Seven saunas in Edinburgh have had their licences renewed following raids in June.

Until recently, Edinburgh had employed something of a laissez faire approach to public policy surrounding prostitution.

The city’s saunas – which are licensed as ‘entertainment venues’ – had traditionally been tolerated by council members and police as part of the city’s more ‘pragmatic’ approach to sex work.

According to supporters of this approach, sex workers employed at these saunas were granted a relatively safe and comfortable workplace, at odds with the violence and risk inherent in street-based prostitution.

To others, Edinburgh’s 27-year tolerance of the indoor sex trade masked the reality; that sex workers can never be truly safe from the ‘core harm’, exploitation and gender inequality that marks the purchase of, usually women’s, bodies for sex.

However, since MSP Rhoda Grant’s unsuccessful attempts to criminalise the purchase of sex in Scotland and the merging of the country’s local police forces in April to create one unified Police Scotland, there has been a marked change in approach.

This change has been apportioned by some to the influence of the more ideologically-driven ‘zero tolerance’ policies in Glasgow and Strathclyde, which aim to drive the sex trade out of business in what MSP Margo MacDonald called a ‘vain attempt to eliminate prostitution’.

Reports of raids on 13 saunas in June focused largely on the criminal activity allegedly uncovered and what this could mean for Edinburgh’s licensing policies.

It was left to Scot-Pep, a charity dedicated to the promotion of sex workers’ rights, to condemn the raids and publicly reveal the abuse and ill-treatment meted out to the people who, after all, really matter in all of this; the women themselves.

For example, one woman was ‘strip-searched, subjected to degrading and intimidating treatment and held without food or water for up to seven hours’.

Whatever your view of sex work, incidences such as this are indicative of the wide-scale stigmatisation, prejudice and mistreatment sex workers face; not just, as campaigners focus on, by ‘punters’ but also by the societal institutions that are supposedly there to protect the vulnerable.

Edinburgh council, in renewing previously suspended sauna licences, now seems to be locked in a battle with Edinburgh’s police.

The suggestion by the police force that ‘no items of a sexual nature’ should be allowed on the saunas’ premises drew intense criticism from a number of commentators. The implications of seeing the use or presence of condoms as evidence of sex work – and thus the legitimacy of confiscating these condoms – has unthinkable ramifications for public health, and the safety and freedom of sex workers.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has previously condemned such strategies and one sex worker, Cat, told Scot-Pep:  ‘They’re going to perpetrate these traumatic, horrible raids, and for what? To find condoms in my purse? All women should be afraid of these developments, but sex workers especially. What if they confiscate my condoms and I still have to work that night?’

The practice of simultaneously ‘tolerating’ sex work to ensure safety yet considering the employment of increasingly oppressive tactics which enhance risk is symptomatic of the contradictory environment in Edinburgh.

An environment that is doing nothing to support sex workers as such, and a blurred, indefinite policy reduces accountability and leaves the vulnerable open to institutional abuse.

Edinburgh police swiftly rejected claims they were referring to the banning of condoms, insisting they were concerned with the safety of sex workers.

Regardless, Edinburgh council refused to accept the proposal, possibly conscious of the imperative to ensure the city does not return to its past, when misguided police crackdowns on drug users led to it shouldering the tragic and burdensome moniker of the ‘AIDS capital of Europe’.

Sex work is a hugely complex issue, with arguments from both sides of the debate sometimes overlapping.

The centrality of the issue is surely the primacy of safety for a group of, predominantly, women who are unjustifiably stigmatised, maligned and put at risk, while those with the power jostle for position.

Anti prostitution campaigners and Edinburgh police argue that they want women to be safe and that they do care for sex worker’s welfare. This is no doubt true.

Yet banning condoms or closing saunas will not see the sex trade instantaneously perish and does not address the question of where these women go after their livelihood is snatched away without any warning or any support being given. Pulling the rug from under women will not ensure their safety and will surely increase the stigmatisation they face.

It will also not stop these women working if that is what they need to do. It will just make it more dangerous.

Sex workers are 18 times more likely to be murdered than the rest of the population. This is a horrific manifestation of gender violence which begs the question: why on earth would you not take the chance to lower this figure?

Closing saunas and potentially driving women to work on the infinitely more dangerous streets is not going to do it, nor is criminalising clients, which drives sex work deeper underground, further out of sight, leaving only the dangerous, twisted individuals on the streets.

Sex work is indeed symbolic of gender inequality but proselytising about how repugnant men are for paying for sex and how sex work is commodification misses something. There are deep cultural, political and systemic reasons – beyond any surface-level notions of misogyny and sexualisation – as to why women engage in sex work.

A large part of this is in relation to what so many refuse to see – that for some, sex work is work.

That is, the absence of decently paid work that women, denied other chances because of structural inequalities, are so often faced with.

Many women who function below eye level in society live in absolute poverty because policy makers do not want to think about drug users, or multiple deprivation, or the lack of appropriate accommodation for homeless women, or entrenched prejudice towards single mothers.

We need to address all of these factors because society, the economy and government policy all help to make selling sex the easiest or only option for a lot of women.

Some sex workers stress their autonomy and freedom to choose sex work. Many others do not and it is those who have had little or no choice that many are quite rightly concerned with.

Policies driven by a dogmatic adherence to ideology rarely address the whole picture and, true to form, some of the recent approaches in Edinburgh seem to be dealing with one aspect while the wider ramifications go untouched.

Having said that, in all of this there is a truism so many of us writing about sex work so often forget; it is not about us.

Sex workers are not puppets we can manipulate to further our causes.

Sex workers, lest we forget, are human beings who deserve as much safety, dignity and respect as anyone else. We talk so much about disempowerment and the structural forces that operate behind many women’s entry into sex work.

And yet a lot of this feels as if we are debating over the top of their heads while they remain voiceless, left to pick up the pieces after opposing world-views lock horns once again.