Over at Liberal Conspiracy this week, Jess McCabe has written an excellent piece on prostitution and the necessity to change perceptions around the world towards women. Unfortunately, while everyone could agree wholeheartedly on the issue of women's rights and the need to combat sex trafficking, the well used comments section ultimately divided people on the necessary measures needed to affect change most.

As I have previously written on this blog I can't bring myself to find the logical connection between a shifting of the legislation against prostitution, or indeed a further criminalising of the act, and the solutions that are required and desired by the majority of the free world. So what is it that I would suggest?

Firstly I would scrap talk of this "Swedish model" where women are no longer criminals for selling sex but anyone buying it from them is now outside of the law. Despite technicalities claimed to the contrary the effett of this can only be a criminalisation of the trade and as such a criminalisation by proxy of the seller. On one sense feminists can argue the woman has all the rights, but on the other they fail to deal with the issue that it is still criminals that control the business. There are benefits that Swedish reports touch on but there is a distinct lack of evidence about how much trafficking has actually decreased and how much it has just gone underground.

Patently I disagree with any wholesale criminalisation of the trade, as it cannot deal effectively with the issue of sex trafficking still being widely available given that illegal transactions for sex are the only option. What is clearly needed, though would never be considered by this government, is a way of freezing out the illegal trade while offering men and women the opportunity for a legal and largely hassle free avenue to pursue their desires with women that are supported and not coerced to be in the job.

I would like anyone to correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it there is 0% problem with sex trafficking in mainstream professional pornography, by which I mean production companies that churn out those DVDs and websites all year long. The reason I believe this is because there are stringent regulations on publishing pornography for sale like that. It is this kind of thinking that we need on prostitution.

It is time that brothels were legalised while street trade was completely criminalised. Street prostitution is a negative image for area's and is something that in our current culture causes distaste...we for better or worse live in a society where if it's not happening on our doorstep it is wholly more digestible. For the maximum safety of women the "call girl" trade should also be criminalised, though this may be a step too far against sex workers wishes. The effect of this would be to provide an avenue for men and women that wish to have sex in return for paying some money, while maintaining a greater degree of control over the situations sex workers get in to and therefore their personal safety.

But this wouldn't be enough, in places like New Zealand they have similar systems and still have problems. Organised crime and child prostitution is still and issue, but this is because the countries haven't gone far enough. They've made a statement but they've not followed it through. To actually start impacting on the sex trafficking trade and child prostitution legalised brothels need to be licensed, sex workers need to be registered, and they need to adhere to some basic legislation to ensure that the safety of the workers and their clients are as high as they can reasonably be.

With this situation we suddenly move away from current UK and Swedish models where the only option for people is to engage in an illegal trade on some level with women that may or may not wish to be there, and we start a relationship to change the culture of thinking about prostitution by saying to those willing to pay for sex; you can risk finding a street worker for whatever price that may be, with the health risks that come with it, or you can be fully legal with workers in a licensed brothel that are encouraged to have free regular check ups and are guaranteed to be women in it for their own reasons rather than because they have been tricked and abused in to the trade. Suddenly the options for sex traffickers under a much more regulated system get a lot slimmer

Of course as with there still being a problem in the larger scope of pornography, and in particular underground pornography rings, there will always be unethical businessmen and women that try to make their money with illegal sex trafficking, and one has to reluctantly accept the inevitability of some level of this happening. However with a system similar to that which I propose, giving legitimate workers no excuse to not be legal, and the current systems blurring the lines between abused and non-abused workers, I know which I would prefer when it comes to making it easy for law enforcement agencies to crack down own the despicable dark side of prostitution.