Joan Smith: Yes, it should be a crime to pay for sex

You've got that bloated post-Christmas feeling, brought on by too much food and too much time with your nearest and dearest. What to do? Some people go to the gym, some meet their mates and go to a football match, and some want nothing more than a bracing work-out with a teenage sex slave. Trafficked women report a surge in demand at this time of year as men go along to massage parlours and brothels advertised in local papers, drawn by the promise of a regular supply of fresh young girls from Thailand or Ukraine.

If they look under age, speak little English and seem scared, so what? It's their choice, men have to get sex somewhere and going on the game is a traditional way for girls without education or skills to make a bit of easy money. What sort of killjoy could possibly object to that? Only those bloody feminists, who've even managed to get themselves into the Government these days, but we all know they're female eunuchs who just want to stop blokes having a good time. I mean, Harriet Harman? Don't get me started.

I'm caricaturing, of course, but not by much. Next month, when MPs return from their Christmas holidays, they'll be asked to vote on an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which would give councils and police chiefs the power to ban men from paying for sex in designated areas. The idea is to extend action against kerb crawlers to brothels and massage parlours, which is where the majority of trafficked women are forced to "work" in this country; it's a British version of a Swedish law which came into effect nine years ago and has radically changed the way many people think about prostitution.

Like most radical proposals, it has polarised opinion, although the degree of personal invective against those of us who support it is an eye-opener. Actually, I can't help suspecting that some of the critics have a vested interest in maintaining a man's "right" to buy sex, or their responses wouldn't be quite so hysterical.

Their Pollyanna fantasies could not be more out of touch with the real world of prostitution and trafficking, two phenomena which are inextricably linked. Voluntary prostitution by which I mean that minority of women in the sex trade who go into it because they are poor, out of work and dependent on drugs is such an awful job that there are simply not enough women and girls to meet demand.

According to a study published four years ago in the Journal of Trauma Practice, 89 per cent of women in prostitution want to escape; a field study in nine countries showed that between 60 and 75 per cent of women in prostitution had been raped, between 70 and 95 per cent had been physically assaulted, and 68 per cent displayed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in the same range as combat veterans and victims of torture. Other research, this time from Canada, suggests that women in prostitution are 40 times more likely to be murdered than the rest of the female population.

Against this background, a lucrative opportunity has opened up for sex-traffickers to bring foreign girls and women to countries like the UK to satisfy growing demand. No one knows how many trafficked women are "working" in city centre and suburban brothels in this country, with estimates varying from 4,000 to 25,000. What is clear is that in most Western countries the sex trade is now dominated by foreign women, many of them tricked or coerced into sexual slavery. The men they are forced to service are not the classic shy loners beloved by pro-prostitution fantasists; research shows that most clients are sexually-active men aged between 30 and 55, married or co-habiting, whose attitudes to women are about as enlightened as your average Manchester United footballer.

They buy sex because they like variety, because they want sex acts they can't get from regular partners, and because they like verbally abusing or beating women; it is these men ordinary husbands and fathers who spent a fortune on presents for their wives and kids a couple of days ago who are the engine of the trade in trafficked women. The US State Department considerably understated the case when it suggested that where prostitution is legalised or tolerated, "there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims and nearly always an increase in the number of women and children trafficked into commercial sex slavery".

Amazingly, there is still no shortage of people arguing that the answer is legalisation. Here we enter another fantasy world, where all the problems associated with prostitution are about health and safety, and can be answered by setting up legal establishments where attractive young women with certificates of sexual health happily service polite clients (themselves free of STIs). There was a time when such arguments appealed to liberals like me, but that was before they were put into practice in several countries notably Germany, the Netherlands and some parts of Australia with disastrous consequences.

Legalising prostitution stimulates demand, encourages trafficking and promotes the existence of a parallel illegal industry where men can get unprotected or anal sex. In Victoria, which has a population of only 3.5 million, the number of legal brothels jumped from 40 to 94 in a 10-year period, and were easily outnumbered by unlicensed establishments. But the most astounding figures come from Germany, where legalisation has created a situation in which 1.2 mllion men pay for sex each day. An estimated 400,000 women are working in prostitution, 80 per cent of them foreign and a high proportion trafficked. During last year's football World Cup, many of them "worked" in narrow booths on motorways, forced to have sex with dozens of men each day.

In the nine years since Sweden made buying sex a criminal offence, there has been a drop in the number of women working as prostitutes and in trafficked women. Fewer than 600 women are trafficked into the country each year, compared with more than 10,000 in neighbouring Finland, and intercepts of telephone conversations between traffickers show that they're giving up on Sweden. At least 1,700 men have been charged with paying or trying to pay for sex, and the figure would have been much higher if the courts had been able to handle them.

It's a bold experiment, and the government is unashamed of the fact that the law is based on the notion that prostitution is an aspect of male violence towards women and children. I couldn't agree more, and I have a final thought for those who have steam coming out of their ears. If prostitution is so great, why don't you encourage your daughters to go and work in a brothel? Not to mention your sons.