would either instruct local authorities to provide those services or commission third parties to do that, as it does now.
There are two funds that the Government puts money into at the moment—the victim centred approach fund and the equally safe fund—which amount to more than £60 million. I have had a discussion with the Minister for Victims and Community Safety, and I imagine that it might be possible to refocus some of that funding as a result of the bill, with some of it going to prostitution spending.
The committee will be aware of Routes Out in Glasgow, which is an example of a provider of excellent services to those who are exposed to prostitution. It is funded by Glasgow City Council to the tune of about £400,000. In calculating the amount for the support services provided for in the bill, we had to include—I thought this was slightly odd when we were preparing the documents—that Routes Out funding in our figures, even though the money is already being provided for support services relating to prostitution. We have calculated support services at something between £1.3 million and £2.2 million, depending on how that works out.
As Maren Schroeder said, a number of records, some of which are on paper, might need to be changed. The SCTS gave us a figure of what it would cost it in administrative time to find, locate and update those records.
Thank you. I will bring in other members, and I hand over to Liam Kerr.
Good morning. Ash Regan, I can entirely understand the premise of what your bill seeks to achieve, and I find myself sympathising with an awful lot of what you have said in your set-up.
According to your policy memorandum, your bill will
“reduce the amount of prostitution in Scotland”.
However, that begs a question. What evidence can you provide to the committee that your new offence and the repeal of the existing offence will reduce the number of people who are involved in prostitution?
It would reduce the number of people involved in prostitution. We need to be clear about that from the start. Some people have the idea that, because prostitution will always exist and always has existed, we should not seek to have an appropriate legal or legislative framework to manage it. My view is that, as legislators, we need to look at the international evidence, the harm that is being done to women who are in prostitution and the harm to society, and we need to come up with the best possible option.
This is not a perfect solution—there are no perfect solutions. Other countries have criminalised the buyer through a challenging-demand model. Demand drives the supply. The buyers, 99 per cent of whom are men, demand the service, and the traffickers and the pimps step in to fill that demand. That is what drives the trafficking inflows. We know from the data on buyers that, if buyers know that they will get a criminal record and that what they have done will be made public, most will stop. You reduce the demand by creating that deterrent effect. In the countries that have brought in such a legislative framework, the market for prostitution has contracted. We can see that, and we have data for that. I will ask Maren Schroeder to go into the specifics. We also have international data that shows that the trafficking inflows into a country will also drop. We know that the model works.
It is also about decriminalising the women. I say “women” as a shorthand, because we estimate that 96 per cent of sellers are women. It is not all women; there are men who sell sex as well—I put that on the record—but I say “women” as a shorthand because the majority of sellers are women.
What also seems to happen is that, when the women are decriminalised, they develop a better relationship with people in law enforcement and are able to work with them. In the countries that adopt that approach, not only do they create crimes around the purchase of sex; it tends to lead to better investigations and investigation results on other crimes that are connected to that, the obvious one being trafficking.
We saw that in France. The statistics there showed that, when France changed the law quite recently—the French law is only a few years old—investigations into other crimes relating to the purchase of sex went up by 54 per cent. When I went to Sweden a few years ago, the Swedish police told me that, too. One of the police officers there, who was in charge of the issue in Stockholm, told me that he had no idea that that would happen once they started to criminalise the sex buyers. He said, “Well, we would go and arrest them, and then we would look in their car and find all these other types of criminality”—I am sure that you can imagine. Moreover, someone who was selling sex gave them very good evidence that led to the arrest of high-profile individuals for other issues.
It creates an environment in which things are all working together towards the ends that we as a society want to see. We do not really want to put these people in prison; we are seeking to create a deterrent effect, so that men who buy sex realise that that is exploitation and stop doing it, and then the market will drop.
I will let Maren Schroeder give us some facts and figures on the international data.
That data seems crucial to me. If the data exists—
It does.
Correlation is not causation. However, if you could supply data that shows France bringing in legislation and then having a decline in prostitution, that would be very helpful for the committee.
Sure. I will send that to the committee.
This is a table that we have created, which shows rates of people in prostitution by legislative framework from 2006 to 2014. I will read those out to you. Obviously, countries have different-sized populations, so the rate is per 100,000 people. Sweden’s rates of prostitution per 100,000 are 6.6 to 15.4, and the Republic of Ireland’s rates are 16 to 20. We can contrast those with countries that have a different model, which we can go into later. Germany has a legalisation model and its rates per 100,000 are 185 to 493; in the Netherlands the rate is 147 and in New Zealand it is 183. It could not be starker. I will make a note to circulate the table to the committee, because the data clearly illustrates what we are discussing.
Several highly experienced organisations, however, have responded to your consultation and suggested that, if a law such as the one that your bill proposes were to be brought in, it could compromise safety and even increase the risk of violence against those involved. How do you respond to that? Is there at least a possibility that similar legislation has driven practices underground—that prostitution has not decreased but has simply been driven underground where it is not so known about—which could explain the statistics that you have just adduced?
I will start with the point on driving practices underground, because it is quite a prevalent argument that the pro-exploitation lobby uses. What the word “underground” means is never defined. It could mean that prostitution has gone indoors where you cannot see it, or it might mean that it is more unsupervised or more unregulated—those are the definitions that I can think of. However, that is not what the data shows. Prostitution cannot really go underground, because it is an act of purchase, so the buyers and the sellers must connect with each other. Sweden’s national rapporteur on trafficking, Kajsa Wahlberg, said:
“prostitution activities are not and cannot be pushed underground. The profit of traffickers, procurers and other prostitution operators is obviously dependent on that men easily can access women … If the buyers can find the women … the police can too.”
11:15That claim is frequently repeated, but it is not supported by the evidence at all. The most compelling example of what you are talking about is probably what we have seen in France. The claim that the law was in contravention of the human rights of those who were selling and pimping, and that more violence was created by the law, was thoroughly examined by the European Court of Human Rights, and it was rejected in June 2023 in the judgment on MA and others v France. The court stated that the applicants had not demonstrated that the contested legislative provisions had had any effect on their situation or had exposed them to increase in violence or danger. The harms that the opponents to that court case described are real. Women in prostitution are subjected to horrendous and consistent levels of abuse and violence, but those harms are inherent in prostitution and they existed in France before the law. It is not the law that causes the harms; it is prostitution.
Does that answer your question?
Yes, that is interesting. As I said previously, the more data that you can send the committee, the better, if that is possible, although I note your remarks earlier about the support that you have.
The example of France and the European Court of Human Rights is so compelling that it is in the policy memorandum—or it should be. We will check that and make sure that, if it is not in there, we follow it up and send it to the committee.
I am grateful.
Rona Mackay, I forgot to bring you in for a supplementary to my questions.
I just wanted to go back to the quashing question. Why did you go down the route of quashing and not pardoning. Is there any particular reason?
It is a good question and, to be honest, we wrestled with it a little bit ourselves. The reason behind the policy intent is that, as you can imagine, as the law stands, women who are selling are often arrested and have convictions for selling sex under soliciting legislation.
I have one friend who has exited prostitution. She has been out a long time now. She entered prostitution when she was 15 and she had 39 convictions by the time she was 17. I probably do not have to explain to the committee that, if you have convictions in this area, it can create a barrier to accessing services, because women often do not want to disclose that they are in prostitution. We often see women in prostitution having their children taken away from them. If you want to exit prostitution, it could have a damaging effect on your employment prospects, whether you are able to get access to housing and a range of other things. Survivors were very clear with me that they wanted not only to be decriminalised but to have any existing convictions for the offence to be quashed or pardoned in some way.
If the committee still has doubts about that, it is borne out by the Casey review report that just came out. I do not know whether any of you have looked at it. It is about the Asian grooming gangs—well, they get called that, but I call them “rape torture gangs”—and it was commissioned by the UK Government. It has 12 recommendations on that particular issue, and the UK Government has accepted those in full. You will know that many of the girls who were groomed into those situations ended up in commercial sexual exploitation, so they were prostituted. Obviously, most of them were young—in many cases, they were below the age of consent—so one of the recommendations is that no one should be criminalised for their own abuse or their own exploitation. That is the policy intent.
How we get to the outcome, I am not so set on. I very much like the idea of an automatic repeal. The reason for that is that, when the records are looked up, there will not be anything on them. The offence will not be listed and then disregarded—it will not be on there at all. If, when they fill in forms, such women are asked whether they have a criminal record, they will be able to legitimately say that they do not, because it will have been removed.
However, there are other ways to get there. There are three quite recent pieces of legislation, the names of which Maren Schroeder will help me to remember. We have based our approach on the Horizon legislation, because we want there to be an automatic repeal, for the reasons that Maren set out. Only one crime code is involved, and there is no need for a case review.
With the Horizon legislation that you mentioned, the quashing was done so that the complainants could have redress. Is that part of your reasoning for going down that route?
No. We are not suggesting that my bill will provide any redress whatsoever, but I am making the point to the committee that many of the women will have entered prostitution as children or will have been trafficked, and they will have criminal records in relation to their own exploitation. I think that, as a society, we would agree that that is completely unacceptable.
That is my preference for how we should go about it. If the Parliament does not agree, I am perfectly willing to look at other options. For the sake of transparency, I point out that, in her letter, the Minister for Victims and Community Safety said that she did not think that basing our approach on the Horizon legislation was the right way to go, and I think that the Law Society of Scotland might have said the same.
There are a couple of other options. We could do something like what was done in the Miners’ Strike (Pardons) (Scotland) Act 2022, or in the Historical Sexual Offences (Pardons and Disregards) (Scotland) Act 2018. There are other ways of doing it.
There is a huge difference between quashing and pardoning.
Yes.
I have a tiny additional question. Maren Schroeder gave some cost figures. In the Horizon case, it worked out at about £4,000 per person. What do you estimate that the cost would be, per person, if you went down a different route?
We do not know. We would have to take that away and come back to the committee. However, we suspect that you are right—we suspect that it would be cheaper.
I thank Ash Regan and her team for being here today and for all the work that they have put into tackling the issue.
How do you envisage enforcement being undertaken? Earlier, you spoke very powerfully about how existing law has helped to tackle street prostitution, and the challenge that we face in the 21st century with indoor prostitution. I would be interested to hear more about how you think that enforcement would be done.
Absolutely. The committee might want to have a look at Ipswich. The committee will probably be aware that, a few years ago, there was a spate of murders of women working in prostitution in Ipswich. The local community came together and decided on a particular approach in an attempt to get a grip on what was happening. By using existing kerb-crawling laws and working with the police, they made the deterrent effect so strong that they eliminated street prostitution altogether—they simply got rid of it.
There was also a cost saving to that. There is a report that estimates that, for every £1 that was spent on that, the local area saved £2. We believe that a law of the type that I am proposing would eventually—not initially, because there would be set-up costs—result in a saving. We think that the costs would peak in the medium term—about four or five years after the law came into effect. However, after 10 years, once the trafficking and the prostitution market had gone down, the number of people seeking support—it is very expensive for the state to provide that support—would, we expect, have reduced, because that is what we have seen in other countries.
Ipswich is a great example for people to look at. However, you are right. Because of the nature of modern prostitution, the kerb-crawling laws are no use to the police—they have told me that. We have had conversations with the police—in particular, officers who specialise in sexual crimes—and they have expressed their frustration about the fact that, when they go into a premises, they find people who are clearly victims, who are sometimes people who have been trafficked, but they simply have to let the punters walk past them, because they cannot do anything. I sense that the police would like to have additional powers so that they could do something about that.
On policing, the commission on the sex buyer law submitted a report in 2016 to the then all-party parliamentary group on prostitution and the global sex trade in 2016 entitled “How to implement the Sex Buyer Law in the UK”, which the committee might want to look at. The commission looked at the law that applies in England and Wales. I think that it included a serving police officer and a former police officer. The report looked at the law in Sweden and considered what applicable powers and structures would be needed in a UK context. It concluded that a
“standard four-step enforcement operation ... would be consistent with existing policing powers.”
I will go through the four steps. First, police officers locate the premises that are used for prostitution. Secondly, they confirm that prostitution is taking place. To do that, they might contact the premises either in person or by phone. That is done covertly in Sweden, but it does not have to be. Thirdly, they observe—they watch the buyers going in. Fourthly, they take action.
Therefore, how the buying of sex would be policed would be very similar to how the police enforce the existing kerb-crawling legislation, which is to go to the area where the offences are taking place, observe and then make arrests.
When I spoke to the Swedish police about their approach, they explained to me that, in Stockholm, they have dedicated police who are working on prostitution. I cannot remember how many of those officers there were—I think that it was three. When they are in the office, they will visit adult websites, where they see adverts for sex. They phone or text the numbers and make an arrangement to purchase sex. After that, they usually get a message back that includes not a full address but an apartment block. The police wait outside the apartment block and then message to say that they are there, which is when they will be given the apartment number. At that point, they can go into the apartment. However, they might not do that; they might observe the sex buyers going past and then they can choose to take action at that point.
A constituent of mine wrote to me—I think that it was just last week—to say that two of the 16 apartments where she lives are being used for prostitution. When she is in the garden with her grandchildren, she watches a steady stream of sex buyers walking up the stairwell.
It is not difficult to find people buying sex. I believe that the police would tell you that, if the bill is passed, they will enforce the new offence in the same way that they do for kerb crawling.
I have a few further questions. In the policy memorandum, you cite the different jurisdictions to substantiate what you said earlier, which is helpful for Parliament.
Liam Kerr asked about the effect of criminalising the purchasing of sex. Will you say a bit more about the effect, as you see it, of decriminalising the sale of sex and any potential effect on enforcement?
My legislation would send a message to society—like other countries that have adopted this approach—to say that, in Scotland, we recognise who is the exploiter and who is being exploited. We now conceptualise most of the people who are in prostitution as victims. A lot of the women who I have spoken with who have exited prostitution would not think of themselves in those terms. They consider themselves very much to be survivors; that is how they want to refer to themselves.
Consider the testimony that Fiona Broadfoot gave. She came to the launch of the bill a few weeks ago and spoke with the media quite extensively. She was prostituted in Scotland, including in a brothel in Edinburgh. She explained that there were a couple of times when she was on the street with her pimp and the police arrived. They arrested her and took her away. She was a teenager at the time. There is a power imbalance between the exploitees and the exploiters, who are not just the sex buyers but the pimps.
Reem Alsalem has written a number of really good papers on the topic. She has a country report in which she talks about prostitution in the UK and recommends that we move to a challenge-demand model. She has also penned an excellent letter—if the committee has not seen it, I will circulate it. It is brutal. In it, she talks about the reality of prostitution, particularly for those who are trafficked and coerced. She also refers to pimps as being—I cannot remember exactly how she phrases it—the biggest users of torture. That is how bad things are; they are torturing prostitutes.
We should flip that and let the women who are working in the sex trade know that they are decriminalised. I know that some people think that you should not do that—they feel that, if you think that prostitution is wrong, you should criminalise everybody. However, I believe that some of these women are so traumatised by what has happened to them in prostitution that they will never really recover from it. Adding a layer of criminality to that, in my view, is just wrong. Decriminalising them does not lead to an increase in prostitution because the demand is coming from the buyers. If you decriminalise the sellers, it will not have an impact on the size of the prostitution market.
11:30
My first question was about enforcement and the role of the police. With decriminalisation, does the evidence from other jurisdictions point towards any increase in the number of people who sell engaging more with the police and feeling more empowered to speak up? Will you elaborate on that?
Yes. We have seen in other countries, particularly in Sweden, that there is an improved relationship between the sellers and law enforcement. That comes back to what I was saying earlier about the police getting lots of tips from sellers about sex buyers who had also committed other crimes. That information is documentable.
Maybe we need to have a think about who is in prostitution, because I feel as though you were implying that if you decriminalised sale, it might attract more people into prostitution.
I was not insinuating that.
Okay.
Melissa Farley is very good on this. She would probably be described as the leading researcher on prostitution and its harm. She says that 2 per cent of people who work in prostitution feel fairly happy and can mitigate the risks against them. They feel that they have made the choice to do that.
She then says that 38 per cent of people working in prostitution are likely to be women who have suffered child sex abuse, including incest. They might have come from very chaotic, violent backgrounds, or they might have come through the care system. A lot of women who end up in prostitution have been through the care system, which, to my mind, is a shocking statistic that should give us all pause. Almost a majority of those people have entered prostitution as a child or are under immediate, extreme financial hardship. The rest—60 per cent—are trafficked. The 2 per cent might think that decriminalisation is good. Overall, if you look at the make-up of people who are involved in prostitution, you can see that they are not people whom you would want to criminalise at all.
Thank you. I have one final question. You spoke earlier about how you and your team have progressed the preparation of the bill, including the drafting, the evidence and the research. If the bill were to proceed to stage 2, would you be looking to engage with the Government to utilise its facilities for legal drafting, to get advice on competence and on all the other points that would need to be satisfied in order to produce an implementable and appropriate piece of legislation?
Yes. For those in the committee who do not know, I have been working and researching in this area for probably more than a decade. I was working as a volunteer on the issue before I got elected. When I got elected, I was about to do a member’s bill on the same topic in 2018, and then I got made a minister. I was then made a minister in this area of law, so I thought, “Okay, that’s great—I will be able to do this as a minister”. Some of the front-line services that work in this area and I thought that that approach might be more appropriate, because, if you think about it, this piece of legislation directly takes on serious organised crime. It would be good for the Government, with all the support that it has around it, to do that; however, that is not where we are. I was not able to progress the bill when I was a minister for various reasons; I have done it at the first possible opportunity after leaving Government.
We have been engaging with the Government extensively. I have been meeting the minister who is responsible for this area every couple of months or so. I update her on progress. We meet regularly, and we continue to talk about the bill. We met most recently on Thursday last week. Last week’s meeting was to hear from the Government about what issues it might have with the provisions of the bill, and I believe that the minister set that out in her letter to the committee.
Once we get to the point of amendments, the Parliament will provide us with drafting services. If the Government and I agree on amendments, I would be happy for the Government to draft them.
Thank you.
I have another couple of questions. You have spoken about other models, such as those in Sweden and Northern Ireland. The consultation responses indicate that there is a significant amount of support for the bill’s provision that would more fully criminalise those who are seeking to buy sex. However, I am aware of the work that has been done on legislation in Northern Ireland which, essentially, did the same thing, in that it criminalised the purchase of sex. The Department of Justice commissioned an official review in 2019 which found that there was
“no evidence that the offence of purchasing sexual services has produced a downward pressure on demand for, or supply of, sexual services”.
What is your view on the Northern Ireland experience? How might that shape your thinking about the legislative provision in Scotland?
That is a good question that gets brought up quite a lot. The main takeaway for the committee to remember from Northern Ireland is that, even without strong enforcement, the law has had a measurable deterrent effect. The issue in Northern Ireland is not with the legislative framework, but with the enforcement of the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Criminal Justice and Support for Victims) Act (Northern Ireland) 2015. I will bring in Maren Schroeder, because she has looked into it extensively.
In 2017 or 2018—I cannot remember what year it was; I will have to check—I went to Northern Ireland when I was preparing the first time around for my member’s bill and spoke to the then attorney general, John Larkin. We discussed in a private meeting that, at the point that I visited, they had not made a single arrest. He admitted to me that there were enforcement challenges.
The Department of Justice produced a short paper; it commissioned research into the enforcement of the law which showed that it did not invest enough money in enforcing it. The department also explicitly acknowledged that there was no way to measure demand—there was no before or after data. The conclusions in the research were based on stakeholders’ opinions. The problem with the review was that the majority of organisations that the researchers engaged with were opposed to the Nordic model of law that had been adopted, which was not properly acknowledged in the findings. If you are opposed to a law, your assessment will be that the law is not working. The researchers also did not conduct a control for broader trends in online prostitution. That said, they did not recommend repealing the law.
In 2024, a paper was written by independent researchers who re-analysed the data that the Department of Justice-commissioned study had used. They found that there had been a 50 per cent fall in street prostitution, even with the lack of prostitutes—if I may, I will explain that. Recently, I have looked into what buyers say about those laws across the world, by consulting a website that is essentially a sex tourist city guide. On that website, the buyers say that the demand from local buyers in Dublin and Belfast has reduced. As a response, fewer women are available from whom to buy services. Coincidentally, there are city profiles on Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Dundee, which happen to have been written when the so-called Scottish kerb-crawling law—the Prostitution (Public Places) (Scotland) Act 2007—was particularly rigorously enforced, which was around 2011 and 2012. The buyers reflect, in their own words, that the women are simply not available because local buyers are scared of arrest. We know from the buyers that where there is a danger of being arrested—where there is a danger of their anonymity being threatened—they are put off.
So the law works even if you do not enforce it. However, if you rigorously enforce it, as they have done in Sweden and France, it will work extremely well.
To pick up on the convener’s line of questioning, international opinion or evidence conflicts with what you said about the success of the Nordic model.
Can we have Rona Mackay’s microphone on, please?
It was on, I think. I was probably just leaning away from it.
You will also be aware that a substantial body of sex workers do not agree with your proposals. In fact, recently, there was a delegation outside the Parliament protesting about it. Obviously, there is a difference of views.
In addition, the internet is now used much more widely for the purchase of sex. Some sex workers say that your bill will make them less safe. At the moment, they can screen buyers on the internet. They differentiate between bad clients and good clients. They fear that, if your bill becomes law, they will be left with bad clients who are more likely to abuse them, because those clients do not care about the law and will break the law anyway. There is some fear among sex workers that the bill will make them less safe. I put their case to you for comment. It is not my opinion.
There was a lot in that. I have written down about five different points.
First, I need to be very clear: the international evidence presents an extremely compelling and consistent case that, if you bring in laws in the style of the Nordic model, you will reduce the market for prostitution, which will mean that fewer women are drawn into it to be harmed—we know that it is inherently harmful—and you will reduce the trafficking inflows to your country.
Doing so will not make prostitution safe. No law can do that, because prostitution is not safe. On the data that we have on that, a US study says that those who work in prostitution are 18 times more likely to be murdered than the general population. Prostitution is just inherently harmful. I think that I answered that question using the French example about the safety level. Nothing about the bill will make anybody less safe than they are now. That covers the evidence.
When it comes to the internet, you are right. A few years ago—more than a few years; a few decades ago—it was all about on-street prostitution. The police in Scotland knew where the red-light districts were. They could go there and, periodically, make arrests or whatever. If you were a pimp running several exploited persons, it was fairly high risk; you had to wait for buyers to come along, then you or they might get arrested.
Now, everything is so anonymous that pimps can run hundreds of adverts at very little cost and with no possibility of their arrest. That situation has also increased the number of clients that a prostituted person can see in one day. It makes the whole transaction very low risk to the pimps and much more lucrative. You are right: it has created that perfect storm, if you like.
To go back to the safety comment, there is a myth that, somehow, out there, there is a “good” sex buyer. Good men do not buy sex. That is a myth. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was reading about the Emma Caldwell case—about which the committee will, no doubt, be aware—which is going to inquiry. One of the women who worked on the street in prostitution alongside Emma said that she had seen that buyer many times. There are often examples of buyers who behave normally and are not violent and abusive during one visit but become violent and abusive on a different visit.
Some people talk about the idea of screening time, which would allow you to check out who the buyers are, but I would say that the reality does not quite meet up with what they are suggesting. We know that buyers routinely use fake names, burner phones and encryption apps—they do not want to be caught or to have to give out their full identity. The reality is that there is not a lot of screening time.
11:45I have also spoken to women who have worked in Edinburgh brothels, and they told me that a buyer will appear and go to one of the people who is working in that brothel at that time. Those people do not have an ability to refuse the client. Despite this idea about screening, there is no screening. The punters arrive, and somebody will see them.
A lot of people here work on criminal justice in relation to violence against women, and we know that, in other settings, it can be very difficult to assess which men are going to be a problem, because they do not have “dangerous man” stamped across their forehead. We use risk assessment tools and so on. We have single-sex spaces for that purpose, so that we can, quite rightly, keep vulnerable women safe in some circumstances. Even trained professionals will struggle to identify a risky man. I do not think that there is a possibility to screen and to try to identify a good punter in a system that is so inherently dangerous.
I think that I have answered the questions. Were there any points that I did not cover?
I will raise one final wee thing: one sex worker said that she fears that the proposals will make her less safe, and she does not want her body to be seen as a crime scene. You can develop that way of thinking if you are involved in that trade.
People who work in prostitution would not have to give evidence or have any involvement in this whatsoever. They would be completely decriminalised, which is not the case now, and they would have a legal right to access support. I believe that there is a lot in this legislation that would be beneficial to people who work in prostitution.
I will pick up on the language that you used. I want to make committee members aware, if they are not already—I suspect that some will be very aware—that the term “sex work” is not neutral language. Many of the survivors who I have spoken to are very distressed about that type of language and see it as glossing over the reality of what prostitution is really about and what it has done to them. They would not use that term at all. I believe that the term is being used to legitimise prostitution and to gloss over the harms that might be involved in it. We would not use it; we would always use terms such as “commercial sexual exploitation”, “prostituted people”, “women exploited in prostitution” and, for those who have exited, “survivors of prostitution”, as they often want to call themselves.
Liam Kerr has a question, following which I will bring in Rachael Hamilton.
Ash Regan, I completely understand the point that you made in response to Rona Mackay’s question much earlier in the session about the quashing of convictions, which is dealt with in sections 4 and 5, but there is a lot of writing from a legal perspective around lex temporis, which means that the law at the time of the offence should govern the legality. For me, the logical progression of that would mean that quashing convictions retrospectively could undermine legal certainty, authority and trust in the legal system and that it could undermine the law’s neutrality and make it more of a moral judgment. How do you respond to that challenge to sections 4 and 5?
That is a fair comment. As I said to the committee, we have wrestled over that area. I have set out my preferred approach, which may not end up being the committee’s or the Parliament’s preferred approach. I chose it because I believe that, in relation to some laws that have been in place for a very long time and in different circumstances, we now have updated ways of thinking about things and conceptualising exploiters and the exploited.
To me, the approach that I have set out seems like the most straightforward way to achieve the policy intent. However, I accept that there are other ways of going about that, and I am open to further discussion on whether it might be better to go down the route that has been taken in other recent pieces of legislation, such as the Miners’ Strike (Pardons) (Scotland) Act 2022 or the Historical Sexual Offences (Pardons and Disregards) (Scotland) Act 2018.
We will go away and do a bit more research and work on that area. We will speak to some of the stakeholders about that part of the bill in more detail. I agree with you that there is a discussion to be had there.
Thank you for giving evidence today; it is very helpful.
We recently had an informal chat and you said that the proposals for the bill would tackle sexual exploitation and human trafficking, as we have discussed today. The real concern that you have about that shone through to me. Your bill proposes to reduce demand, but I cannot see any evidence that the provisions in the bill will break the criminal supply chain. Can you talk about any data that you have on the number of people who are being trafficked and forced into exploitation?
It is quite difficult. Data in this area is patchy. The best data that we have comes from the Encompass Network’s snapshots. It spoke to 291 women who were working in prostitution. Maren Schroeder will remind me what the figure was for those who had been trafficked—was it 80 or 90?
It was about 90.
Yes. About 90 women were trafficked, which is about one third of the women Encompass spoke to. I would say that, as the Government has recognised in its reports, the average trafficking victim probably comes from eastern Europe, while Nigeria and Vietnam tend to be up there among the top source countries.
Women who have been trafficked and are under the control of third parties probably do not speak any English. They are constantly surveilled. They are held in apartments, and the business model involves moving them around the country. They might be in Glasgow for four weeks, then the person who is controlling them will put out new adverts in Aberdeen saying, “New in town!” and move the women there for a few weeks, then they will move them somewhere else. The buyers require “fresh meat”, so the women are moved around constantly.
My view is that that figure of one third of the sample underrepresents the full scale of trafficking, because that type of victim never engages with services. No one ever talks to them about their health or their safety. They never come into contact with the police, because they are surveilled all the time and kept in confined and constrained environments. I believe that we are very much underestimating the figure.
We have wiretap evidence from Sweden of traffickers discussing the countries that they want to go to. They can be heard saying, “Do not bother with Sweden, it is too difficult there.” Traffickers are only interested in money and the most lucrative, lowest-risk destinations, which is where they are at least risk of being detected, interrupted, arrested and convicted. They will just not bother with anywhere that they think will be too much trouble. The international evidence consistently shows lower flows of trafficked people into countries that have the proposed model for addressing prostitution—I gave you some stats about that earlier.
Let us consider the example of Germany—Maren Schroeder is German, which has been helpful. The committee will be aware that Germany has pursued a different and opposite approach to prostitution. It started off in 2002 with the decriminalisation model, but only a few years later it realised that that was an absolute disaster for people who are working there. It had not affected trafficking. In fact, trafficking and exploitation were worse than before. It was a minefield of organised crime.
The prostitution market doubled after the legislative model was changed. Prior to 2002, about 90 per cent of the women who were working in prostitution in Germany were German. Now 80 to 90 per cent of the people who are working in prostitution in Germany are of foreign extraction, so we can assume that they have been trafficked. We think that about 80 per cent of them have been trafficked. Despite the fact that it was expected that the market would be regulated and unionised, and the women would be protected, the murder rate became, quite frankly, astronomical.
Germany has since gone the other way, moving to a more regulatory model.
I appreciate your comment about the situation regarding Germany’s decriminalisation model, but that is a slightly different case. I believe that Ireland’s model is probably more similar to what you are proposing, and I note that Ireland has not seen a reduction in trafficking, and I am very concerned that, if we do not address the core issues that drive people into sexual exploitation, such as addiction, poverty, issues with immigration status and the organised crime networks that abuse women, your bill will not achieve what you want it to.
It will, because all the international evidence sets out a very clear and compelling case. The international evidence shows that, if you pass the bill and enforce it appropriately, you will see a reduction in the influx of trafficked people. We know that that is the case.
Ireland has issues with enforcement. Maren Schroeder has found the correct page in the briefing, so she can give us more detail on that. The issue is not the legislative framework, so the situation is exactly the same as what we have seen in Northern Ireland, which we discussed with the convener. The legislation in Ireland is having an effect, but it is not having as much of an effect as it would do if it were rigorously enforced.
To come back to the statistics that I gave you earlier about the make-up of the people who are in prostitution, 60 per cent do not choose it; they are trafficked. They do not decide to traffic themselves on to a boat to Italy or other parts of Europe; they are sold or coerced into being trafficked. In some cases, they are forcibly taken from their home countries, stuck in the back of a transport vehicle and brought here to service the demand.
I am aware of the time, but I have a final question. How will exploited and trafficked women be able to access healthcare, for example, through the statutory right to assistance and support that you have set out?
The committee will know about the national referral mechanism, which is set out in UK Government legislation. The women will have access to that and to a temporary recovery and reflection period, during which they are protected from deportation. That period normally only lasts for 30 days, but, in practice, it can often last up to 12 months, until they get the conclusive grounds decision. In that time, they are entitled to things such as safe accommodation, healthcare, legal advice and other support, but they still have to pursue the immigration route if they want to stay in the country.
My bill is part of a suite of support that is offered to victims, but it would not have any impact whatsoever on how the support is set out.
You have not included that in the bill’s cost summary. Is that because it is up to the UK Government to fund it?
Yes, although it is the Scottish Government that allocates funding to the trafficking awareness-raising alliance project Scotland. Is that funding shown in our figures, Maren?
Yes.
The Scottish Government funds TARA Scotland quite extensively in order to work with trafficking victims, so that money is accounted for.
I want to follow up on the evidence that shows that demand reduction models generally decrease trafficking inflows. There have been two large-scale studies: one, published in 2013, looked at evidence from 150 countries; and the other, from 2016, looked at trafficking inflows in the European Union. Both studies confirmed that there are significant differences in the size of trafficking inflows into countries that have adopted the Nordic model.
We can say very confidently that the model has worked in Sweden. Within two decades of adopting a Nordic model law, Sweden declared its market was dead. It is no longer a destination country for traffickers, and the explanation is simple: trafficking is all about profit, and where no profit is to be made, trafficking stops. More interesting is France, which only adopted its current approach nine years ago. France has vigorously enforced the law: its criminal investigations into pimping and trafficking rose by 54 per cent. It seized millions of euros from exploiters and has reported a reduction in trafficking.
I have to bring the session to a close, so I thank Ash Regan and her staff for joining us this morning. That has been a helpful session.
We will suspend for a couple of minutes to allow our witnesses to depart.
12:00 Meeting suspended.