In a bid to tackle the demand for prostitution, the Policing and Crime Act will toughen up on kerb-crawling, replacing its current tendency to caution with more first-time arrests. The definition of persistent soliciting has also been amended, so that "persistent" now constitutes just two incidences in three months. Criminalising clients inevitably impacts negatively on the sex workers, and fails to deter the unscrupulous punters, those who seek whatever services they want, whatever the law says. For some, it will merely inflame the thrill of the illicit, for others, intensify the guilt, confusion and self-loathing they experience in purchasing sex in the first place, something that can then be projected on to the sex workers themselves. Since Scotland criminalised clients in 1997, reported incidences of violence against sex workers have more than doubled. According to the human rights organisation Justice, violence against Swedish sex workers rose after kerb-crawling was outlawed.

Rape convictions for sex workers are well below the national average. Meanwhile, the government's Violence Against Women strategy, published last year, acknowledged that sex workers are the most vulnerable women in the UK today. And yet sex workers are rarely afforded Article 7 of the Human Rights Act — the right to equal protection of the law. Sex workers, it seems, have less right to consensual sex than other Britons.

Jane, a high-end escort, told me how she was forced to abandon her home and move 60 miles to escape the harassment she experienced for selling sex. A female neighbour verbally and physically intimidated her, pumped Halon gas through her letter box and held a knife to her throat, claiming that her "whoring" was damaging the neighbourhood. When Jane reported this to the police, they told her that if she wanted the neighbour to stop, she should stop escorting, "or we will shut you down". 

In a recent raid on a brothel in Mayfair's Shepherd Market, prostitutes complained to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) that the police were aggressive, busting down doors, smashing security equipment and stealing money which had never been returned. According to the Home Office, the Policing and Crime Act supposedly aims to increase "police accountability and tackle crime and disorder". 

Astonishingly, no sex workers were consulted in the construction of the Act. Only after it was passed by royal assent did a civil servant, Alistair Noble, consult sex workers to ask what they felt its practical implications would be. There are multiple sources of alternative, credible research which the government could and should have taken into consideration when constructing the Act: the Royal College of Nurses and the British Psychological Association, the human rights organisation Liberty and academics such as Hilary Kinnell, who wrote Violence and Sex Work in Britain, to name but a few.

Following the murder of five women in Ipswich in 2006, the government amended the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, conceding that the criminalisation of sex workers would only increase their vulnerability. The Policing and Crime Act resurrects that murderous threat.