Oldest profession hits back

Press, 6 May 1980, Page 24

Oldest profession hits back

By

DAVID LEIGH

in the “Guardian,” London

Outside the London courtroom where 46-year-old Cynthia Payne was imprisoned recently for running a brothel, one lawyer pungently quoted Lear: “Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back; thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind for which thou whipped her.”

None of those who dealt with the case late last month were clients .of Cynthia Payne but her Christmas party did include at least two Recorders — part-time judges — according to legal sources.

And there were other barristers, solicitors, managing directors, accountants, a peer, an Irish M.P. — and several vicars.

Cynthia Payne’s counsel, Geoffrey Roberts.on, described witheringly this “endless

parade of suburban male respectability who beat a path to her door.” None of them were punished, although names are locked up at Scotland Yard — statements were taken from all the 53 hapless men discovered queuing on the stairs clutching £25 tickets in their hand. Well might Ml 5 have been concerned at the blackmail possibilities, as legal sources disclosed they were after the raid.

But while the male establishment was plainly anxious to see this affair carefully handled, the prostitutes are determined to turn it into a feminist issue. “We have a right to do with our .own bodies as we like,” Selma James, of the English

Collective of Prostitutes said after the court case.

“Not only is Cynthia Payne being jailed, but she is being fined so heavily, she’ll have to sell her house. Too few women have enough money to buy a house or even rent a flat.”

The prostitutes collective does not want to see licensed brothels as in Germany and the Netherlands, and as Southeampton council proposed last year in an effort to be realistic about their red-light district. They say that only turns the State into a pimp. They want to be allowed to work freely. “The laws don’t protect young girls anyway,” one of Selma James’s colleagues said. “If she’s in the hands of a pimp she can’t go to the police and complain.”

The Criminal Law Revision Committee under Lord Justice Lawton has been studying prostitution laws since last August, and there is now a distinct British lobby for relaxation, and avoiding unnecessary imprisonment of prostitutes. As the law stands at present, a prostitute must live alone — two women sharing a flat can be‘charged with brothel-keeping — and kerb-crawling street customers, who are men, go untroubled.

Cynthia Payne’s counsel referred at her trial to the hypocrisy of a social system which punishes her, an unmarried mother who brought up. her son without recourse to social security, and lets men go free. As he also said: “The Christmas party is over — and she’s been left to pick up the tab.”