Government Cracks Down on Few Brits Actually Having Sex

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When is it PC to equate women with children? Pretty much whenever you're screwing over women by "trying to help." In defense of a planned 'zero-tolerace' approach to prostitution in the U.K. (a reversal from an earlier plan to decriminalize the sex trade), Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart tells BBC:

It is a form of child abuse -- most women who are prostitutes started being prostitutes at the age of 13 or 14 and we have got to have strong mechanisms to reduce prostitution.

Like social conservatives trying to collapse the issues of human trafficking and sex work, Mactaggart deliberately confuses questions of consent and coercion. She doesn't argue that the country needs mechanisms to reduce child prostitution, but that government needs to eliminate sex work altogether. The logic here is something like: "Some prostitutes are adolescents. Therefore we must stop adults from paying for sex." And somehow within that particular worldview, harassing adult women who choose to sell sexual gratification is the moral equivalent of prosecuting child-beaters.

Guy Herbert at Samizdata has more.