Hello and welcome to The Spectator podcast.

I'm Lara Prendergast and on this week's episode we'll be asking whether prostitution can ever be empowering.

We'll also be looking at the wide open race to be the next Tory leader.

And finally we'll be considering whether British universities need to become more elitist.

Prostitution or sex work has come to be seen as a choice, one which can even empower women.

But as Julie Bindle says in this week's issue of the magazine, this is a myth. In fact, prostitution

is still one of the worst forms of abuse going on in the UK, and it must be addressed as part of the

fight against modern slavery. Julie joins me now, along with Rachel Moran, a women's rights

activist and the author of, Paid For, My Journey Through Prostitution. So, Julie, you spent the past

few years researching your book, The Pimping of Prostitution. What did you discover?

This is a topic that I've looked at in the kind of realm of

violence against women for decades. But what I wanted to do in researching the book was to see how

the pro-prostitution lobby, the lobby that is prevalent around the world and very well funded,

presents its argument to the person

on the street. So, for example, if you go outside now and ask a pass-a-by, what do you think we

should do about prostitution? Because everybody knows that there are problems related to it.

They will tell you legalise it. They will tell you that it will make it safer for the girls, that it will

bring it above board, and that anything else would be a disaster. Now, they don't know anything

about the sex trade, the people that you stop. I'm just assuming that they're kind of lay

people who've never been involved in it and who aren't politicians or policy makers. But the reason

why they would say that, as opposed to what I would say,

and the other feminist abolitionists would say, which is, you should try to eradicate it,

...