The finding that one in ten men has paid for sex sadly confirms what I observed in my role as Detective Superintendent of Suffolk Constabulary β that there is currently a minority of men in this country who feel entitled to exploit vulnerable women and girls and use them as sexual objects.
My experiences in Ipswich taught me that society cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the abuses these men are committing β and that we can and must end demand for prostitution. In , five women were tragically murdered in Ipswich by Steve Wright, a local sex buyer. I had responsibility for leading Suffolk Constabulary's strategic response on the issue of prostitution β and tolerating the status quo was never going to be an option.
We knew from experience that arresting women for soliciting, as the law currently permits, wasn't working. They would simply go back out on to the streets to earn money to pay their fine. We also knew that tolerating this harmful trade wasn't working.
The women involved in prostitution in Ipswich were highly vulnerable and had complex needs arising from addiction, trauma and the abuse they suffered on the streets. This is no different from the national picture: an estimated 50 per cent of women in prostitution in the UK became involved as children, and up to 95 oer cebt of women in street prostitution are problematic drug users. Allowing men to continue exploiting these women by paying them to perform sex acts was not an option we were willing to entertain.
So we cracked down on demand, taking a zero-tolerance approach to kerb-crawling which is currently a crime , and made sure the message got out far and wide that paying for sex on the streets of Ipswich would not be tolerated. We also made every effort to divert women away from the criminal justice system and worked with local agencies to support women to exit prostitution and start the process of recovering and rebuilding their lives. The results of this approach speak for themselves: an independent evaluation by the University of East Anglia confirmed that we ended street prostitution.
