Session 2024-25
Crime and Policing Bill
Written evidence submitted by Women at The Well (CPB22)
Registered Charity No: 1118613
Written Evidence: Submitted to the House of Commons Public Bill Committee re Crime and Policing Bill
Executive summary
1. We are a small, women-only service in London delivering specialist support for women facing a wide range of disadvantages, including those who have been or are at risk of sexual exploitation.
2. We warmly welcome the commitment in the Crime and Policing Bill currently before Parliament to criminalise ‘cuckooing’, a nasty and extremely harmful practice which our caseworkers encounter every day of the working week, and which does serious harm to women who have often already long struggled to secure safe housing before their properties are viciously taken over. We work closely with local Police and housing to try to address this but have heard repeatedly from those agencies how they do not have enough powers to protect and prevent.
3. We also welcome the use of the Bill to implement some IICSA recommendations because a high proportion of the women we work with are survivors of sexual abuse in childhood, an issue which continues to have considerable impunity despite its lifelong consequences for victims.
4. We urge Members to support amendments NC1, NC2, NC3 and NC4, which relate to the law around commercialised sexual exploitation and trafficking. The ‘laissez-faire’ and out of date legal and policy approaches to most aspects of prostitution in England and Wales have left women who sell sex facing criminalisation; have permitted the stealthy growth of ‘pimping websites’ with hardly any attention to the serious harm they clearly potentially enable; and represent an indifference to the problematic demand to be able to pay for sex and how it is this that disproportionately threatens harm to women who are already disadvantaged.
5. We recognise and applaud the Government’s ambitious aim to halve VAWG in a decade. Action to tackle the specific harms experienced by the group of women who are serially and multiply offended against throughout their lives needs to be at the heart of this. As well as changes in criminal law related to cuckooing, child sexual abuse and commercialised sexual exploitation, it is imperative that this is matched by policy to tackle women’s persistent economic inequality, real commitments to safe and secure housing for all, and action on poverty and destitution in our communities. Women’s safety and equality must always be considered ahead of their immigration status. We need radical reform in social care and the family courts where women who have experienced abuse are often subject to further punitive measures in relation to their children, and we need adequate, sustainable funding for specialist support services in the community. Specifically, responding to the harms of prostitution and sexual exploitation should be recognised as part of this necessary provision.
About Women at the Well
6. Women at The Well is a small, women-only support service working out of the King’s Cross area of central London and across the capital since 2007. We run a no-appointment, daily drop-in centre for women in King’s Cross who face a lot of disadvantages including homelessness, addictions, mental health issues, histories of abuse and destitution. Many have been in the care system; some have been in prison. Our small team of outreach workers also meet women facing these problems across many London boroughs. We have a specialism in supporting women in prostitution and/or subjected to other forms of sexual exploitation. Last year there were more than 2,000 visits to our drop-in centre and we did specialist, tailored longer term advocacy and support with more than 200 women.
7. We are a voluntary organization with funding from mainly non-statutory sources and as such we offer support with few conditions and, crucially, without time limits. We take referrals from many other agencies and self-referrals. Many women come to us by word of mouth. We are currently working with women experiencing a wide range of sexually exploitative practices, including: women engaged in street prostitution in several London neighbourhoods; women engaged in ‘survival sex’ where sexual acts are ‘exchanged’ for drugs, basic material needs and safety; women who have been trafficked and sexually exploited; women experiencing the forced occupation (‘cuckooing’) of their flats for exploitative purposes (eg holding drugs and weapons) and where sexual coercion can feature; women who are being controlled while involved in begging, drug runs and shop-lifting.
Amendment NC1
8. Amendment NC1, which has been tabled by Tonia Antoniazzi MP, would make it an offence to enable or profit from the prostitution of another person and clarify that this applies both on and offline. This would bring the controls we expect against the advertising and facilitating of prostitution in the offline world into parity in the online world.
9. As in many other areas of life, the development of online means of advertising so-called sexual services has rapidly changed the nature and reach of this ‘market’ and with very little scrutiny or curiosity from either law enforcement or wider society as to the consequences of this. The leading ‘pimping websites’ have worked hard to become market leaders, and on promotion of their activity as business the same as any other, but the potential for harm which they present is obvious and is not comparable to the brokering of any other ‘service’. The sites are an ideal place to advertise people, mainly women, who are being controlled, women who have been trafficked, women who will be moved around, women who do not consent to the list of ‘services’ they are said to be available for, women who are not the age or ethnicity they are implied to be, and much more. The sites are ideal for advertising and controlling multiple women across locations, and for receiving payment easily, with little risk to those organising and exploiting others. The owners of the sites have neither a real interest in nor a real ability to detect exploitation, control or trafficking.
10. For ‘sex buyers’, the sites make commercialised sexual exploitation very easy to access, easy for other related businesses to link to and integrate with, and are likely to be further normalising and minimising the seriousness and potential harms of this ‘trade’. This social and cultural consequence of the operation of these sites is important. The way women are described and marketed on the sites, the way women are racialized in the listings, and the imagery used all matter at a time when we are confronting the reality of rampant online misogyny and the influence of identified misogynistic influencers on boys and young men.
11. There are of course important questions to be discussed about women’s safety, how harm can be reduced for women already at risk and engaged in the sale of sex, and the impact of changing the law in this area. But it is time to examine the unique nature of these websites and the inherent risk of harm they present.
Amendment NC2
12. This amendment, also tabled by Tonia Antoniazzi MP, would make it an offence to pay for sex and as such goes to the heart of the key driver of demand for commercialised sexual exploitation.
13. This measure is radical. It dares to take responsibility for the harms that ensue from commercialised sexual exploitation back to the source: the small minority of men whose sense of entitlement to pay for sex without consequences creates the demand for this trade. This demand has never been matched by any truly ‘willing’ supply, and leads to the trafficking and control of mainly women on a large scale and very grave human rights violations in communities all over our country. Measures to control and deter demand for commercial sexual exploitation are the right place to redesign policy and law in this whole area.
14. In more than two decades work with women who have been exploited in prostitution, we have seen that women who come to be exploited are disproportionately from backgrounds where there has already been experience of VAWG, and where there are significant and multiple disadvantages. It is ironic that studies repeatedly show that the one in ten men who pay for sex are also not ‘average’ men but rather a subset of men who hold the most sexist and misogynistic attitudes towards women (eg Melissa Farley et al, 2022). A ‘laissez-faire’ approach to this practice is wrong. A society which is aiming to halve VAWG will look at the life trajectories of women who experience abuse serially and from multiple men in childhood and as adults, and will act to disrupt the potential for sexual exploitation in girls’ and women’s lives.
15. T he example of other countries who ha ve adopted law which criminalises the purchase rather than the sale of sex, including France, Sweden and Ireland , shows that such law reform is a vital early step on this road. It is a normative change which spotlights the issues and pushes necessary public conversation about who is involved, who get s harm ed and what the act of seeking to pay for sex means in the context of men’s and women’s equality. In Sweden, where this legal model has existed for many years, public attitu des are said to be less tolerant of sex buying, and traffickers are reported to find the country a poor destination.
Amendment NC3
16. This amendment, also tabled by Tonia Antoniazzi MP, would repeal the offence of soliciting, an offence which women in prostitution have long been charged, convicted and sanctioned for.
17. Sanctioning women for offences related to being in prostitution can only exacerbate their situations, from generating a need to earn more money to pay fines to having a conviction which prevents them entering some kinds of employment. We have worked with women in exactly this position and who experience additional harm in being made the responsible person by the law for an offence related to a prostitution transaction. It is also utterly symbolic of patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes towards women as needing to be problematised, stigmatised and shamed for their role in activity driven by women’s inequality and some men’s sense of entitlement.
Amendment NC4
18. This amendment, tabled by Carolyn Harris MP, simply amends the definition of trafficking in line with internationally agreed definitions. It removes the requirement for a victim to have travelled as part of the exploitation.
Thank you for reading our Submission.
28 March 2025