With child protection, it is a mountain of nonsense. For example the killer from Soham would not be barred by the legislation adopted following the review on his murders and employment.

NASUWT says sex offenders can’t be banned.

So a jeep load of guidance, endless prevarication, and never-ending paper-work, and the sex offenders do not get banned from schools.

Let the NASUWT run the country, they’re already in charge.

The NASUWT came up about once every 15 minutes in relation to prostitution reform.

It was decided legal brothels would only encourage teachers to throw restraint to the four winds.

Let the NASUWT run the country, they’re already in charge.

Their campaign to reform ( abuse of trust) the SOA 2003, no crime, no police, no search warrant, no child pornography.

Is there any sex crime they don’t want a veto on, no? Thought not.

The Brits pass laws they haven’t the slightest intention of enforcing,

the FBI for example know the violent pornography laws in the UK come out of their budget, the Brits will take a VP case from the CP referrals.

The VP will be from CP referrals as a rule I expect, and as Britain, doesn’t do to good, with CP, it is down to the FBI.

Sunny that is not a decent argument for “symbolic laws”, it’s an argument for clear drafting of the laws that we do want. A significant part of the problem has been Our Beloved Masters legislating for headlines so much that there is either insufficient time to properly draft and debate legislation that is needed, or passing laws that were never mean’t to have any significant effect beyond giving a minister a boost in the papers.

The point of having laws is to define what is illegal and to do so very precisely, it has no other purpose. Using the legal system for “messge sending” is like using a toque wrench as a hammer. Once or twice it has an effect, though not as much as using the proper kit and in the end you have a precision tool that is now only useful as a blunt object.

SIR – I am a young barrister based in Nottingham. This week, I received my brand new 2009 edition of Archbold, the leading criminal law text, used by nearly all advocates and judges in English and Welsh court rooms.
Having taken my new barrister’s bible out of its box, I cast an eye over the preface to this year’s edition: “It has been a recurring theme of the preface to this work that there is far too much criminal legislation. The willingness of the Labour Government to continue its practice of legislating by trial and error has shown no signs of abating even in its eleventh year in office… The state of the criminal statute book is a disgrace. The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 is the usual hotchpotch of measures, with no theme, with much of the detail tucked away from close scrutiny in the schedules, and consisting in large part of textual amendment to earlier legislation. Much of the amendment is by way of undoing this Government’s earlier legislation.”

Coincidentally in the same paper there was this letter:

Sir – In a letter to Lord Laming, asking him to review child protection measures following the death of Baby P, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, wrote obscurely: “What are the key barriers, including in the legal process, that may impede efficient and effective work with children and families and that may be preventing good safeguarding practice from becoming standard practice everywhere?”
I also found this heading on a flowchart produced by Mr Balls’s department: “LSCB [Local Safeguarding Children Boards] objectives pursued through LSCB functions help produce outputs that contribute to overall outcomes.”
In contrast to this turgid jargon, the clear prose of Lord Laming’s report into the death in 2000 of Victoria Climbié stated: “The problem is less about the ability of staff to read and understand guidelines, and more about the huge and dense nature of the material provided for them. The test is simply one of ensuring the material actually helps staff do their job.”
I would urge anyone interested to study the torrent of government guidelines since Victoria’s tragic death. If the material was “huge and dense” then, it is immeasurably more so now.

If the experts cannot understand it, what hope for the layman?

The law must be clear, precise, consistent, and unambiguous. It should not be used to “send a message”.

The perceived rights and wrongs (morally) of the sex trade are neither here nor there. The question is how best to get help and assistance to the most vulnerable street sex workers. I really can’t see how people fail to grasp that you can’t help people you can’t see, and that any criminalisation of the sex trade – whether the letter of the law applies to “seller” or “buyer” of sex – will only serve to drive the street sex workers themselves further underground.

It may leave a bad taste in some people’s mouths, but legalisation really is the only way to help.

So, against a background of unenforceable legislation, the government introduce new legislation that will potentially criminalise millions who will be entirely unable to determine if and when they are breaking the law. This is quite impossible to enforce and is therefore bad law.

It’s only purpose is to placate frustrated social engineers.

Symbols should be left to the arts world where ambiguity and paradox are a plus, not the law courts, which demand clarity, precision and consistancy.

Agreed, however it doesn’t always work out as clearcut as you think, especially if you know someone in the CPS or the police who have to bring forward the charges or make a case for prosecuting. I’m not passing judgement on the merits of this case, however I know from long conversations with someone at the CPS that many times the laws against forced marriage (well, there wasn’t an actual law but there was existing legislation around it) was sometimes a bit ambiguous, so even if the police wanted to prosecute, the CPS might decide that the law wasn’t clear enough and they’d reject the case. This happens with a lot of domestic violence stuff. Which is why I came back with the view that much as we think laws are tightly understood instruments, they’re actually very ambiguous and fuzzy in reality – so sometimes symbolic laws have an impact because they send a clear signal to prosecutors.

Laws should not be used for sodding statement making. If you wish to make a statement then get up and talk, don’t go debasing the legal system with idiotic legislation.

It is a good rule of thumb that if the offence being brought into law is one of strict liability then it’s a very bad idea that will lead to injustice. There should at least be a defence that the purchaser of the sex, (not always a bloke although far more usual to be), had an honest and reasonable belief that the vendor was acting from their own volition.

Finally, prostitution is one of those very difficult problems where there probably isn’t an ideal solution to find. I can’t see that a legalised regulated environment would cause more damage and it does offer some hope of improving the lives of those working as prostitutes. Further legislation against prostitutes or their clients is likely to make things even worse.

Anyone with a magical solution speak now etc.

Really? You think that someone else should potentially have their life ruined for paying for sex with someone with whom they’ve no idea might be “controlled”? This law is, as Unity has argued, one of the worst and potentially most destructive which Labour have come up with, and which unlike the “extreme pornography” law which came in today more likely to have significant police resources allocated to it.

Whoever said the bit about it not being too difficult to get someone to sleep with you also perhaps needs to look a little deeper into it; those who can’t get laid probably aren’t going to use sex workers, either though.

Yup the police are alerted to roughly 2% of trafficked women by punters.

After they’ve raped them, of course…

Punters do, currently, contact the police in such situations because they know that there are criminals but they aren’t them…..

If you really want to see a reduction in prostitution bring back an economy where people actually make things, pay them a decent wage and decriminalise drugs.

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/01/11/the-misogyny-of-new-labour/

you really gotta see these clowns in context.

I disagree strongly – have said it before but might as well carp on.

Making any aspect of the sex trade illegal will push it even further underground. Do you really think this puts the most vulnerable women in a position to utilise the law? How exactly do you see this working – will johns only choose women who show them an ‘I ain’t being pimped?’ badge? Good Lord. Why not put women in a position where they are protected by the law and comfortable in accessing all aspects of it?

And to think that Labour has done this not to protect women, but to try and scrap up a few more middle of the road voters. I really like your work, Laurie, but I kind of wonder where the feminism is going on this one. Step back from the Labor party for God’s sake, and see them for the prissy, give-me-a-conservative-voter regulators that they are – didn’t you used to take the pro-legalising view on this topic?

Blah.

given that’s changed a hell of a lot – certainly in this country anyway – hence my question. i’m trying to understand the drivers – a lot of people claim its purely ‘biological’ but we know what drives us about sex, is rarely just ‘biological’ – it ain’t that simple. what psychological aspects are involved in sex with someone for money – given that (i’m assuming) most people can prob. have sex for free, with a certain amount of effort. Of course it could be something like, well i haven’t the time and effort and i want it NOW. but that’s what i’m asking. seeing as most people DO NOT admit paying for sex, i actually have no idea.

and there’s another thing – ok now people might not be wanting to admit it – but before, when they were in the clear – it was hardly the au fait thing to do to admit paying for sex? Why not?

but yes, its about time something was done about the ridiculous disparity in ‘the prostitute is doing something illegal, but the other person isn’t’.

and overall, the ‘market’ isn’t going anywhere till we understand it better.

It’s not all that long ago that it was indeed very difficult to do that if you were not married to the person in question. A couple of generations or so. And I think it’s true that prostitution has fallen since those days.

So that is part, but not all of the explanation for prostitution’s existence. That it still persists when it isn’t that hard means to me that there’s is indeed some other explanation necessary.

“on the men who buy sex without a thought for the consequences. On the men who consume others’ bodies for their own pleasure, who don’t care where it comes from as long as they come.”

well i’ve been asking this for a long time because i can’t see what pleasure anyone [normal] would get from having sex [read mechanical to-ing and fro-ing ] when you know they don’t fancy you and they’re doing it cos they have to. Clearly its not doing your ego any favours – so what is it? I don’t think we’ll get to the bottom of all this till we understand the demand. i’ve always thought [unless you're a total weirdo freakout] and perhaps even then, it’s not that hard to get someone to sleep with you for free, i mean they might be drunk or something, and not really fancy you in the daylight, but hey…

is it just knowing you’re forcing someone to do something they don’t want to?

Can anyone enlighten me?

By making sex with women forced into prostitution a strict liability offence – one where it doesn’t matter if you thought or hoped she wasn’t a sex slave – this law might make prostitution what it so desperately needs to be: a seller’s market.

This, of course, will entirely depend on whether or not a court will accept that an individual took steps to ascertain both consent and the ‘untrafficked’ status of the prostitute as a legitimate defence, or whether he will be held liable because (for whatever reason) the woman lied. (Your statement ‘If you’re worried that you might sleep with a sex slave by accident – you may want to look again at how and where and why you buy sex’ addresses this, but only in conceding that either the legislation was deliberately – and badly? – worded to ‘send a message’, rather than be effective, or that ‘vetting’ sex workers will become part of the commercial exchange.)

PS – you missed out two other examples of ‘whataboutery’:

- If you think the only reason men pay for sex is because they’re sad, ugly losers who hate women and want to abuse them, kill them, chop them up into pieces, and stuff them into Lidl shopping bags…then you have a very narrow view of heterosexual male desire (or you watch too much Lynda La Plante)

- If you think men always behave like perfect gentlemen when they pay for sex, and that men who are fucked up, misogynist, violent, or who like to pick on someone vulnerable to vent their hatred or their frustrations don’t visit prostitutes…I’d call you naive.

There is no single figure of ‘The Prostitute’, – and no single universal type of ‘punter’ either: it’s good that (most of) your list made that clear.

xD.