The Anglican Bishop of Chester has supported the Government’s move to make it illegal for people to pay to use trafficked prostitutes.Proposals in the Policing and Crime Bill would making it a criminal offence for a person to promise to pay a prostitute when a third party has used force, deception or threats to encourage the prostitute to provide sexual services.
The plans came under fire in the House of Lords from both main opposition parties and cross-bench peers including Lord Lloyd of Berwick, a retired Law Lord.
If the provision becomes law, it will make the matter a criminal offence even if the person did not know, or had no reason to know, that the prostitute they were using had been the subject of force.
Lord Lloyd argued against the “strict liability” nature of the offence and said it would be “obviously unjust” to convict a defendant who had no means of knowing he was using a “controlled prostitute”.
But Bishop Peter Forster argued that the offence was only a “semi-strict liability” as “the man has chosen to pay for sex” and was therefore not “innocently caught up”.
He added: “I would not want to say that we presume the guilt of any man who pays for sex but any person paying for sex needs to take extreme care to make sure that they are not complicit in the exploitative activities to which we have referred.”
Bishop Forster said there had been an “inexorable growth in prostitution in our country, for which the figures are alarming”.
“As I understand it, about 80 per cent of active prostitutes in London come from abroad,” he added.
“Not all of them are trafficked, of course, but a significant proportion are.
“I approach this matter not on the basis of a moral view that I have but simply on the basis of how you protect women in our society. A key issue is how we frame the law around prostitution to give the maximum protection to women in our society.”
He told peers: “The issue turns on whether we need a whole culture shift in the area of prostitution. I think that the Government take the view that we do.
“There is a growth in prostitution and those who are engaged in it are now increasingly exploited in the most dreadful way.
“In those circumstances, I think that the Government are right to say that something has to be done—something which targets the worst examples and aims to achieve a culture shift.”
He said he admired the Government’s “courage for taking this matter on” and said that the measure without the strict liability provision would be “a dead duck”.
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