It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, and I thank Ruth Maguire for bringing it to the chamber, although the last time I spoke in a members’ business debate on this subject was in December 2017, and I am not sure how much progress has been made in the intervening six years.

During her summing-up speech, the minister might want to address the question of whether it is still the Government’s position that prostitution is a form of violence against women and, if so, set out what plans the Government has to do something about it.

The motion addresses a report that makes international comparisons and looks at the importance of learning from the experiences of other countries about what works and what best practice looks like. I will draw on some examples of that work.

In Ireland, it was noted that, when previous convictions for prostitution were expunged and paying for sex was criminalised, it was more likely that women would then report any violence that had been committed against them.

In France, measures were put in place to provide support, including financial and accommodation support, for women who were exiting prostitution, and 90 per cent of women who exited prostitution found stable jobs at the end of that programme.

Sweden stressed the importance of training law enforcement officers in order to ensure the effective roll-out and implementation of legislation, as well as the importance of tackling trafficking alongside prostitution. One person said that doing those things together made Sweden a very unattractive location for traffickers, as their market dried up.

It is also hugely important to identify and recognise the importance of culture change and of shifting the boundaries of what is recognised as being acceptable behaviour within society, rather than normalising exploitative behaviour. Once again, there are examples from Sweden. In 1996, before the implementation of the legislation, 33 per cent of the population were in favour of criminalising payment for sex; by 2015, that figure had risen to 72 per cent, and only 0.8 per cent of men reported paying for sex in the previous 12 months, which was the lowest figure in all of Europe. After the implementation of legal reforms in Iceland, it was noted that those had created a space in which people saw prostitution as something that threatened the dignity and health of the seller.

The report is also clear that strong political leadership is an absolute prerequisite to addressing the challenge and that the role of Government is to end violence against women, not to mitigate or legitimise it.

Finally, I want to reflect on the points that I made in December 2017 that were addressed to those who seek in some way to justify paying for sex or are opposed to its criminalisation. I find it very peculiar and illuminating that they take the word of supply-side pimps, industry bodies and powerful economic lobbies in this sector when they would never take the word of the equivalent people in any other sector. They are right to call out, as we all do, exploitative sexual behaviour in the workplace or anywhere else that relies on significant imbalances of power, but they do not recognise the significant imbalance of economic power that is core to paying for sex. They would find abhorrent and would oppose, for example, men asking for sex as part of a rental contract, yet when the mechanism of exchange is not rent but cash, they find that acceptable. Those points deserve to be made again.

I thank Ruth Maguire again for bringing this debate to the chamber, and I thank those who worked on the report for the very helpful guidelines that it promotes for taking this work forward in Scotland.