Scotland still criminalises women while shielding buyers — Ash Regan’s bill aims to flip the script and tackle demand, says Kevin McKenna

I’ve been told it’s something to do with “your age and your upbringing”. I’d offered the view that men who visit prostitutes were guilty of a sex offence.

My analysis, I was also told, would “drive prostitution underground and thus undermine any safeguards for the women and young girls.

I’d simply felt that a bloke who paid for sex was using economic power to obtain it from women who’d be otherwise reluctant to sleep with him. “My upbringing” regarded such men as the slime of humanity.

Last weekend, at the Morning Star Scotland’s autumn conference in Glasgow, I listened to a profoundly affecting and distressing talk by a former prostitute now active in counselling victims and advocating for them.

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She cited a survey conducted last year by YouGov in which respondents were asked if they supported decriminalisation of the prostitution. A majority said they were in favour. When subsequently asked if they’d be happy to be friends with a prostitute, a majority said ‘No’.

Yet, it was the question not asked in the survey which told you a lot about the psychological and moral contortions that must be performed when seeking to ‘normalise’ the sexual exploitation of women. Would you be happy to be friends with a man who paid for sex?

In Scotland right now, our very liberal and enlightened government is performing its own moral contortions. After 25 years of devolved........

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