These MPs have three main tasks if they want to accomplish their goal. Firstly, they need to undo an enormous mistake that was made as part of the legalisation of the sex trade. Secondly, they need to modernise laws preventing organised prostitution. And lastly, they need to make sure that the few legal rights we do have are protected. It was a change of tactics that approached prostitution as a social problem.
Today, that decision seems incomprehensible. Business regulations, labour rules and social services should protect people. Why not extend these protections to sex workers, especially if their trade is considered to be a social problem? Only the fewest of us would be likely to take advantage of that opportunity if it were available, but there are some that would.
For those that did, it would be a way to get help if they wanted to take classes to learn a new trade. Instead of letting us go through the existing channels, parliament comes up with one costly exit programme after the other. Each just as ineffective as the last. This is a major hindrance that would help alleviate many of the practical problems that instead wind up turning into cases of human trafficking.
Such is often the case with many foreign sex workers. They get help to come to Denmark, and then once they get here they wind up disagreeing with their handlers about what the deal was. The next problem is the ban on organised prostitution. The common perception is that the ban protects us by making sure that anyone who makes money off our work gets punished for it.
Not only do these people get punished, it was never the intent of the law that they should. The ban was intended as a way to protect public decency, and this is why the state hangs on to the money it confiscates in cases of organised prostitution, instead of giving it back to the sex workers it was taken from. If it were, then the stores that sold us the items we use in our work would also need to be punished.
