Brothel Registered, Secure, No Children, Pays Taxes – Still It’s Closed Down

Clearly and obviously a brothel will be closed down because brothels are illegal. And yet that’s not quite the point, the important thing being, well, should brothels be illegal? We all know that the sex trade is going to happen – yea even Sweden’s making buying sex illegal hasn’t stopped it. So, given that it will happen whatever we’re really only left with two questions.

The first is that civil liberty thing. Why are we stopping consenting adults from doing what consenting adults decide to do? In a more religious age perhaps there was an excuse – saving people from their own immorality was itself considered to be a moral action. There aren’t enough of us still believing in anything other than the NHS for that to be true these days. So, the default should be that when there’s no third party harm consenting adults can and should be left to get on with whatever.

The second is that it never will just be consenting adults and whataboutthetaxes and so on. Which gives us this:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] A married couple who built a £3.8million brothel empire were allowed to continue operating by police for 14 years who instead focused on “serious types of organised crime”, a court has heard. Sandra ‘Sandy’ Hankin, 55, and Mark Hankin, 57, made a fortune running two massage parlours where sex was sold for a minimum of £50 a time. The couple’s brothel, called ‘Sandy’s Superstars’, was said to have “flourished” in Northenden and Bury, Greater Manchester thanks to an agreement made with police. Police had limited resources and priority was given to tackling brothels which used underage people, trafficked women or had links to organised crime. [/perfectpullquote]

That all sounds entirely sensible. We’ve limited resources to handle or deal with anything at all, we must prioritise. Sex with underage prostitutes has another name, rape, and we’re pretty keen on getting rid of that. And so on.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Prostitutes were given regular security and health care checks courtesy of NHS officials during their stints at Sandy’s……The massage parlour business was accredited with the Security Industry Authority and routinely paid its taxes with HMRC inspectors…..“Both brothels were well known to the police. The companies made and provided proper tax returns and paid tax with dividends on the company profit.[/perfectpullquote]

And yet they were closed down? Obviously, given the illegality, but it’s an entirely serious question. Given reasons one and two, why not freedom and let’s reduce the harm done anyway, why do we have this law against brothels?

Other than that some people are horrified at the thought of their existing of course but then we can say the same about the Tory Party, soda pops and Simon Cowell. We don’t – sadly in the case of the last – use the law to ban those so why do we brothels?