Sir, The Home Office consultation paper Paying the Price, published in July 2004, reports that: “Prostitution may be driven by economic necessity.” It also reports “survival to be the overriding motivation” and that 74 per cent of street sex workers “cited the need to pay household expenses and support their children”. The lack of money to live a healthy life and participate as citizens in the UK forces choices women would rather not consider. Survival is a powerful motivator.

Buying the things that most people consider necessary is impossible at the lowest levels of income in the UK economy without deciding to go into debt, shoplifting, bending the benefit rules, carrying drugs or, for some, entering prostitution.

At Christmas some credit companies will be lending £1,000 with £700 interest repayable to women wanting to do the best for their children but finding it impossible on benefits, which are below the Government’s poverty thresholds. The best the Government could do about that was to invent another fast-track tribunal to examine cases of unfairness, to which access is near impossible for the majority.

All the political parties have failed fully to address such poverty in the fourth largest economy in the world.

THE REV PAUL NICOLSON
Chairman
Zacchaeus 2000 Trust

Sir, The problem is simple, but requires money and political will.

The key is to tackle drugs (intimately linked to prostitution). Pursue drug dealers while providing rehab and some form of “social employment” for those coming off drugs and out of prostitution. Increase coastguard and customs personnel to ensure that being caught drug running is more than a theoretical risk, expand the Royal Navy and anti-drug intelligence forces to ensure that we are interdicting this stuff at a distance. That in itself would deal a serious blow to prostitution, organised crime, gun crime and most of our other social ills.

The very last thing we do is show more tolerance, more looking people in the eye and saying “the liberal Establishment has decreed that it is fine for you and your life to sink into a dark place because you are too hard to deal with, and we can play at being progressive by selling you down the river”.

G. FINCHAM
Norwich

Sir, We aren’t responsible for prostitutes’ choice of work or their drug habits but we are responsible for their Dickensian working conditions. As long as we criminalise the women who solicit, we force them to work on dark lonely streets late at night. Most prostitutes who have been attacked or raped don’t, for obvious reasons, report their crime. It is not until they are murdered that the crimes become visible.

We treat prostitutes as the problem and our solution is to serve ASBOs, which force them to work out of their area or lock them up if they breach their orders. It’s time we accept that prostitution is part of our society. We don’t have to advocate it as a career option for our daughters, but we must stop demonising the women before more are attacked, raped and murdered.

VADA WINTERS
London NW6

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