Prostitution law, hate crime and women’s prisons

The Equality Model — also called the Nordic Model, Abolition Model or Sex Buyer Law — would replace the Prostitution Reform Act 2003. It decriminalises the prostituted person while criminalising those who exploit them, and pairs that with funded exit services for women wanting to leave: housing, education, training, legal and welfare services, childcare, and emotional and psychological support.

While the 2003 Act remains, the document strongly opposes removing section 19, which bars people on temporary visas such as student visas from prostitution. Its stated reason is preventing international trafficking.

The party would work with other groups to call for a ban on using “rough sex” as a defence in a murder case or one involving serious harm. The document links this to its opposition to pornography, which it describes as filmed prostitution.

The position is against new hate crime laws but for a specific amendment. The Sentencing Act’s section 9(1)(h) lists characteristics including race, colour, nationality, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age and disability — but not sex. The document argues that absence suggests hating women is more acceptable than other hatreds, and would add “sex” to the list. It opposes hate crime laws generally as creating what it calls a hierarchy of victimhood, and prefers standalone sex-based laws with penalties matching the seriousness of the offence.

Women and girls would have the right to single-sex gatherings for any purpose, including women-only social media groups, and to single-sex spaces the document lists as including toilets, changing rooms, prisons, refuges, rape crisis centres, saunas, swimming facilities and hospital wards. It opposes housing biological males in women’s prisons, and adds that women prisoners must have humane and supportive conditions for pregnancy, birth and caring for babies.

More resource to help women leave domestic violence, public funding for women-only refuge services, public funding for services supporting detransitioners, and exit services for women leaving gangs or religious cults. On the justice system: protection orders enforced, and applications for them accessible and affordable.