FYI, my other email today:

Dear Morning Report Team

Your article this morning entitled “Campaign to Legalize Prostitution in the UK” was disappointing. The interviewer blithely accepted everything the interviewees claimed and treated an important issue as if covering a light-hearted school play.

When interviewee “Shirley” referred to a Nevada brothel she had visited as a “prison”, no challenging question ensued such as “Were the prostitutes there free to stay or leave?”.

When Shirley claimed NZ brothels were better for protecting the women, no question ensued about protection for the clients. A little further exploration would have highlighted the fact that although NZ legislation includes rudimentary provisions to protect the physical health of clients, to protect the reputation of particular streets or areas in the community and to limit the type of advertising brothels can undertake, there is no requirement for NZ prostitutes to operate according to a code of ethics and barely any attention is paid to the needs and safety of the consumer. That’s because the NZ legislation was based on feminist priorities and beliefs that prostitutes are exploited victims forced into their meagre $150 to $500-an-hour trade through patriarchy.

When Shirley then claimed that the NZ system was safer for the community and clients, no question ensued to require her to explain how that could be so.

In New Zealand, health and helping practitioners are legally required to observe a raft of ethical practice rules in order to protect their clients from them. However, in the case of prostitutes (who earn as much as most professionals, who become aware through their service of intimate personal information about their clients and who are unlikely to be motivated by the pro-social aims typical in most helping professionals), no such protection for clients is in place. Prostitutes were legalized (which I support) and given relatively open slather to push their particular vice in society (which I don’t support). Why did NZ not take the opportunity to impose some ethical rules on prostitutes, for example to protect marriages and families, to discourage extortion, to ensure that prostitution was made fully accountable according to consumer protection laws, to establish a user-friendly and confidential complaint process regarding inadequate or unethical services, and so forth?

It would have been interesting to hear the same good journalism on this topic evident in most other articles in your otherwise excellent show. Unfortunately, it seems that the P.C. (politically conformist) line is usually taken with any issues of relevance to feminists and their propaganda.

Hans Laven