The WA Parliament has passed new laws to legalise brothels and the purchase of sex. The government hopes to improve the welfare of prostitutes and to provide clarity to the police but experience shows this approach will backfire. Even though the bill has been given the go-ahead by the Upper House, we cannot give up on this matter. A foundation has been laid and this will be our stepping off point to see it overturned in the future. What has the WA government proposed? The Prostitution Amendment Bill 2007 seeks to legalise and regulate brothels. Brothel owners will be able to apply for a certificate to run a ‘sexual service business’ and to employ ‘sex workers.’ They will have to comply with certain regulations governing matters such as advertising, employment of over 18s only, the provision of free condoms and health information to clients and staff, and will face fines or imprisonment if they breach the terms of their certificate. People are banned from engaging in commercial sex if they have a prescribed infection, and this is punishable by fines for a first offence and imprisonment for subsequent offences. Sounds great, right? Surely if you do all that you end up with a nice, clean brothel (sorry, sexual service business) run by model employers who care about their staff’s health and wellbeing and provide good service to their clientele. Get real! What’s wrong with the idea? Experience shows that legalising brothels does not work. The government’s first aim is to improve the welfare of prostitutes (sorry, ‘sex workers’). But legalising brothels (sorry, ‘sexual service businesses’) doesn’t help women working in the sex industry. It just raises the status of pimps, madams and men who buy sex. Sanitising the terminology does not sanitise the industry. The first rule of business is that the customer is always right. Though the new bill contains many worthy statements about health information, condom use and the right of a prostitute to refuse to provide sex, the reality is that brothel owners will usually put their clients’ wishes before the welfare of their staff. After all, the client is the one with the money. This means that condom use will not be enforced if a man would rather not. And this puts the woman at high risk. Now, failure to use a condom would probably breach the law as those engaging in a ‘commercial sex act’ must take all reasonable steps to minimise the risk of spreading a sexually transmitted virus. But the police will not be in the bedroom to enforce the law, so how on earth will they know when it is being broken? The government’s second stated aim is to provide greater clarity to the police. Well, the WA Police Commissioner gets to do a lot more paperwork under this bill as s/he has to run checks on applicants for brothel licences. And the police can issue more fines for brothels that breach the licence terms (assuming they ever find out), which should provide a nice revenue stream for the government. The main problem for police will be the massive expansion in the legal and the illegal sex industry that will follow the legalisation of brothels. This was certainly true when similar legislation was passed in NSW and Victoria. The number of illegal brothels tripled and the police were not able to control it. Of course, such a popular and expanding industry needs many more staff to meet the demand. Most Australian women have too much self-respect to prostitute themselves meaning that there is a domestic skills shortage. The Chairmen and CEOs of WA’s Sexual Service Businesses (those nice people we used to call pimps and madams) will try an overseas recruitment strategy, but without the bother of all that paperwork to get a 457 visa…Human trafficking is so much easier. One of the ugliest effects of legalising brothels is the increase in trafficking of women from overseas into sexual slavery in Australia. In a year when many Australians are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, the WA Government has proposed legislation that would condemn many women to a life of sexual slavery. Are there better alternatives? Yes! If WA’s existing prostitution laws need improvement, then the Government should stop copying the failed ‘reforms’ of NSW and Victoria and instead learn from Sweden and Tasmania. The ‘Swedish Model’ offers a much better method of controlling prostitution. In the early 1990s, Sweden legalised its sex industry then struggled to control the dramatic increase in trafficking of women into the country’s brothels. By 1999, the Swedish government drastically altered its position. By recognising prostitution as sexual exploitation and making it an offence to buy sex, Sweden reduced the number of women involved in prostitution by 2/3 and reduced the number of men purchasing sex by 80%. The number of women trafficked into Sweden dropped to just 400, compared to nearly 17,000 in neighbouring Finland. This is a much, much better approach, which really does help women and provide clarity to the police. Tasmanian legislators also saw that women are worth more. In 2005, the Tasmanian government sought to legalise brothels but changed its position in the face of concerted community opposition and concern, as well as the harrowing accounts of former prostitutes. The Tasmanian government threw out its plans and instead introduced tougher penalties to combat prostitution. Rather than legalizing brothels, the WA government should be providing greater support for women so that they are not forced into prostitution in the first place. And it should be providing exit strategies for those women who are desperate to start a better life. Fire off a pollie mail now to insist that women are worth more. News flash - Watch the Prostitution Agenda DVD on YouTube In this short film, former prostitutes and academic researchers convincingly show that legalising brothels does nothing to help the women working in this brutal industry.