LONDON’S Conway Hall is exactly the place to be, for another lecture on an intractable moral dilemma.

It’s an issue where many liberals would love to see normalisation, crooning the old refrain that “it’s the world’s oldest profession” and putting faith in the unionisation of rape.

The opposing army in this critical debate sees the world of prostitution as the most venal and abusive instrument of that toxic blend of patriarchy and capitalism.

The current programme of talks, hosted by Conway Hall Ethical Society, is a series: Prostitution, Pimping and Trafficking, curated by Deborah Lavin. She’s decided to run six events, with lone speakers, rather than panels, hoping that specific opinions would be fairly heard, before debate ensued.

Laudable, indeed, though the first lecture lasted five minutes, before interruption. Dr Stacy Banwell, speaking on ‘Forced Prostitution: Unpacking the links between globalisation, neo-liberalism and the illicit sex trade’, had not mentioned feminism in her introduction; hackles were raised.

There were some interesting reflections here, on the devastating effects of war on women, especially widows, left as heads of households, where there is no food and no hope of getting a job to make the money to buy it. Dr Banwell has focused on Iraq and Syria, where “women were forced into prostitution, and trafficked. Men became emasculated, both by unemployment, and by the presence of a foreign force.”

Women, it seems, become part of a “coping economy,” sacrificing themselves to keep the family going; men tend towards the “criminal economy,” hence the handy income-generation in trafficking, sometimes selling their own wives. Women trying to escape war zones may trade sex to pay their so-called rescuers, including police officers in detention centres.

It’s puzzling that Dr Banwell, a principal lecturer in criminology in the School of Law at the University of Greenwich, posits that women are “using sex as a method of survival.” Suggesting that women have any agency whatsoever, though, seems a huge assumption. As curator Deborah Lavin challenged Banwell’s audience: “How many of us have actually been in a situation where there is no milk for a child, and no means of getting it?”

References to the “global sex trade” seems palatable enough, until we realise that this phrase means women being kidnapped, enslaved and raped repeatedly. The choice here is between “very little choice” and “no choice at all.”

In 2014, Dr Banwell did some empirical research with women in prostitution in the UK, for a piece of work called “Decriminalisation helps all of us and criminalisation harms all of us,” a project looking at government proposals to reform prostitution laws in England and Wales.

She focuses on transnational feminism, which “…. attributes women’s social, political and economic marginalisation to capitalism, class exploitation, neo-imperialism and neoliberalism.

“It also addresses the local and global contexts in which violence against women and girls occurs. The political economy approach broadens what is meant by violence and abuse, seeing forced prostitution — resulting from a lack of employment opportunities — as a form of structural violence.”

So far, so reasonable. It would have been helpful, though, to have put a spotlight on other areas of the world. It may well be an unassailable truth that neoliberalism contributes to the collapse of economies in conflict. Is the Jungle at Calais, or are the beaches of Lesvos, conflict zones in which desperate people take desperate measures? Are the young women in Britain being lured by venal “sex-for-rent” landlords also victims of hijacked economies?

This first lecture seemed to leave many questions unanswered. As the series progresses, it will coincide with the launch of another movement designed to decriminalise prostitution and to attack the Nordic Model, which aims to criminalise punters. Decrim Now will see Labour4Decrim appear at The World Transformed Festival in Liverpool, during Labour’s conference later this month.

The last lecture at Conway Hall features Professor Roger Matthews, who advocates that Britain adopt a form of the Nordic Model. The author of Prostitution, Politics & Policy says: “You can’t remove the abuse and coercion from prostitution, whether legal or not,” so “the answer is to clamp down on the punters, while helping the women to get out and stay out.”