Labour’s most ambitious pledge isn’t to reach the highest sustained growth in the G7, or to transition Britain to zero-carbon electricity by 2030. It is to halve male violence against women and girls over the next decade. At least 100 women were killed by a man in 2023. So achieving this would be an extraordinary feat that would transform the experience of being female in the UK. But a real test of Labour’s commitment is whether it is prepared to protect some of the most vulnerable women in society who find themselves trapped in prostitution.

Prostitution puts women in mortal peril; it is hard to quantify precisely but women in prostitution are many, many times more likely to end up murdered than other women. Femicide Census figures highlight that 47 women involved in prostitution were killed by men in the UK between 2009 and 2023.

Too often, these women are effectively written off. An example came just last week in BBC reporting of the trial for the alleged murder of mother Samantha Holden, whom her family described as a “kind and beautiful soul who will be forever loved”. She was found by her 18-year-old son strangled and suffocated to death. That wasn’t how the BBC framed her death: “murdered sex worker found dead by son, court hears”, its headline read for hours before it was changed in the face of righteous anger. This plays into two damaging social mores. The first is the age-old assumption that women who take payment for sex – who are overwhelmingly coerced or trafficked into this rotten “industry” – are somehow less deserving than other victims of male violence. The second is the newer idea that governments should turn a blind eye to this........

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