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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I 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?

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, I note that 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.

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.

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.

It was called the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act 2024.

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.