Jailing prostitutes helps no one

Jailing prostitutes helps no one in the The Observer August 12
"The Criminal Justice Bill that will go before Parliament when it reconvenes threatens to turn the clock back. It will give magistrates the power to jail prostitutes for three days if they fail to attend mandatory counselling. Encouraging rehabilitation is admirable, but to work, it requires real resources, in particular, treatment for drug addiction....Using the threat of prison as an incentive undermines good intentions. Jail won't cure drug addiction and it certainly won't give women a route out of prostitution."

Prostitution in Sweden is technically illegal, since it is a crime to purchase the service. Sweden considers prostitution a form of violence against women so the crime does not lie in the prostitute selling sexual services, but in the customer's buying of such services.

"It often takes many years after a law is enacted until the norm expressed in that particular law is firmly inscribed in a society. The Law in Sweden has been in effect for 5 years. During that time, street prostitution has declined in all parts of the country,and the majority of the prostitution buyers have disappeared. Service providers and the police maintain that the law also functions as a deterrent for men who use women in brothels, at porn clubs,and through escort agencies."
From: The Swedish Law That Prohibits the Purchase of Sexual Services Best Practices for Prevention of Prostitution and Trafficking in Human Beings GUNILLA EKBERG Ministry of Industry, Employment, and Communications

Quite right so why aren't we looking and learning from Sweden - best practise and what works?
From http://www.justicewomen.com/cj_sweden.html
In just five years Sweden dramatically reduced the number of its women in prostitution. In the capital city of Stockholm the number of women in street prostitution has been reduced by two thirds, and the number of johns has been reduced by 80%. There are other major Swedish cities where street prostitution has all but disappeared. Gone too, for the most part, are the renowned Swedish brothels and massage parlors which proliferated during the last three decades of the twentieth century when prostitution in Sweden was legal.In addition, the number of foreign women now being trafficked into Sweden for sex is nil.

How did this happen? Sweden's Groundbreaking 1999 Legislation

In 1999, after years of research and study, Sweden passed legislation that a) criminalizes the buying of sex, and b) decriminalizes the selling of sex. The novel rationale behind this legislation is clearly stated in the government's literature on the law:

"In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant social problem... gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them."

In order to see prostitutes as victims of male coercion and violence it requires that a government first switch from seeing prostitution from the male point of view to the female point of view. And most, if not virtually all, countries of the world still see prostitution and every other issue from a predominantly male point of view.

Legalised prostitution doesn't work. At the end of the 1990s, while Germany as well as Belgium and the Netherlands legalised prostitution, Sweden adopted a "hard" line and made the purchase of sex a punishable offence. Nowadays Sweden is regarded as a shining example, the newspaper writes. "There are around 400,000 prostitutes in Germany today. Their legalisation was intended to combat discrimination, however so far there has been no major improvement in their situation.