We thought you might be interested in our new petition calling for a ban on commercial sex websites.
Commercial sex websites are today’s red-light districts and mega-brothels. They have made buying women for sexual use and abuse easier than ever before. Men no longer have to get into their car and cruise the streets looking for a woman to buy or make their way to the local brothel in a side street in the city centre. Now they can simply browse an online catalogue of women and order one up to their flat or hotel room as if she were a pizza.
This has normalised prostitution and led to rapid expansion of the industry and many broken lives as girls and young women are brutalised within it – while society at large carries the bill.
Commercial sex websites currently operate freely in the UK. Far from using the law against these sites, the police have entered into partnership with them and have little or no interest in prosecuting the pimps and traffickers who freeload off the women advertised on these sites.
We are therefore calling for the introduction of new offences of (a) enabling or promoting, and (b) knowingly profiting from, the prostitution of another person, and that these are used proactively against those behind commercial sex websites, along with mechanisms for closing down or restricting access to websites that contravene this law, and for seizing their profits.
This needs to be combined with ring-fenced funding for services for women (and others) involved in prostitution that provide viable alternatives and genuine routes out of the industry. Any profits seized from the websites should be used to fund these services.