Julie Bindel points out the conflict of interest problem with Keith Vaz:

In July this year, a UK Home Affairs Committee published an interim report on prostitution, recommending the decriminalisation of the sex trade.

It also made clear that the committee members, chaired by Keith Vaz MP, were unlikely to recommend introducing a law to criminalise those who pay for sex, stating that the committee was, “not yet persuaded that the sex buyer law is effective in reducing, rather than simply displacing, demand for prostitution, or in helping the police to tackle the crime and exploitation associated with the sex industry.”

And who was the chair of that committee? Keith Vaz, sex buyer.

Now it is alleged that Vaz is a sex buyer, we most certainly should be questioning the validity of that enquiry. An interim report that more-or-less recommends full decriminalisation of the sex trade should be declared null and void, bearing in mind that its chair appears to have vested interest in preventing the criminalisation of punters.

Julie is writing a book on the global sex trade.

During my research I have heard of the best and worst ways in which governments tackle this dangerous industry.

In the US state of Hawaii last week, a violent pimp had his conviction for pimping and carrying out a violent assault on one of the women he was controlling overturned because the prosecutor said, in her closing speech, that the victim was probably seen as ‘just a prostitute’ by the court, when in fact she is ‘somebody’s mother, somebody’s sister, and a woman’.

Justin McKinley, who had been convicted in January 2015 of pimping and sentenced to 20 years in prison, was seen on video beating a woman in a hotel room. The victim had testified that she didn’t want to be in prostitution anymore, and told the prosecutor that McKinley had beaten her for refusing to answer telephone calls from prospective punters.

The Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals ruled that the prosecutor’s comment was not a legitimate area of inquiry and “could have inflamed the jury”. How any court could consider evidence that a victim of a brutal crime is a human being ‘inflammatory’ is beyond me. Perhaps it is because so often, the women in prostitution are considered less than human, and therefore treated as such.

While the punters are considered fully human and tragic victims of something something feminism.