Call for ‘john schools’ and the legal requirement that all persons found purchasing sex attend them.

Survivors of Prostitution-Abuse Calling for Enlightenment (SPACE) is an international group of sex-trade survivors with core membership from Ireland, the US and the UK.

They will be talking at different events in different parts of Scotland as part of the 16 Days of Action against violence against women.

The speakers will be highlighting the need for support for people who sell sex and for appropriate services for those who wish to leave prostitution.

They will also focus on the role of ‘punters’ and how the demand to buy sex drives the sex industry.

SPACE was first formed in Dublin, Ireland, in the spring of 2012 by five Irish women, all of them prostitution survivors.

These women have come together to raise the public’s awareness of the harms of prostitution and to fight for social change in how we approach, think about and deal with this sexual exploitation by challenging the demand and raising equality between men and women.

The women decided to forgo their anonymity for the purpose of speaking out against prostitution in the public arena.

Their objectives are:

Political recognition of all forms of prostitution as sexually-exploitative human rights violations.

Criminalisation of the demand for paid sexual access to human bodies.

The implementation of Exit Programmes.

Public education programmes to inform society about the global exploitation of the most vulnerable populations.

To draw attention to the way women who are racially marginalised are grossly overrepresented in prostitution, and that the majority of men buying them are white.

The implementation of ‘john schools’ and the legal requirement that all persons found engaging in the purchase of sex attend them.

Rachel Moran, one of the group’s founding members, said, “We know, though our lived experience, that the vast majority of women in prostitution are impoverished and are in prostitution for exactly that reason; and we also know, through our lived experience, that it is simply a cruelty for any government to introduce legislation that limits the ability of a woman in prostitution to earn a living without simultaneously offering her a way out.

“We thus strongly feel that prostitution can only be tackled by a strategy that recognises equally the need to suppress the demand for paid sex while offering women viable alternatives to providing it.

“Too often, groups that concern themselves with this issue overlook either one root cause or the other.

SPACE is asking governments to suppress demand for prostitution by criminalising it, and equally that governments address the shortage of living-wage opportunities for individuals in the sex trade.

“Both these aspects,” Moran concluded, “are equally important in the fight against commercial sexual exploitation.”

Members of SPACE will be speaking at The Trades Hall Glasgow, 85 Glassford Street, Glasgow from 9.00am to 9.45am on 27 November. For further details of their talks, email.