Let's make existing vice laws work

Harriet Harman proposes outlawing payment for sex. Will she have restaurants policed to ensure that a couple eating out together are going Dutch?
Ms Harman and others are keen to exploit images of women both as vulnerable victims and as free agents making bold career choices. The difficulty is which to apply in this case.

But selling sex is not the only occupation where we might suspect some underlying problem. Many other ways of making a living, including Ms Harman's own, could in some cases be considered "prostitution" in its most fundamental sense.

It would be easy to approach the problem from a position of prejudice about "male chauvinism". Fortunately we have a gay community to save us from such stereotypical thinking. Commercial sex, like free sex, operates fo
r every permutation of male and female and similarly produces outcomes that can't be explained by saying "Yes, men are bastards".

Legislation is advocated partly as an aid to curbing the trafficking of sex workers. Does the illegality of cannabis prevent the trafficking of Vietnamese children to tend cannabis factories? Has the government focused on the "demand side" in counter-drug enforcement as it now proposes to do for sex? I suspect that on each issue the aim is not to find a rational solution, but to identify which group it is more opportune to demonise.

How hard can it be to track down illegally trafficked women, when their location needs to be advertised? Is it too much to ask ministers that, instead of going on jollys to help them dream up yet more laws, they put some effort into making the existing ones work?