Over on The Daily (Maybe) Jim sets out the thinking behind the Green Party policy on prostitution – decrimininalistion – so well that I won’t bother to repeat it.

He was prompted, as will be many commentators in the next few days, by the confirmation, if it were needed, that a serial killer has been targetting street sex workers in Ipswich: the death toll now has risen to five.

In the less likely surroundings of The Times, Alice Miles arrives at the same conclusion:

The solutions are too unpalatable for polite politics, which relies on middle-class votes in “nice” areas like Suffolk for election.
First, brothels: proper, clean, large-as-you-like, licensed knocking shops, with medical checks and protection for the girls. And tax credits too. Not all prostitutes would want to join one, but at least they would have a choice. At the beginning of this year Labour launched a “prostitution strategy”, after the most thorough review of the law in half a century. It abandoned ideas for managed zones in non-residential areas and instead prescribed a crackdown on kerb crawling, early intervention, efforts to tackle demand and new attempts to help women to escape from the lifestyle. It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious and so sad: a pathetic range of tried and failed “policies”. The only promising proposal was to allow up to three women to operate from the same premises in sort of mini-brothels without facing prosecution; but there has been no sign since of the legislation needed to implement it.

I’d add a still more radical line – we should stop regarding sex work as having any sort of stigma; should try very hard to remove any of our lingering Judeao-Christian hang-ups about sex. It should be a job choice like any other – and one that attracts exactly the same – indeed given the level of risk, higher, levels of health and safety protection. (I have no doubt that the rate of death and injury among sex workers is higher than that of any other line of work – higher than fishermen, building workers et al) .

I’ve just been reading something so horrible (I’ll blog it when I can get my head around it) that I need to collect some good news. So a short selection:

1. The British Army is finally abolishing a gross discrimination that has continued since 1816 – female Gurkhas are to be recruited alongside the men. You might think that getting into the army and being sent to Afghanistan or similar is hardly a privilege, but if this is the way for you to escape being a house/field near-slave, win tremendous respect and the opportunity to get your family out of abject poverty, the opportunity can only be a good thing for the women. (As evidenced by the fact they’ve started queueing already, even based on a rumour.)

And hopefully someone will also re-educate the colonel who calls them “girl gurkhas”…. (Somehow I doubt they’ll be recruiting under 18s.)

2. Two books find women are finding new ways in and around relationships. One finds that in the US if you have a PhD or Master’s, despite all the stereotypes you are more likely to be married than your less-educated sisters. (Not that I think marriage is necessarily a good thing, but I fear these stereotypes stop some women continuing their education.) The other finding is that many women who want a child are finding ways to have them, sucessfully, even if there’s no bloke around.

3. Hummer sales have fallen from 34,000 in 2003 to 17,000 this year. Yes, I feel slightly sorry for the people losing their jobs as a result, but a lot more sorry for the Nepalese farmers I was reading about today who are losing all of their land to climate change.