TVScope: Anne Widdecombe Versus Prostitution, UTV, Wednesday, 10pm
"There is perhaps no phenomenon which displays so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue." - Erich Fromm
'Shameless, desperate and probably on drugs," trumpeted Anne Widdecombe in her judgmental opening salvo on street prostitutes in this, the first of a three-part series in which the highly opinionated Conservative MP aims to tackle social issues.
Prostitution is a complex, multi-layered, multimillion pound industry, but her focus was almost exclusively on those on the very lowest rung - the street prostitutes.
Her extraordinarily ineffective approach to "understanding" their lifestyle was to charge straight up to the pimps, prostitutes and their kerb-crawling customers and, with the considerable ammunition of her formidable size and rasping voice, proceed to question them.
She was lucky to get away with having only beer thrown at her.
She did have a valid point that "decent people" living in Britain's leafy suburbs should not have to put up with prostitutes and their customers on their doorsteps, leaving behind their grim debris of used condoms and syringes.
However, she failed to grasp that she needs to tackle the underlying cause of drug addiction, rather than prostitution, with 95 per cent of the young women enduring the risks associated with street prostitution in order to feed their drug habits.
Ironically, one of these women, Collette, explained very logically that it is precisely because of the high risk involved that the women congregate in middle-class suburbs as here at least they can run and get help if attacked.
Instead, Widdecombe held up Southampton as a solution, where a zero-tolerance approach towards the kerb crawlers by the police has reduced the number of women on the streets from 300 to 89 in four years.
There was also unfortunately only brief reference made to the "legalise prostitution" debate, and to the New Zealand experience where it is felt that the decriminalisation of prostitution has made women safer.
The most disturbing part of this documentary was Widdecombe's haranguing of Collette about her lifestyle. The shaking Collette was then pressurised into contacting her family in order that Widdecombe could declare her "safe".
Inevitably, by the end of the documentary, Collette was back on the streets again.
It would seem that the shady pimps and kerb crawlers were not the only exploiters of Collette's vulnerability.
Review by Olive Travers, clinical psychologist