A new bill put forward by the independent MSP Ash Regan which would make buying sex a criminal offence is to be discussed in Scottish Parliament this month.
The Prostitution (Offences and Support) Bill would bring in the model followed by Nordic countries, which criminalises the buying of sex rather than the individual selling it. Writers Terri White and Kate Lister give their perspective on the effect of this approach.
In the Noughties, you’d have heard me chirp: “Women have the right to do whatever they choose with their bodies!”. In the 2010s, I’d be declaring: “Sex work is work!”.
Just another liberal, left-leaning, progressive young feminist riding the third wave like Zorro and calling for prostitution to be decriminalised. The exchange of sex for money in England and Wales was then and is now legal, but not so keeping a brothel, or soliciting or selling sex in public.
And in the 2020s? I’ve shed the sex-trade teachings of Pretty Woman’s perky prostitute Kit De Luca (“We say who, we say when, we say how much!”). Just in time to go 12 rounds on the recurring debate, kick-started in the dying days of 2025 when UK charities sent up a flare. They warned the country’s continuing hardship was driving more women into prostitution.
Some in the sex trade are repeating calls for decriminalisation for both “buyers” and “sellers”, arguing this would prevent the “industry” from being driven underground. Others have demanded legalisation, meaning regulation and state oversight, just like any other industry and job. (Taxes! Unions!)
The gist of their argument: it’s the world’s oldest profession – women will always sell sex, men will always buy it (and to be clear, it’s still predominantly those groups doing the buying and selling) but this way, women are safer, and their rights are protected.
Before I go any further, please allow me to call bullshit (any other group of people we’d be up for being bought and sold, or just women?) and push independent MSP Ash Regan’s private member’s bill your way, which is back in Scottish Parliament over the next few weeks, in which she proposes making buying sex alone a crime, and only punters criminals, which is known as the Nordic model. I’m a big fan.
First introduced in Sweden in 1999 and since adopted by Norway, Iceland, Canada, France and in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, it’s a model that refuses to accept and legitimise a system predicated on exploitative power structures and the pleasure and profit of men (not to mention the perpetual pain of women).
Eradication of the sex trade – its ultimate aim – is the only reasonable response when abuse is baked into that trade’s foundations. When there is no such thing as “safe” prostitution. Because, let’s be honest: there’s no such thing as “consensual” prostitution. It’s a violent act.
By decriminalising the sellers, women will no longer face fines (which push them into more paid-for sex), prison sentences, or a caution (which is on their record for 100 years). Instead the book is thrown at the buyers, suppressing demand and numbers of women pulled in.
The alternative we’re being sold is decriminalisation across the board, including for those exploiting women – giving these lads the thumbs up to buy sex, kerb-crawl, run a brothel, and pimp women.
The suggestion that this would make women safer is almost as la-la as the contention that without any criminalisation – and the corresponding stigma – there would be less violence in the sex trade.
And let’s talk about that violence. About the evidence given to a UK parliamentary committee in 2016: women in prostitution being 18 times more likely to be murdered; 74 per cent having experienced violence “from men who buy sex”; more than half reporting a rape or sexual assault.
It’s frankly obscene to point to criminalisation as the source of violence when it’s stitched into the “industry”, and when the men committing it are, you know, right there. According to campaigners, only one “prostituted woman” has been reported to be a victim of murder in Sweden since they introduced the Nordic model (and that wasn’t at the hands of a “client”) – while the Femicide Census said that two women “exploited through prostitution” in the UK were killed in 2022 alone by men paying for sex.
These men are the type of men that kill a partner or ex-partner every five days in this country. That have beaten, stalked, assaulted and raped women and girls with such regularly that it’s been proclaimed a national emergency.
Because, quite simply, they can. And because they want to. Because they believe our bodies are theirs to do with as they choose. Because they want to exercise total power, control and dominance over all of us.
But there is a message when some women can be bought: all women in society can be for sale. And if the only goods being flogged are our bodies, price becomes the point, not consent. In fact, consent doesn’t exist at all – not when money is more than compensation, it’s coercion. Erasing consent, erasing us.
This is the truth about prostitution, far away from today’s hyper-individualist, influencer-addled delusion that window-dresses objectification as empowerment. The reality: prostitutes in the UK are predominantly women in poverty, often single mothers, with most having experienced homelessness, addiction, mental ill-health, domestic and sexual abuse, a traumatic childhood.
These are the women in the majority. The women who are vulnerable, who are always at risk. The women who illustrate in hypercolour why and how economic desperation and entrenched inequality makes no choice in the sex trade free.
Who remind us why it’s a likely catastrophic time to consider decriminalising the too-often violent men who buy sex in our efforts to (rightly) decriminalise women forced to sell it. When we’re still drowning in the splash-back of austerity and the cost of living crisis; when modern slavery referrals, women and children in poverty and homelessness are all at record levels.
So, as 2026 begins, we look to the sky lit up by that flare, knowing that by the year’s end, more vulnerable women will have entered the sex trade. And it’s in their name I no longer chirp, but now call for its end.
Your next read
square FRANCES RYANAngry about Motability? Disabled people face a far bigger crisis
square DR RICHARD WOOD What Does Putin Do Next?I’m a psychologist – Putin’s childhood tells us what he does next
square SIMON KELNERI quietly agree with Trump on one thing
square LANA HEMPSALLMotability is a luxury that’s being abused
Hence then, the article about i supported decriminalising prostitution this is why i changed my mind was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( I supported decriminalising prostitution – this is why I changed my mind )
Also on site :
- UK to list 65-year-olds as reservists amid Russia threat claims – Telegraph
- Gaza plan phase two: US to discuss Hamas disarmament, Israeli withdrawal
- AI boom fuels fears of an industry bubble (VIDEO)