The “independent review” of the Holbeck Managed Approach (“MA”) to prostitution in Leeds has now been published, and what an unambitious, self-congratulatory exercise in carpet-brushing it is. Concluding that while the MA failed from its outset in 2014 until it was refreshed a bit in 2018, its most recent year demonstrates success, it recommends that the MA is retained and suggests that there is no other viable model.

Here are just a few of the issues with the report:

Is this some sort of joke? Women are not going to be made to feel safer by being made to engage in a propaganda exercise. The way to make women feel safer is for the area to be safer, by ending demand for commercial sex.

“Deliberate media use” - as opposed to the entirely accidental sort, we suppose - has unfortunately mentioned that there is a problem. The solution proposed by the report? Just don’t mention it!

There is “no other viable model” - which of them were considered? you might ask. The answer is that the Nordic Model was deemed to be “of limited value” and therefore disregarded, because “The buying and selling of sex is not illegal in the UK, whereas the soliciting for sex, use of coercion for sexual purposes, human slavery and people trafficking are.” It was therefore held by the authors of the paper that the Nordic Model couldn’t be replicated here as it was incompatible with UK law. This makes no sense. The MA is already incompatible with UK law, because soliciting for sex and kerb crawling, both tolerated under the MA, are illegal. There is no reason at all that the Nordic Model couldn’t be used as a reasonable comparator when it has already been successfully trialled in Ipswich.

This brings us to the next, fairly huge, problem. The authors don’t appear to know what the Nordic / Ipswich model actually is, viewing it exclusively as the criminalisation of sex buyers. It appears, they report breathlessly, that the Ipswich approach “was not simply about enforcement” - well no, it never was, and anybody authoring a paper about this subject should bloody well know this. It is a tripartite approach whereby the sale of sex is decriminalised, the purchase of it is criminalised, and most importantly, exit programmes are provided for those involved in prostitution. This last appears to have been news to the authors, who promptly dismiss the explanation provided by Ipswich of their exit strategies as a departure from the original model, when in fact it was central to it.

Secondly, but also important, the authors place weight on there already being a legal mechanism for the prosecution of those who purchase sex from a coerced woman or a child. This is true, at least on paper, but did they factor in to their assessment the realities of that situation? They didn’t even need to do their own FOI; it’s already been done, and here are the pitiful results:

2014 a bit dated? Don’t worry, there’s a more recent one which shows no prosecutions at all under s.53a for 2015 - 2018, and 8, 7, 11 and 6 for 2015, 16, 17 and 18 for s.47. In view of what we know about the internal trafficking of children from care homes, and international trafficking of women, these are absolutely wretched statistics, representing virtual impunity for those who purchase sex from coerced women and children. Nothing is said of the number of migrant women in the sex industry and there is no attention paid to whether trafficking or racism feature in the MA at all.

Speaking of coercion, the report highlights that residents are unhappy about drug paraphernalia associated with the MA, and that drug and alcohol dependency keep women in prostitution. Does this feature in the risk and harm analysis? Does it fuck. And yet the Palermo Protocol specifically recognises that in a trafficking context, the “giving of payments” or “abuse of a position of vulnerability” amounts to coercion. If women in the sex industry in Holbeck are there because of drug abuse (a position of vulnerability) then this needs to be viewed in the context of coercion, not of enthusiastic consent.

One of the worst features of the report is the treatment of the murder of Daria Pionko - a murder of a human person, a woman, killed by a violent man in a city which now promotes its tolerance of violence against women as a feature(1). No ink was expended in sympathy or mourning in this report; instead, her name appears twice, once as part of a timeline where her murder is said to have “thrust the MA and Holbeck into the media spotlight” and once as an “unanticipated event.” Unanticipated? UNANTICIPATED? It was HIGHLY FUCKING PREDICTABLE, because male violence against women in prostitution is a multi-century global pandemic that makes Covid-19 look like the chickenpox. The sheer nerve of suggesting that it was unanticipated when the data shows the risk is breathtaking.

The statistics are interesting regarding crime against women in prostitution. This table shows the number of crimes reported prior to and subsequent to the MA.

Reported crime has more than doubled against women in on-street prostitution and this is uncritically attributed to an increase in reporting rather than an increase in attacks, coyly bowdlerised as “incidents.” There is absolutely no evidence shown to support the working here. This is surprising given that the initiator of the MA has disowned it as a “mistake”.

More questions are raised than answered with another set of statistics. Have a look at these three tables.

Don’t be fooled by the apparent similarity between the number of warnings given to sex buyers (who, incidentally, get “sex buyer” named in quotes where sex workers do not) - the first table is twice as high as the second. Of the 55 men warned or arrested, all were because of not complying with the MA rules. Of the ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIVE warnings or cautions given to women, only six were for non compliance. This strongly suggests the continued over-policing of women and tolerance to men. Historic figures available for one year on the disparity between convictions for soliciting and convictions for kerb crawling in the UK show that there were 2,678 of the former to only 993 of the latter. Is the MA’s over representation of enforcement against women compared to men just more of the same old sexism? Did the authors consider or even notice it? Apparently not. And yet under the Nordic Model, the women would expressly be decriminalised rather than disproportionately targeted for enforcement.

Then we turn to the views of residents. Relatively few contributed - only 6% of eligible households - but those who did have a view felt strongly that the MA had made things worse, had failed to offer exit strategies or reduce on street prostitution, and had given Holbeck a bad reputation.

The authors recognised - no shit! - that women and children were those who felt least safe.

Their solution, as we saw above, was for those women simply to believe that Holbeck was safe by engaging in a propaganda exercise. Once women have believed another impossible thing before breakfast, no doubt they will indeed be safer. At this stage of reading the report I had to check that Prof. Pangloss was not named as an author.

Genuine positives are that those involved in prostitution have access to a Police Sex Work Liaison Officer and feel able to speak to the police. Support and exit strategies, such as those promoted by the Nordic Model, have been helpful. This is positive, but it does not follow that trialling decriminalisation of purchasing sex is therefore a wholesale positive. This is a feature which should be part of any model and is not exclusive to the MA. A major missing analytical strand from this report, and from the MA in general, is an analysis of why men should be entitled to pay for sexual consent, or the recognition of prostitution as a form of VAWG.

Councillors are as unimpressed as survivors:

Why should men expect sexual access to women whose options are limited by drug or alcohol dependency, poverty, or other positions of vulnerability? Why are Leeds not even considering the Ipswich Model when they have been expressly asked about it, including by FiLiA? (We received no reply.) Why didn’t the researchers appear to know that exit programmes are central to the Nordic / Ipswich model? And why, WHY, is “we don’t wanna do it” not the final word in a society which supposedly understands that “no means no”? The quote below is placed where it should have been in the report - as the last word in the conversation.

(1) The Crown Prosecution Service names and recognises prostitution in its VAWG strategy and prostitution is recognised by the UN as a form of violence against women.