Too few to count

or... on 3 decades of dealing with apologists for the systematic denial and neglect of women’s needs

Twitter is a strange beast. I found myself embroiled in a little twitter spat with Prof Hines when she suggested that prostitution related offences can account for why incarcerated transwomen have such disproportionately high histories of sex offending (relative to the male prison population in England and Wales). It’s a familiar argument which I call the “Ah, but prostitution” argument. In my opinion it is a rubbish argument designed to neutralise concerns about whether transwomen ought to be placed in the female prison estate.

In England and Wales soliciting and loitering for prostitution does not attract a prison sentence. The prostitution related offences that do attract prison sentences are those that involve exploitation and/or coercion and/or children.

I know this because I have been doing research in this area for more than 30 years. And anyone who knows anything about prostitution related research will know, very few people are arrested for soliciting or loitering anymore. Just before I started my research career around 10,000 women (and they were almost always women) were arrested and convicted for soliciting or loitering for prostitution. The peak numbers coincided with the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis when both gay men and women in prostitution were blamed for the pandemic and police constabularies were operating street sweeping campaigns. It was a time when the balance between indoor and outdoor prostitution was firmly towards the latter. Even then, few women were sent to prison for soliciting or loitering for the purposes of prostitution. A Home Office circular some years before had established that the standard sentence for soliciting was a fine. By 1993 the ridiculousness of this policy was clear. Fining street working women who were in prostitution through force of economic necessity, quite apart from any exploitative relationships they had with the men in their lives created a revolving door into and out of prison. Women unable to pay the fines they accrued due to convictions for prostitution related offences went to prison for fine defaulting. Once they came out of prison they had few choices except to go back to sex work. Police would do a ‘purge’, arrest anyone out on a particular night. Often the same women would be arrested time and again. Many of the women I spoke to back then talked about stacking up their fines and asking magistrates to sentence them to prison to pay the fines. The reason was simple: if they planned it like this, they could ask friends and family to look after their children when they went to prison and so mitigate some of the horrendous effects of incarceration on women’s domestic and family lives.

But that was then. Nowadays, the street scene has all but dried up. Sex work has mostly moved indoors aided in great part by the internet. And criminal justice responses have been shaped by two decades of feminist and academic efforts to help governments understand that many women in prostitution are more victimised and offended against then offenders and that a careful balance of harm minimisation and welfare input is better than the revolving door. There is much more to say about these changes but that is for another blog.

The point is here is that the argument “ah but prostitution” is a non-starter. So when someone – especially any socio-legal or academic – argues “ah but prostitution”, I hear three things. Firstly I hear “I know nothing about these issues but am happy to argue based purely on my political biases”. And oh how weary I am of academics who should know better sacrificing academic rigour for political expediency. Secondly I hear “the needs of the women in prison don’t count”.  Yeah, well, I’ve been hearing that particular argument since I started my academic career, perhaps even before. But there is a third thing I hear. The ultimate DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender). There are too few males who identify as women in the female prison estate to count.

Why is that the ultimate DARVO? Because for decades now people like myself, as well as activists and many of the professionals working with women in the criminal justice system – and politicians who are minded to care – have been saying that women’s needs are neglected and under resourced in a system designed for the notional male offender. Remember: women in prison make up around 4% of the total prison population in England and Wales. Women generally make up less than 20% of everyone in the criminal justice system. And for at least 50 years, there is a solid evidence base that says that women in the criminal justice system are not men. We say this not in relation to contemporary political issues about whether transwomen are or are not women. We say this because the sex-based social inequalities that women experience – remember those? Everything from male violence or the burden of child care to unequal access to justice – shape both their offending as well as their rehabilitative needs. Women in prison have needs specific to their histories as women living in societies structured by sex-based inequalities. Yet, the systematic neglect of adequately resourcing the criminal justice system to address and deal with these needs has often been justified by a political rationale that can be summarised as “too few to count”. Take for instance the Female Offender Strategy (2018). It starts with a recognition of the different needs of women in the criminal justice system – particularly in relation to their vulnerability. As the then Secretary of State said in his foreword:

Yet, only a few years later, the National Audit Office condemned the political disinterest showed by Johnson’s government.

Too few to count. Too few to prioritise, after all there was a pandemic happening and the male prison system with its much greater numbers was in crisis too.

But now, to see tweets like this one from Prof Alex Sharpe, implying that there are such small numbers of males who identify as women in the female prison estate, any ‘outrage’ people like myself feel is out of proportion. They are too few such people in the female estate to count.

Likewise the new Scottish Prison Service guidance that is based on the notion of an acceptable level of risk introduced to the female estate only makes sense in a context where the needs of females in prison are neglected. They simply don’t count.

I’ve been here before. I know the dismissal of women’s experiences, their voices, their lives and their needs. I know that where such things happen systematically in our criminal justice system, the outcome is the denial of equality for women based on the denial of their needs as women living in a society structured by material inequalities of class and sex.

To the “ah but prostitution…” and “but they are only a few” I say this. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I know that the deprioritisation of women’s needs isn’t just a phrase. What it really means is the realities of sexism, male violence, women’s poverty relative to men simply do not matter much at all in their grand scheme of things. Once again, it is men’s needs that matter more – but this time those who advocate for the rights of a minority of males are dressing their disregard of women up in radical politics and telling us that our concern for injustice is somehow retrograde politically.

What complete rubbish. And although I have grown weary of saying it, I will continue to say it: women’s needs count.