If I suggest to fans of prostitution that nothing terrible will happen to men if they can’t pay for sex, I hear the same complaints: ‘But what about disabled men? How will they get a date?’ When I point out that sex is not a human right, I’m told about the mother who bought her severely disabled son a prostitute for his birthday, and that a returning war hero who has lost his legs should have the ‘right’ to pay for a woman. But consider all those millions of oppressed women. What about their rights?

In the midst of all the outrage about modern-day slavery, usually vulnerable men forced into manual labour, there is actually a far worse form of abuse going on in the UK. It happens in every city, town and even village. It’s endemic to every culture and region of the world, and yet these days we justify it in the name of ‘liberation’. We’ve become accustomed to thinking of prostitution as a legitimate way of earning a living, even ‘empowering’ for women. We call it ‘sex work’ and look away. We should not.

For the last three years I’ve been investigating prostitution worldwide to test the conventional wisdom of it being a career choice, as valid as any other. I conducted 250 interviews in 40 countries, interviewed 50 survivors of the sex trade, and almost all of them told me the same story: don’t believe the ‘happy hooker’ myth you see on TV. In almost every case it’s actually slavery. The women who work as prostitutes are in hock and in trouble. They’re in need of rescue just as much as any of the more fashionable victims of modern slavery.

One of the most disturbing discoveries I made was that the loudest voices calling for legalisation and normalisation of prostitution are the people who profit from it: pimps, punters and brothel owners. They have succeeded in speaking for the women under their control. The people who know the real story about the sex trade have been gagged by a powerful lobby of deluded ‘liberal’ ideo-logues and sex-trade profiteers.

As Autumn Burris, a former prostitute from California, who escaped in the late 1990s, told me: ‘I had to tell myself lots of things, lots of lies, in order to keep my brain from splitting into a million pieces and me going crazy with the continual abuse that was happening over and over and over, and the violence that goes along with prostitution.’ Autumn now campaigns for an end to the sex trade, and she runs training courses for police officers and other professionals on the realities of prostitution.

A survivor of the sex trade in Germany, Huschke Mau, put it this way: ‘Every time I met a john I had to drink not just one glass of wine but a bottle. If you’re sober and not doing any drugs you cannot make a (date) with a john. Once I stopped drinking, I couldn’t do it any more.’

If prostitution is tantamount to slavery, then why on earth do human rights campaigners and so many on the left support prostitution as a ‘job’ for women, and a ‘right’ of men? It all begins with the emergence of the campaign against HIV/Aids. It seemed, back then, to make sense to legalise brothels and pimping, and to create street-based ‘tolerance zones’ such as the one in Leeds. The ‘logic’ of this stance was that if you remove all criminal penalties, prostituted women will engage with support agencies, leading to 100 per cent condom use. This in turn will dramatically reduce HIV rates, argued the pro-legalisation lobby, and end the murder of women by pimps and punters.

This was the theory. But I visited a number of legal brothels in Nevada, Germany, Holland and Australia, and examined the claims made by the proponents of legalisation and what I found is that these arguments — the basis for our debate about prostitution today — simply don’t stand up.

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