The Anglican Bishop of Portsmouth has questioned the potential effectiveness of Government proposals to tighten the law on prostitution.Under planned changes, people who pay for sex where the person who is paid is controlled for gain would be committing a criminal offence.
Bishop Stevenson said in the House of Lords: “Like many measures in the field of prostitution, this is a worthy intention but one that gives rise to problems of enforcement.
“I do not accept the argument that it is wrong in principle to penalise in law payment for sex, but I wonder whether the law can discriminate between tolerable and intolerable transactions as finely as this proposal suggests.
“Can it be proved either that the person paid is being controlled or that the client has knowingly or culpably taken advantage of a victim of trafficking?
“It is reported that a similar law in Finland has been singularly ineffective, and many are pressing for the adoption of the Swedish law that applies to all payments regardless of the circumstances.”
In the debate on the Queen’s Speech he also welcomed the Government’s intention to have “a coherent and effective strategy on immigration” but called for a “generous” approach.
He told peers: “The notion of balanced migration, which is being pressed on the Government, although I hope will never become government policy, is questionable in practice.
“If we cannot regulate emigration, how can we administer a pattern of flows that guarantees the maintenance of an appropriate balance of skills?
“Balanced migration may also be misconceived in principle. Account must be taken of the social and economic costs and benefits of immigration, but why should we conclude that a static population is optimal, whether set at 65 million or 70 million?
“The danger is that such an ideal plays on fear of ‘strangers’ and reduces the value of people to their short-term economic contribution. It may also fail to do justice to the needs of asylum-seekers, as distinct from economic migrants.”
He said that to restrict the right to stay to “our minimum obligations under international refugee conventions and our opportunity for short-term economic enrichment would be to close our eyes to migrations that result from violent displacement and acute suffering, and sometimes stem from our own economic and foreign policies.”
Bishop Stevenson added: “We should not forget that the burden of accepting refugees is commonly borne on a large scale by societies much poorer than our own. Let us indeed have workable border controls, but let us also set the criteria of entry realistically, justly and generously.”
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(Source: RI)