Unforeseen Consequences

Unless you've been living on Mars, or at least outside the UK, for the last couple of weeks, it will not have escaped your notice that someone has been murdering prostitutes in the the Ipswich area. With a blog titled "Sex and Death", I could hardly fail to comment on this, albeit a bit late.

Matthew Parris has written an excellent article about it here, in which he lays the blame fairly and squarely at the current laws on prostitution.

The important point to take from this is that whenever governments make a law prohibiting something, there will be unforeseen, and often undesirable, side-effects. By making brothels and advertising illegal, they force women to work on the streets, and by making drugs illegal they push up the price and force addicts to commit crimes to feed their artificially expensive habits. That's what the International Collective of Prostitutes think, and they should know.

In this case, the murdered women would not have had to hang around on street corners, making themselves easy targets for a maniac, if the law had been different. It's a pity the lawmakers aren't able to see this.