MLabour’s most ambitious pledge is not to achieve the highest sustainable growth in the G7 or to move the UK to zero-carbon electricity by 2030. Rather, it is to halve male violence against women and girls over the next decade. At least 100 women will have been killed by a man by 2023, so achieving this would be an extraordinary achievement that would transform the experience of being a woman in Britain. But a real test of Labour’s commitment is whether it is prepared to protect some of society’s most vulnerable women, trapped in prostitution.

Prostitution puts women’s lives at risk; it’s hard to put a precise figure on this, but women in prostitution are at a much, much higher risk of being murdered than other women. Femicide census figures show that between 2009 and 2023, 47 women working in prostitution in the UK were killed by men.

All too often these women are effectively written off. An example of this was just last week’s BBC coverage of the trial of the alleged murder of her mother, Samantha Holden, who her family described as a “kind and beautiful soul who will be loved forever”. She was found strangled and suffocated by her 18-year-old son. This was not how the BBC portrayed her death: “Court hears murdered sex worker found dead by son” was the headline for hours before being changed in the face of righteous anger. This plays into two damaging societal mores. The first is the age-old assumption that women who take money for sex – who are overwhelmingly coerced or trafficked in this depraved “industry” – are somehow less deserving than other victims of male violence. The second is the more recent idea that governments should ignore this commercial sexual exploitation because “sex work is work” and the state should allow it to happen rather than cracking down on men who buy sex. Both are harmful because they undermine women’s protection from violent men.

That women are killed is a feature, not a bug, of prostitution. One only has to read some of the appalling online reviews to see how men view these women as objects that exist to satisfy their sexual desires, however violent. In one study, a significant minority of men who buy sex openly said that their payment entitles them to demand any act of their choosing; more will genuinely think that. The concept of consent itself falls apart in a situation where a man is paying for sex: how can a woman meaningfully act consensually with someone she knows could kill her within minutes if she says no or makes the wrong facial expression?

Rape becomes a hollow concept; sexual abuse becomes the entitlement of a paying customer. One survivor, Esther, told me that her decision to tattoo every part of her body was a safeguard to stop violent men from going too far, because it made her body so recognizable.

Men who buy sex are more likely to commit violent crimes. For some men, paying for sex is clearly a conveyor belt to violence and sexual abuse. Why would a society serious about combating violence against women leave that conveyor belt to young men whose sexual norms are already unhealthily influenced by violent pornography?

Feminist and advocacy organisations such as UK Feminista and Cease are posing this question to the Labour government, which has set itself the breathtakingly ambitious target of halving violence against women and girls. Does the government view the vulnerable women harmed by male sex buyers – a study in nine countries found that almost seven in 10 prostitutes suffer from PTSD – as as valuable as other female victims? There are encouraging signs: two home secretaries, Diana Johnson and Jess Phillips, are former members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation (APPG), which has recommended recognising prostitution as a form of violence against women and criminalising the purchase of sex or profiting from another person’s prostitution. Phillips promised last month that the government would pull out all the stops to reduce demand for commercial sexual services and protect women from exploitation.

But Labour must confront the “sex work is work” mantra promoted by the pimp lobby (which it has rebranded as “sex workers”), which has a strong influence on parts of the left. Men who pretend that prostitution is a business based on the same power dynamics and privileged naïve people who buy into the “lucky hooker” myth that many women are happy to offer sex for money but never ask themselves whether they would accept £20 for a blow job are easily persuaded.

The reality is that prostitution is predominantly reserved for women who have no other choice: they are addicted to drugs or alcohol, or have a history of domestic and/or sexual abuse in childhood. The average age of entry into prostitution is 15. And women are trafficked from countries like Romania to the UK and kept as virtual sex slaves, where they are raped daily by multiple men who pay for the privilege. According to one study, more than half of male sex buyers know that most women in prostitution are lured, tricked or trafficked, but they exploit them anyway.

Meanwhile, the state looks the other way. Too few police forces use the fact that it is a crime to offer sex in public to crack down on men who buy sex, while it is perfectly legal to arrange sex online. Sexual exploitation websites such as Vivastreet and Adultwork rake in huge profits from pimps plying women. Their business model drives demand for sex trafficking by making it extraordinarily easy for criminal gangs to connect with buyers. Sex trafficking is almost ten times more profitable than other forms of forced labour, but is much harder to prosecute under UK law because it requires proof that terrified women have been forced into sex work, which is extremely difficult in practice.

International evidence shows that criminalizing the purchase of sex reduces male demand for prostitution. Sex trafficking is most prevalent in countries such as Germany where prostitution is legal. In Sweden, where the purchase of sex was criminalized in 1997, male demand for prostitution has decreased significantly without increasing the risk for prostituted women, as the pimp lobby often argues. Male demand for prostitution is not innate. Governments influence it through legislation.

Back to the core question: Will Labour seize the opportunity to curb this deadly form of violence against women and girls?