Tim Barnett: Challenge of prostitution law is to minimise harm

COMMENT

It is now three months since the Prostitution Reform Bill passed its tense and memorable final reading in Parliament. Most of it became law three days after that. But, because it includes a certification scheme (for operators) and the abolition of the licensing system for massage parlours, the full law will not be in effect until the end of the year.

Fundamental law reform creates fascinating challenges for people and agencies. Under the old law, prostitution was governed by an odd mixture of criminal law, a fantastical concept of a massage parlour (which was in effect a state-endorsed front for prostitution) and a generous helping of police discretion.

At the same time, the Inland Revenue Department ran a special Wellington-based collections unit for sex workers, showing an impressive disregard for the criminality which generated the money.

To complete the surreal picture, the Ministry of Health supplied the Prostitutes Collective with condoms, the presence of which was used over the years by the police to prove that people were working in the sex industry.

Now much has changed and some, notably the Auckland City Council, seem to have but a limited understanding of their role in the new world of prostitution law.

At the heart of the Reform Act is the concept of harm minimisation. That means accepting the inevitability of prostitution, but not endorsing or morally approving of it. The systems and obligations in the new law are practical and enforceable, each designed to minimise a specific harm. That offers the best hope to marginalised sex workers.

Many agencies have responded well to this challenge. The Prostitutes Collective has received a stream of visitors from OSH, Labour and Health. Guidelines are being developed, and talk of raising standards of employment, health and safety has dominated the sex industry.

Potentially unsafe practices, such as the provision of human breast milk from a Taranaki brothel, are being dragged into the open. All this will take time to work through, but it is so obviously the right way to be moving.

Local bodies have specific responsibilities under the new law. Of the dozen harms identified and tackled in the bill, they deal with only two.

The first is the specific opportunity to ban offensive signage advertising prostitution services. That addresses the potential harm to the public through being offended by some of the images on display.

That new power would be hard to abuse, although clearly local bodies need to ensure some consistency between their approach to the sex industry and other in-your-face advertising.

The second local body responsibility is to develop an approach to the siting of brothels. (The act does not allow a local body to completely ban brothels, since that would cause harm to sex workers by forcing the industry underground.)

Present sex-on-site premises fall into three categories: licensed massage parlours, escort agencies and residential properties. Licensed massage parlours will already be located in appropriate areas (commercial or equivalent zoning, or in residential areas after a consultation and hearing process) unless the local body handled the consultation badly.

Escort agencies operate in commercial or residential areas, some almost identical to massage parlours, some low profile and unnoticed by neighbours. They operated outside the old law, and have challenging decisions to make under the new law.

In addition, there are workers, alone or in small groups, doing in-calls or out-calls from residential properties.

The key question to ask is: where is the harm?

I would not deny that there are potentially some harms involved in the matter of brothel location. But there are also real harms involved in too brutal an approach.

The nuisance caused by brothels is likely to be subtle; none of the places described above are likely to be sources of noise or offensive behaviour visible to the public.

If they are, that indicates the poor standards of management which will probably also be in breach of the new public health, OSH and labour standards.

However, they will generate traffic. More importantly, their presence is offensive to many people for reasons which are genuine, but hard to define.

They are not alone in this. Many people would object to a gun shop, a late-night cafe or a liquor outlet next door, but councils are not trying to consign those operations to light industrial areas.

The Prostitution Reform Bill was driven by a desire to ease the suffering of sex workers. If Auckland City Council ignores reason and effectively declares war on every sex-on-site location, including escorts working from their own home, they will be rejecting the concept of harm minimisation.

Indeed, they will be contributing to the harm by producing just the sort of moralistic, lowest-common-denominator rule which dominated the old law.

Either they work from the principles of the act, or they will be responsible for workers being trapped in the industry, brothels being forced into unsafe areas and an increase in the number of street workers.

Please think again.

* Tim Barnett is MP for Christchurch Central and sponsor of the Prostitution Reform Bill.