Visitors of U.K. Prostitutes Must Bring Crystal Ball

The U.K. government is threatening to clamp down on prostitution by making johns responsible for knowing whether the women they visit have in any way been trafficked or coerced. It doesn't take this BBC interviewer very long to cut to the foolishness of the plan:

I'm trying to just work this one through. A man approaches a prostitute. How can he possibly know whether she is being controlled or not?

The customer can't. He's going to have to take his chances, or decline to visit prostitutes at all. Either of which would suit Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who's been defending the plan. Under the Smith/Gordon Brown scenario, every john must understand that he's facing possible arrest (including a criminal record and a thousand-pound fine) literally every time he visits a "pimped" prostitute. In most cases, he won't be able to tell the difference. The constant law-enforcement threat, then, is a huge deterrent — which is, of course, the point of this ueber-moralistic campaign.

And for those who aren't deterred, they'll likely be forced to give big wads of cash to the government. Enough, in each case, for five or ten or twenty paid erotic encounters. Johns treated thusly will soon be suitably gunshy, not to mention seriously cash-strapped — another boot on the throat of the world's oldest profession.

The proposal is exactly similar to punishing regular shoppers for wittingly or unwittingly buying sweatshop or child-labor products. Chances are, customers concerned enough to ask a salesperson whence the product came and who made it won't get a truthful answer. And that wouldn't matter one whit in the eyes of the law; buying those 18-dollar made-in-China WalMart sneakers will brand you a criminal if it turns out that, unbeknownst to you, the upper soles were glued in by a 14-year-old girl in Chongqing.

This would be justice only in the eyes of the plentiful Labour kommissars and mandarins who are waging the U.K.'s current Cultural Revolution, aimed at re-educating non-party intellectuals and the dumb masses alike.

As a policy initiative, the Smith/Brown measure, ostensibly aimed at creating freedom (for "enslaved" women) is instead being used to generate precisely the opposite of liberty. The scheme isn't even especially veiled, is it? Even a BBC interviewer can see right through it.

Comments

[Mike]

not to mention the likelyhood that the 14-year-old girl in Chongqing who glued the soles on probably depends on the sweatshop job in order to avoid prostituting herself.