Dear Friends:
Here is some news to lift the spirits. Government leaders in the UK are proposing a ban on massage parlor and escort agency advertisements!!! If this measure passes it would be a huge success for the anti-sex trafficking movement. It's also an idea that should be replicated elsewhere.
Abolition!
Lisa
From The Sunday Times
February 14, 2010
Labour to ban massage parlour adverts in newspapers
Marie Woolf, Whitehall Editor
Advertisements for massage parlours and escort agencies are to be banned in a government assault on the sex industry.
Ministers plan to “disrupt” the sex industry by banning newspaper advertisements for prostitutes and brothels in a new law put forward in Labour’s election manifesto.
Failure to comply with the law could carry a £10,000 fine.
Ministers are concerned that many of the ads offer women who are the victims of trafficking and have been forced into prostitution. The clampdown is being led by Vera Baird, the solicitor-general, and Harriet Harman, the equality minister, who has said that the demand for trafficked women must be stemmed to stop “teenage girls being bought and sold by criminal gangs”.
They are concerned that a request to remove the adverts has had only partial success. Although The Newspaper Society succeeded in persuading some newspaper groups to stop carrying them, ministers are concerned that many others have failed to do so.
A 2008 survey of London’s sex industry that was commissioned by Poppy Project, a government-funded group that helps trafficked women, estimated that the 921 brothels it examined made at least £86m a year through their newspaper ads alone.
The Crown Prosecution Service has already studied a similar law in Ireland and concluded that it would work in the UK.
The new law would also inform publishers which kind of ads will be banned by defining, for example, the difference between a massage parlour which is actually a brothel and spas offering therapeutic massages. Sex phone lines, carried in many tabloid newspapers, would not be caught by the law unless they are a front for arranging prostitution.
It would also make it a criminal offence to print or distribute telephone-box cards advertising prostitutes. Under the current law, it is an offence only to be caught in the act of posting such a card.
Baird said: “It is now appropriate to move against people who make money from advertising prostitutes. The Newspaper Society tightened its guidance on taking such ads but there is still a market that we now have to look to legislation to disrupt.”
Here is some news to lift the spirits. Government leaders in the UK are proposing a ban on massage parlor and escort agency advertisements!!! If this measure passes it would be a huge success for the anti-sex trafficking movement. It's also an idea that should be replicated elsewhere.
Abolition!
Lisa
From The Sunday Times
February 14, 2010
Labour to ban massage parlour adverts in newspapers
Marie Woolf, Whitehall Editor
Advertisements for massage parlours and escort agencies are to be banned in a government assault on the sex industry.
Ministers plan to “disrupt” the sex industry by banning newspaper advertisements for prostitutes and brothels in a new law put forward in Labour’s election manifesto.
Failure to comply with the law could carry a £10,000 fine.
Ministers are concerned that many of the ads offer women who are the victims of trafficking and have been forced into prostitution. The clampdown is being led by Vera Baird, the solicitor-general, and Harriet Harman, the equality minister, who has said that the demand for trafficked women must be stemmed to stop “teenage girls being bought and sold by criminal gangs”.
They are concerned that a request to remove the adverts has had only partial success. Although The Newspaper Society succeeded in persuading some newspaper groups to stop carrying them, ministers are concerned that many others have failed to do so.
A 2008 survey of London’s sex industry that was commissioned by Poppy Project, a government-funded group that helps trafficked women, estimated that the 921 brothels it examined made at least £86m a year through their newspaper ads alone.
The Crown Prosecution Service has already studied a similar law in Ireland and concluded that it would work in the UK.
The new law would also inform publishers which kind of ads will be banned by defining, for example, the difference between a massage parlour which is actually a brothel and spas offering therapeutic massages. Sex phone lines, carried in many tabloid newspapers, would not be caught by the law unless they are a front for arranging prostitution.
It would also make it a criminal offence to print or distribute telephone-box cards advertising prostitutes. Under the current law, it is an offence only to be caught in the act of posting such a card.
Baird said: “It is now appropriate to move against people who make money from advertising prostitutes. The Newspaper Society tightened its guidance on taking such ads but there is still a market that we now have to look to legislation to disrupt.”
No comments:
Post a Comment