28.02.2008
Sex, murder and DNA tests
Jim Moody asks who controls the social controllers
Big Brother is not just a gawpers’ reality show. In the phrase’s more sinister 1984 Orwellian sense it is to a large extent already here, what with MI5 and Special Branch, CGHQ and phone tapping, CCTVs and snooping on bank accounts, credit cards and medical records. And if a strange alliance of police chiefs, press editors, establishment feminists and national socialists have their way, the power of the intrusive state is set to become yet wider and more intrusive. Witness recent demands for a compulsory national DNA database in the aftermath of two gruesome murder trials and calls for the introduction of the ‘Swedish model’.
One Sunday newspaper summed it all up: “Steve Wright, 49, was sentenced to life in prison last Friday for killing five prostitutes in Suffolk. Within two hours, pub chef Mark Dixie, 37, was told he would spend at least 34 years in jail for murdering 18-year-old would-be model Sally Anne Bowman ... Yet both men might be free today had their genetic profiles not been entered into the national DNA database for relatively minor, unconnected offences” (The Observer February 24).
Certainly we want murderers caught and stopped. But we do not trust the state and its minions to handle forensic evidence dispassionately or honestly in every case - especially when there are political objectives at stake. There have been enough examples of falsified evidence and abuse of information to suggest something less than absolute objectivity on the part of the authorities. These have ranged from the crude, such as the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad (of Birmingham Six infamy), to seized computer evidence of what individuals look at as proof of terrorist intent. To put it mildly, faith in the police and the criminal justice system is not as widespread as it might be, and quite rightly.
After all, who controls the social controllers? Certainly not the mass of the population, the working class. We have no control over how the data-gatherers use their information. The inability of government to keep private and privileged information confidential has become a byword in the last year. So much so that a significant section of the ruling class has come down against the universal introduction of identity cards. If data is not secure from loss, it cannot be secure from being altered malignly. And if that is so, then anything is possible.
It is does not take much to imagine a scenario, perhaps under a different political regime, in which revolutionary A’s DNA profile has been substituted for violent criminal B’s. And while we are dealing in nightmares, there is the question of population-wide DNA data-gathering providing the opportunity for future authorities that are so minded to ‘weed out’ those with the ‘wrong’ profile - whether that be according to ethnicity or propensity for an expensive-to-treat disease.
On the basis of civil liberties and democratic freedoms, record-keeping of DNA samples must be restricted to convicted sexual or violent offenders. The records of others, whose DNA has been harvested through special police sweeps or routine methods, whether the donor is innocent or guilty of minor crime, must be destroyed forthwith. Indeed, only through a discrete court order should a DNA sample be taken from an individual and retained until court proceedings are exhausted.
A second vital question which arose from the murder of the five prostitutes and the trial of Steve Wright concerns the status and social position of sex workers and the legality of their work.
There has been an interesting shift in how the media depicted the murdered women - as human beings first and foremost. Gemma Adams was described as a “courteous, animated child ... joining the Brownies, horse-riding and learning the piano ... at 15 she met her childhood sweetheart ... and the pair descended into a spiral of heroin addiction”. Annette Nicholls “had enjoyed writing poetry ... completed a four-year beautician’s course at Suffolk College ... and was looking forward to setting up her own business ... in her mid-20s, the young single mother became hooked on heroin and took up prostitution to feed her habit” (The Independent February 22).
These particularly shocking murder cases have not only stirred up calls for mass DNA sampling, but they have prompted puritanical moralists to come out with demands for more laws and state powers. For example, on the letters page of The Guardian last weekend was Fiona Mactaggart, Labour MP for Slough, who objected to the term “sex workers”, preferring instead to refer to “street prostitutes”. Pointing out that “prostitutes were 40 times as likely to die violently as other women”, she correctly encouraged fellow MPs to support the abolition of fines for prostitution, though her letter ended on a sinister note: “I hope the next [issue] will be to follow the Swedish example and make the men who use prostitutes criminals.”
Of course, Mactaggart’s objection is only to some ways in which sex is sold: she says nothing about bourgeois marriage or how rich men still in effect buy sexual favours - their wife’s - little different in essence from the other kinds of prostitution to which she objects.
Mactaggart’s proposal comes fast on the heels of a parliamentary delegation to Sweden, where the Riksdag (parliament) did exactly as she urges when it passed the Prohibiting the Purchase of Sexual Services Act 1998. In mid-January, junior home office minister Vernon Coaker, solicitor general Vera Baird and deputy minister for women and equality Barbara Follett trooped off to Stockholm in a high-profile visit intended to publicise a governmental six-month review of prostitution laws in the UK.
“In Sweden, prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children ... purchasing - or attempting to purchase - sexual services has constituted a criminal offence punishable by fines or up to six months imprisonment ... The offence comprises all forms of sexual services, whether they are purchased on the street, in brothels, in so-called massage parlours, from escort services or in other similar circumstances” (Prostitution and trafficking in women Ministry of industry, employment and communications, January 2004).
Sadly, it is not only rightwing Labourites who have taken up the cudgels against sex (commercial variety). The Scottish Socialist Party debated the question at its 2003 conference, but only women took part for and against; the SSP’s male comrades were mostly silent on the issue. Five years later, these social-puritans are alive and well and continuing to propagate their statist, anti-working class ideas on this question in the rump SSP, vaunting “the Swedish model of targeting the demand ... The SSP after much debate and discussion concluded that prostitution by definition was violence against women and therefore harmful to them. There can be no tolerance of it ... decriminalisation is not the answer, for this is not a victimless crime” (Mhairi McAlpine, SSP women’s network: www.scottishsocialistparty.org/pages/prostitution.html).
Sweden’s ‘solution’ is nothing of the kind: it simply forces prostitution further underground or exports it abroad. In Sweden’s case, Denmark, Norway, Finland and the Baltic republics are easily accessible. Pursuing prostitutes’ clients certainly means that the most vulnerable sex workers, those on the streets, are forced to go to ill-lit and less-frequented areas so the cops cannot so easily nab potential punters. Street prostitutes’ ability to look after one another, albeit limited, noting dodgy clients’ car number plates and so on, is seriously eroded.
For some customers under the Swedish system, prostitutes’ potential to be prosecution witnesses against them may even trigger the men’s violence to silence them, perhaps permanently. Potential danger from some men fearing prosecution will increase against sex workers wherever they operate. And a possible ‘blackmailer’s charter’ situation might be resolved very negatively.
As Niki Adams of the English Collective of Prostitutes and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape noted in their letter to The Guardian, “... prosecuting clients is a dangerous diversion from prosecuting violent men. It doesn’t answer why it took five deaths in Ipswich to put women’s safety on the agenda. If prostitution is the problem, why are so many non-prostitute women reporting rape and other violence?” Rebutting Mactaggart, Adams and Longstaff write: “Proposed changes in the law, currently in the Lords, would make arrest for soliciting easier and force women into ‘rehabilitation’ under threat of imprisonment” (February 23).
We are certainly not in favour of featuring prostitution as some kind of career option. However, we are all as workers selling ourselves piecemeal, more or less according to our skills and abilities, in this capitalist system. Prostitution in that context is one of the more extreme methods of selling oneself. The exploitation that prostitutes experience may be greater in degree, but it is nevertheless of the same nature that all workers have to endure. We support efforts that prostitutes have made to organise themselves, including limited organisation within the trade union movement.
Our method in fighting for the working class party we need to create is to be tribunes for the whole of society. On this question, that means calling for prostitution to be completely decriminalised - abolishing those laws used against prostitutes directly, and certainly not replacing them with anti-punter laws along Swedish lines. The state must get out of this area of human life completely.