Rights and responsibilities of our oldest profession

What this cashes out to are policies that decriminalise and constructively regulate indoor prostitution, and prohibit street solicitation and sex.

Behind this approach is a rebuttable presumption that adult women who sell sex are autonomous, and that communities affected by street sex suffer an unjustified loss of amenity and security.

Such policies address the very real potential for exploitation and coercion in the sex trade by offering sex-sellers real opportunities to exit like income support, places in drug rehabilitation programs and police intervention in violent relationships at regular intervals at their “workplaces” and each time they have contact with the law.

The availability of such programs to women working indoors should give us confidence that sellers are choosing this way of life, while offering street prostitutes - when combined with fines and jail terms for punters - a real opportunity to either move inside or to exit the trade.

Women who are truly moral agents must accept both the rights and responsibilities that accompany their choices. I think it vital that public language and policy concerning women - particularly as sexual and reproductive beings - validate us as citizens capable of both making choices, and living with their consequences.

Autonomous adult women have a right to sell as long as they go about it in ways that don’t unfairly burden the community of which they are a part, though as a community we have a positive obligation to ensure that at every stage, of what is potentially a violent, exploitative and coercive game, a woman’s freedom to say “no” is protected.

This is why allowing brothels to operate in a regulated fashion is a good idea, but street sex work can never be tolerated. Not just because a disproportionate number of street prostitutes are too young, too drug-addicted, too psychologically scarred or cowed by violence or abuse to make an autonomous choice to sell themselves, but because the cost to the community of their behaviour, even if theirs is a choice worthy of the name, is far too high.