If you have ever been in a car driven by someone who alternates repeatedly between accelerator and brake, making you jerk along, you will appreciate how change occurs in our society’s moral attitudes.
To illustrate the point about oscillating uncomfortably back and forth between liberal and moralistic periods, consider the last two centuries. The Victorian era of prudery and (therefore) hypocrisy followed the unbuttoned Regency age. It was followed in its turn, after the catastrophe of the First World War, by the party mood of the Roaring Twenties. The interruption of another war led, by contrast, to a decade of dreariness in the 1950s, marked by social constraint and a savage police crackdown on homosexuals, one consequence of which was the suicide of the mathematical genius Alan Turing.
But any revival of puritanism invites a backlash by more liberal and open-minded people, chiefly the young, who do not want to be told what they can and cannot do by finger-wagging nay-sayers. The reaction to the closed atmosphere of post-Second World War Britain was the 1960s, an epoch of triumphantly claimed liberty, which of course the moralisers blame for everything they consider to have gone wrong since.
The truth is that what actually happens during moralistic periods is virtually the same as what goes on in more liberal times; what differs is the lack of openness about people’s behaviour and the hidden nature of any harmful consequences. In moralistic periods, sin, crime and vice get pushed so far under the carpet that moralisers, believing (rather as children do) that what they cannot see does not exist, feel great self-satisfaction. The honesty of more liberal times, and the fact that everyone can then see harm when it occurs, affronts the moralisers; and they hasten to force it back into darkness.
Take drugs as an example. The sale and use of opium and its derivative heroin, and of cocaine and marijuana, were made illegal in the course of the first three decades of the twentieth century, first in an effort to stop the troops in the First World War trenches using them, and then in an effort to stop anyone else doing so. Until then drugs were legal, and could be bought at any pharmacy. The first laws relating to narcotics were passed in the 1860s to regulate their sale, giving pharmacies a monopoly. This had the useful effect of ensuring that drugs were of a reasonably safe standard. Society did not collapse because of them, and at the time people used opium (in the form of laudanum) for their headaches.
The moralistic Victorian-originated prohibition movement that sought to ban drink and all forms of intoxicants had its greatest triumph in 1920s America. A whole nation was criminalised, a vast criminal industry sprang up and the police found themselves at war with machine-gun-carrying mafiosi. When the ban on alcohol was lifted the prohibition of other drugs remained, and with it a continuing industry for the crime gangs. By pushing drugs underground, the effective management of society’s use of that other dangerous drug – alcohol – could not be applied: the results are evident today.
Tabloid prurience about sex has always been with us, but the note of hysteria in reports about the romps of footballers, politicians and celebrities always threatens to push moralism up a notch or two. Sex has ever inflamed the sensibilities of moralisers; proponents of contraception in the nineteenth century were regarded as monsters, and if they tried to publish contraceptive advice they were sent to prison for obscenity. Books depicting sex were prosecuted until the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960. The onset of the Aids epidemic was a hook for another wave of moralising against gay people and sex workers. Now it is ‘trafficking’.
To kidnap, trick, force into any kind of work, whether it is slaving in a sweat-shop or sexual services, is a serious crime and should be punished. There are laws against any kind of coercion and slavery, and in the case of forced sex work the rape laws apply also. So ‘trafficking’, if it means people-smuggling under false pretences into another country to be coerced into any kind of industry against someone’s will, is a horror and deserves the full application of the laws that already exist to deal with it.
But ‘trafficking’ has been defined to mean much more than this, and it has been conceptually entangled with sex work to the exclusion of all else. For example: homosexuality is punitively treated in Poland, a Roman Catholic country, and many gay men have therefore emigrated to live in more liberal places. Some of those who come to Britain take work in the gay sex industry. If a friend has given them accommodation while they look for a home, or arranged a meeting with someone who can give them work, they have officially therefore been ‘trafficked’. Their clients and friends have become criminals, and the police have yet more work to do.
Let us suppose a genuinely kidnapped or tricked woman is forced into sex work, in a country where her clients are criminalised for having any dealings with her. Her clients and her pimps are for that reason going to make it vastly harder for her to be found or helped; she will be deeper in the undergrowth precisely because of the greater risks that now attend her servitude. Such is the effect of criminalisation.
Politicians in England and Scotland, perhaps having reached that middle-aged point defined as happening when narrow waists and broad minds change places, have elected to follow the punitive prohibitionist line of Sweden and Norway in relation to the sex trade. They would have done far better to look at the example of New Zealand, which has moved in the other direction, with liberal laws giving sex workers greater protection, better access to health and welfare services, and which go some way towards removing the moralising stigma that erects a barrier between sex workers and the rest of society. Official and unofficial reviews of the New Zealand approach have consistently praised its benefits. Almost every public opinion poll in the UK shows majorities of people in favour of the same kind of liberal common sense. It is the political class which, on the basis not of good research, humane principles and mature attitudes, but of personal prejudice and moralism, or (more commonly still) fear of the tabloid press, pushes matters in the opposite direction.
There are undoubtedly people in sex work who are there unwillingly, because of debts, drugs or the malign persuasions of pimps. These people need to be helped. Making them more invisible does not benefit them. To the disbelief of moralisers, however, there are also people in the sex industry who are there willingly, and who prefer it to other kinds of work. What happens between them and clients – between consenting adults, where the interaction observes the same standards of acceptable behaviour between any people anywhere – is their business and theirs alone. Poking the interfering fingers of law into their private choices is worse than unjustifiable; it is wrong.
This is the expression of a general principle. The law has no place in the private lives of consenting grown-ups, whether they are playing Scrabble or having sex, and whether they are doing the latter for cash or for the long-term project of building a home and a family together. When the cycles of moral fashion swing back towards prohibition, criminalisation and the interference of law in private lives, and when this results in Canute-like efforts to stop people doing, seeing or being something that the moralisers themselves happen not to like, and which makes them wish to stop everyone else doing, seeing or being it, they need to be challenged – challenged on the facts, and urged to keep a level head. Alas, when it comes to sex and drugs, there seem to be few level heads around to deal with them sensibly.