Women: ‘Living or working near sex clubs negatively impacts our lives’

Women near strip clubs report feeling “uncomfortable, vulnerable or unsafe”, a new study has shown.

More than 700 women in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Manchester shared their views with feminist campaign group FiLiA about living, working or passing city strip clubs.

Such establishments, FiLiA found, were perceived by women “not as neutral features of the night-time economy but as institutions embedded within the sex trade”.

‘Threatened’

Writing in the foreword to the report ‘Life near Strip Clubs: Women’s Voices from UK Cities’, FiLiA Co-founder and CEO Lisa-Marie Taylor observed that such institutions “make women feel unsafe, watched, threatened”.

“Women in Edinburgh describe walking in the road to avoid men spilling out of venues. Women in Manchester take longer routes, cross busy roads, leave workplaces by different exits.”

She added: “Our report documents the single mothers disproportionately working in Cardiff’s clubs, the students pushed towards stripping to manage debt, the young women for whom, as one participant said, the sex trade is positioned as ‘an alternative if all else fails’.”

The campaign group called on decision-makers to close the venues and ensure “that women currently working in them have real, funded routes out”.

‘Moral assumptions’

Commenting on the report, former deputy leader of Edinburgh Council Susan Dalgety described how a number of years ago, “the minority Labour administration on Edinburgh City Council attempted to ban the city’s strip clubs by setting the maximum number of sexual entertainment venues to zero.

“After a two-year campaign that included a court case, they were eventually defeated by a coalition of Green, SNP, Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors who voted to keep the city’s three venues open”.

“At the meeting in February 2024 to decide the fate of the clubs, SNP councillor Martha Mattos Coelho told her colleagues they were ‘not here to make moral assumptions’.”

“Now would be a good time”, she suggested, for council members to revisit that decision for the sake of “all the women in the city”, from those who work in the strip clubs “to the female students too scared to walk home at night”.