The review was commissioned by the NI Department of Justice DOJ in response to a legal requirement to assess the working of the new law after three years. An equivalent study had been carried out before the introduction of the law, so that comparisons could be made.
Rather the research findings indicate that there has been an utter lack of official commitment to the funding and prioritisation of prosecuting sex buyers punters and providing specialist services to help people exit prostitution. In this article we show that the researchers relied in large part on advice, assistance and data from organisations who are not only ideologically opposed to the legislation but also have commercial vested interests in promoting its failure. Overall the research was biased, much of the data and methodology was questionable at best, and many of the conclusions were little more than hypothesis, with the researchers ignoring other relevant socio-economic factors — such as the brutal austerity measures that have disproportionately impacted women.
The offence itself is defined in Article 64A of the Sexual Offences Order and it was known as Clause 6 during the passage of the bill. They can be summarised as follows:. However, the results are not as clear as they might appear on a superficial level. A serious, deep reading of the report reveals omissions and methodological problems that can explain both the anomalous findings and the contradictions between them. There are too many problems to cover them all in this article, so we focus on the most troubling points.
This understanding is recognised in international human rights treaties, including CEDAW and the Palermo Protocol — both of which the UK has ratified, making their terms legally binding. However, this is not how the researchers explain the approach in their introduction. The researchers go on to explain the opposition to the approach, emphasising that because most of the countries that have adopted it do not have robust data of the prevalence of prostitution before it was introduced, it is not possible to say that it has decreased prostitution.
They appear to have made no attempt to mitigate this by using both sets of terminology, as the Bristol researchers did in their recent report into the nature and prevalence of prostitution in England and Wales for the Home Office.
