Someone, Somewhere, Is Wrong about Prostitution, Clients And The Numbers
We’re often told that there’s some 60,000 to 80,000 prostitutes in the UK. And there’s some assumptions made about how many clients they have, how much money they make and so on. And we’ve also got various bits and pieces of evidence about how many men actually pay for sex. And when we compare the two numbers with each other it just doesn’t seem to add up really. Someone, somewhere, has to have some of the numbers wrong.
For example, the ONS (the government’s statistics arm) thinks that there are around 60k tarts in the country. They each have 25 clients a week as well. Each trick pays around 60 and that’s how we get to the idea that prostitution amounts to 6 billion a year or so in the economy. That’s actually part of the official figures of how large the economy is now (and is part of the reason we’ve got to pay that extra €1.7 billion to the EU).
However, on the other side we’ve also got this:
One in nine British men have paid for sex, according to a new study.
And the likeliest to do so are 25 to 34-year-old single men in managerial or professional occupations, and those who have had a high number of partners.
The research, published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections, revealed that 3.6 per cent of the 6,000 men surveyed admitted visiting prostitutes in the past five years.
One in nine have ever done this. And it’s only just under 4% who have done this in the past five years.
Well, how many men are there in the country? Roughly 25 million (64 million of us, take off the children and then 50/50 men and women). 4% of that is 1.25 million men who have, at any time in hte past 5 years, bought sex.
But back to our 60,000 tarts and their 25 customers a week. That’s 1.5 million visits a week: and yet there’s only 1.25 million men making those 1.5 million visits?
We’re supposed to believe that all of the men (on average) who have ever bought sex in the past 5 years are buying it more than once a week?
This just doesn’t add up. It simply cannot be true that all of these numbers are correct. Someone, somewhere, is very wrong.
At a best guess it’s the number of clients that each tart has in a week. Rather than there being that number full time there’s an awful lot of them doing a bit of part time work here and there. But through the fog of these incorrect numbers it’s difficult to tell.
Posted: 18th, November 2014 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
