By Anthony Barich
THE West Australian Barnett Government has not met its election commitment to properly investigate the Swedish model of prostitution regulation, the Australian Christian Lobby said on 21 June.
WA Attorney General Christian Porter announced on 21 June that brothels would be legalised in industrial and commercial areas, five days after The Record reported his plans after he told a Belmont community forum on 8 June that the Swedish model would not limit prostitution as well as his model.
On 8 June he also discredited evidence by Gunilla Ekberg, the expert adviser to the Swedish Government in the development and implementation of their legislation who was brought to Perth to advise MPs who ended up passing the previous Labor Government’s Prostitution Amendment Act 2008.
The ‘Swedish model’ involves outlawing the buying but not the selling of sex, and an extensive education programme of the police and legal professions, as well as educating young boys in schools, based on the premise that all prostitution is abuse, legal or not.
Having researched Ms Ekberg’s original documents, Mr Porter said she sources herself, her own anecdotes of conversations she’s had with people and newspaper articles “which themselves do not have proper sources”.
He noted that she also cites a group of reports issued by County Police of Stockholm, which say that in Sweden there has been some success in reducing street prostitution but “on the other hand, we do not know whether it has had any effect on prostitution overall”.
On whether the extent of prostitution has increased or decreased, he quoted the Swedish Government’s National Board of Health and Welfare as saying: “We cannot give any unambiguous answer to that question.
“At most we can discern that street prostitution is slowly returning after swiftly disappearing in the wake of the law against purchasing sexual services, but that refers to street prostitution, the most obvious manifestation.
“In regards to other areas, ‘hidden’ prostitution, we are even less able to make any statement.”
From this, Mr Porter concluded: “So I would counsel caution against believing on face value some of the quite expansive and, in my view, unsubstantiated positives that people have attached to the Swedish model.”
ACL WA director Michelle Pearse said Mr Porter must explain how State-sanctioned brothels could meet the most basic workplace health and safety standards.
“How would he protect young women from being recruited into the most dangerous profession on the planet?” Mrs Pease said.
“WA is about to follow the failed experiments by Labor Governments in Queensland, the ACT and Victoria where legalised brothels have led to a massive expansion of the harmful sex trade in both its legal and illegal forms.”
While Mr Porter said that prostitutes could report abuse to police under his model, Mrs Pearse said that the recent case of an under-age girl dying in a legal brothel in the ACT underscored the implausibility of making work in brothels safe.
“ACL opposes legalising brothels because of the dangers to young women and believes the law should target the demand side of the sex trade which is the men who use prostituted women,” she said.
Mrs Pearse said that a report by the US Bureau of Public Affairs cited a study into the trauma prostituted women face and revealed that 60 to 75 per cent of women in prostitution were raped, 70 to 95 per cent were physically assaulted and 68 per cent had post traumatic stress disorder in the same range as ‘treatment seeking combat veterans’.
“Why would the WA Government sanction an industry where this occurs?”
As the Federal Government has just launched a marketing campaign aimed at reducing violence in relationships, Mrs Pearse asked the WA Government: “If Australia says ‘No’ to violence against women than why would the Government seek to sanction brothels where women are raped and assaulted?
“If the WA Government was truly seeking the best interests of the community, it would not allow prostitution to occur in any area.”
At a public meeting arranged by Federal member for Swan, Steve Irons, the Attorney General stated that he believed prostitution was ‘morally objectionable’.
Mrs Pearse questioned the rationale of the government in legalising an industry that is ‘morally objectionable’.
“The reason that prostitution is morally objectionable is because it is an injustice to the women involved, and it is an injustice to the wives and families of the men who use prostituted women,” Mrs Pearse said.
Instead of legalising the industry, ACL has called on the WA government to shut down all brothels and implement a law similar to Sweden’s, which penalises the buyer rather than the women who are exploited in the industry.
Mr Porter told the 8 June community forum that shutting down all brothels was impossible.