Prostitution and the law

It's midnight in a provincial city in England.

The neighbourhood seems respectable enough, but take another look. Dejected figures on street corners tell a different story.

The Ipswich murders threw a spotlight on the underworld prostitutes inhabit - and whether the law of the land failed to protect them. Other countries have changed their laws to make women safer, but lawmakers here can't agree how this is best done.

Some say buying sex should be a crime, others argue selling it is a legitimate business.

Emma doesn't want to be on this street corner tonight or any other night. But she needs to earn £1000 a week to feed herself and her addiction to heroin.

At first Emma tried to deny she was on drugs, but the needle marks on her hands were a giveaway. She said she wanted to get herself sorted out, but she didn't seem to hold out much hope.

In the meantime she'd like the government to follow Amsterdam's example - and set up legalised brothels.

Jade grew up in foster care, and now her own son has been taken away by social services. She doesn't want the authorities to know she's still on the streets so her voice is spoken by an actress.

Addiction

Like 95 per cent of street prostitutes, Jade is addicted to class A drugs. She earns £120 a day and spends it all on heroin and crack. She wants the government to make it easier for addicts to get treatment.

But she doesn't think criminalising men who buy sex would stop prostitution.

In Norwich police have launched a crackdown under existing laws, ridding phone boxes of prostitutes' calling cards, installing cctv and targeting kerb crawlers.

Legality

In Britain pimping, brothel keeping and soliciting sex are all illegal. But paying for sex isn't.

The government's looking far and wide for inspiration as part of its review of prostitution laws that began last month.

In Amsterdam, brothels are licensed legal businesses, but ministers have backed away from a proposal two years ago for mini brothels in this country.

Last month a Home Office minister visited Sweden, where buying sex is illegal but selling it is not, so the punters not the prostitutes are criminalised.

The home secretary may be wary though of taking such drastic action. Channel 4 News understands she is now looking closely at what happens on the streets of Finland, where it's a crime to buy sex off a trafficked woman. But an indigenous prostitute is fair game.

Campaigners for a more radical approach fear Jacqui Smith is toying with a compromise that simply won't make women any safer.

Stain on civilised society

One former prostitute we spoke to told us the current law was a stain on a civilised society. Sarah was abused by a stepfather from the age of six, and gang raped at 14. Prostitution in her view is quite simply modern day slavery. Her voice is spoken by an actress.

Sarah was 27 when she finally left prostitution. She quit after being beaten up and raped. She ended up in hospital, unable to walk for days.

The working girls I met in Norwich looked dehumanised. The combination of drug addiction and prostitution seemed to have left them in a strange limbo land, half alive, half dead.

In the last decade, 60 prostitutes have been killed.

There might be little political capital to be gained supporting the estimated 80,000 street prostitutes working in the UK. But what we now know of the lives of these women and those picked off the streets of Ipswich suggests a moral imperative to change the law.

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