If paying for sex is wrong in Haiti, why do we still tolerate it in the UK?

Amid anger at Oxfam, where are the voices of those who turn a blind eye to exploited women at home?

Woman dressed as a sex worker standing against a lamppost. ‘Do you mean to say I can’t buy entry to a poorer woman’s body? What, not even in Leeds?’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Finally, something on which we can agree: charity officials ought not to buy sex. No one, so far, seems prominently to have argued, of the Oxfam employees’ misconduct in Haiti and Liberia, that, providing their female purchases were adult, and not coerced, then their prostitution should rightly be called sex work, that is: a perfectly dignified transaction, from which both sides – say, impoverished survivors of a disaster and benevolent male humanitarians – stood to benefit.

We have yet, admittedly, to hear from Amnesty International, the human rights NGO, which now doubles as the world’s leading advocate of legalised prostitution. In 2015, a year that will forever be celebrated by its allies in the pimping and trafficking community, Amnesty committed to the decriminalisation of all aspects of “sex work that does not involve coercion, exploitation or abuse”.

So, hint for Roland Van Hauwermeiren, who is currently to be found in Ostend, explaining how incredibly easy it is for a vivacious Oxfam official to be mistaken for a sex-buyer: Amnesty is there for you. Equally, critics of Oxfam’s conduct, including Theresa May and Penny Mordaunt, can expect a reminder from Amnesty that it’s people “who live on the outskirts of society that are forced into sex work. It may be their only way to earn a living.” Once you see it that way, Oxfam workers who live, courtesy of charitable donations, in villas suited to large pool parties, can be seen as doing prostitute attendees a tremendous kindness. Inalienable human rights, meet trickle-down effect.

Defending Amnesty’s discovery that voluntary prostitution not merely exists, but in a form that is totally distinguishable, to all caring sex buyers, from the forced version, its head of policy wrote disdainfully, in 2015, of journalists and celebrities who believed the opposite or, as she put it, “climbed on the bandwagon”. The organisation has since ignored criticism from advocates of the well-established “Nordic Model” (penalising the sex buyer, not the prostitute) and, most importantly, from survivors of prostitution, contradicting pimps – from whom Amnesty did take advice – on the gendered, brutal inequality that is the sex industry.

Today, it’s Oxfam’s executive director, Winnie Byanyima, who seems most urgently in need of Amnesty’s counsel, to the effect that the prostitutes she refers to as “victims” were not necessarily “abused” by Oxfam employees, in being paid for sex, so much as looking after their families in a manner that leading human rights experts might consider, in the circumstances, exemplary.

Admittedly, a goatish Belgian might not have been the young Haitian women’s ideal, if any, choice of sexual partner, but that, from the Leeds “managed zone” to Germany’s mega brothels, is surely in the nature of the job.

As many of our punters would certainly add, based on their own triumphs, how do we know the disaster-based sex workers don’t love their work? And it would be wrong, here, not to mention Max Mosley, given his assurances that themed sex parties with paid participants can be agreeable social occasions. Should we, correctly, be identifying the current consternation about sex between affluent benefactors and marginalised locals, as a mass outbreak of whorephobia? True, prostitution is illegal in Haiti, but only because that country has chosen not to adopt Amnesty’s world decriminalisation proposal.

The Oxfam-related outrage must be baffling, also, to many British parliamentarians, for whom the option of reducing prostitution via the Nordic Model (also adopted in Northern Ireland, Canada and France; now backed by the SNP) is so much less appealing than the formal commodification of – overwhelmingly – women’s bodies.

Jeremy Corbyn, for example, supports decriminalisation because he wants to “do things a bit differently and in a bit more civilised way”. Around a pool, perhaps? At any rate, all that was missing from this progressive analysis, given the exploitation reported in the decriminalised German and Dutch industries, was an alternative scheme whereby sex trade “things” could be separated from violence, poverty, murder, pimping, drug abuse, stigma, illness, trafficking, misogyny and coercion – and the inevitable implication that all women, prostituted or not, have their price.

In a rare show of political harmony, Corbyn’s enthusiasm for a free market in women’s bodies, or, as it would be defined in Sweden, unfettered violence against women and girls, is shared by the Lib Dems, the Greens and by the Commons home affairs select committee. The latter, reconstituted under new leadership, has yet to withdraw a 2016 report on prostitution that urged immediate decriminalisation (without any measures to protect women from exploitation). Only after publication did it emerge that its chair, Keith Vaz, one of eight men on an 11-person committee, was himself a sex buyer. Mercifully for Vaz’s future in public service, the relevant purchases had occurred in Edgware, not Port-au-Prince.

Did attitudes change between Amnesty’s pimps’ charter, Vaz and Corbyn’s sex-trade normalising and Oxfam’s resounding sex-buyer shaming? Supposing an eagerness to attack Oxfam, or aid-giving in general, does not entirely account for the near universal condemnation, it could be, in the context of #MeToo, that prostitution is, indeed, the latest, if most extreme, example of women’s objectification to come up for reappraisal. It could even, reversing a UK drift towards a free market, be newly open to legislative review.

In fact, since Vaz, Corbyn, the Lib Dems (though maybe not Amnesty) would all, surely, accept that “no” is the correct answer to any of: “Do you mean to say I can’t trade knee-touching for promotion/rent her as a sporting accessory/use her body to sell roofs?”, how would they not understand that the same answer applies to the question: “Do you mean to say I can’t buy entry to a poorer woman’s body? What, not even in Leeds?” The home affairs committee needs to reconvene.

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