News

Personal experiences which have influenced the lives and opinions of those involved in social care.

How would you feel if a service user with whom you were working told you that he or she wished to use the services of a prostitute? What if the individual in question was a disabled elderly widower, living in a care home, who craved sex with a woman, and who believed that he would never again have a relationship with a woman which might involve sex? Even if he did develop such a relationship, he knows sex would be difficult because of where he lives.

Sometimes we grow professionally and ethically by thinking the unthinkable and seeing what it feels like; like me, you might find the situation I am raising unthinkable. I am thinking about it because of a recent conversation with a man who has thought seriously about the possibility of using a professional agency to access sexual opportunities. His situation overlaps in some ways with the one I have raised.

Let's think the unthinkable together. Imagine that a client has told you that he wishes to procure the services of a prostitute and wants you to help him. What should you do? Should the fact that you do not value prostitution as an activity prevent you from doing what you can to help him? Should the fact that you believe that prostitution is about the degrading misuse of women by men, prevent you from doing what you can to help? Should it make a difference to what you decide to do, that you find the idea of anyone paying for sex distasteful? Or the fact that you consider it immoral? In this, as in other areas of your professional activity, should your personal values intrude in your work? Can you get yourself off the hook by citing the law?

Let's assume, for the moment, that you have decided to help this elderly, physically disabled man to find sex. What will you do? Should you make a booking for him with a woman who is willing to provide this service; and if so, how would you go about locating her? Should you arrange for a taxi to take him to a rendezvous, or take him there in your car? Should you help him into the building or leave him at the door and collect him later? Or would you expect your client to get there on his own?

But perhaps you will conclude that in spite of the fact that he has sexual rights, this physically disabled older person does not have the right to have sex, unless he can make a relationship with someone who wishes, in a properly reciprocal way, to have sex with him. That would be sad, but it is one of the realities of life for most people. Or at any rate, it is one of the realities of life for people who live in the UK. In other European countries, including the Netherlands, sex is obtainable for anyone, even outside a reciprocal relationship, provided that the price is right. There are even services that cater specially for the needs of disabled people. Are we right? Or are they?

Gavin Fairbairn is professor of professional development in nursing and midwifery, University of Glamorgan.