A woman who was forced into sex work as a teenager will no longer have to reveal her criminal convictions to potential employers after winning a battle in the high court.

Fiona Broadfoot, who fought the legal challenge along with two other women, said she was delighted that two senior judges had ruled that forcing them to reveal past convictions was unlawful.

All three women were forced into sex work as teenagers and each have multiple convictions for soliciting or loitering under the Street Offences Act.

The women argued they have been stigmatised by the existing law, which requires people convicted of crimes to disclose their past when applying for a range of jobs or volunteering activity after DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks.

Mr Justice Holroyde, sitting with Mrs Justice Nicola Davies, said: “We accept that the claimants have all suffered a handicap in the labour market, and have suffered embarrassment and humiliation.”



Broadfoot, who waived her right to anonymity and has campaigned for 20 years to prevent women in her situation having to disclose past convictions, said she felt vindicated. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to know that I don’t have to disclose any more that horrible history of abuse and violence,” she said.

She said that forcing women to disclose their records meant they could never move on. “I am 50 this year, and this happened in 1988,” she said. “That was my last alleged criminal offence that was never a criminal offence anyway. It is absolutely ridiculous that I have had to live with this all these years.”

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“In our view, it should be and is possible for parliament to devise a scheme which more fairly balances the public interest with the rights of an individual applicant for employment in relevant areas of work.”



The judges dismissed another six claims brought by the women, including arguments that the law amounted to gender discrimination and breach of privacy.

Holroyde said it was “greatly to their credit” that each of the women had succeeded in removing themselves from prostitution many years ago. He added: “I have no difficulty in accepting that all three claimants have, even as adults, been victims in many other ways.”

Broadfoot said it was appalling that the women had been forced to disclose the records for decades, while the men involved were never arrested. “When I was arrested, the police referred to my pimp by his first name. Well, why didn’t they arrest him?” she said.

“It’s going to be great, it’s going to be huge,” she said. “I won’t have to sit down and explain my abuse time after time after time. If I choose to do it, that’s fine. But I don’t want to be forced into it, because someone thinks I’m a weirdo perv, when the actual weirdo perv, nobody is looking at them. It’s a joke and it’s male privilege. Men, nobody even knows about their secret behaviour.”

Lawyers for the women said the ruling should result in their records, and those of others like them, being filtered to remove the soliciting offences.

Their solicitor, Harriet Wistrich from Birnberg Peirce, said: “It’s a huge victory for the women involved, and it will allow them to move on in their lives without being punished and stigmatised by the disclosure requirements of their past histories, which are essentially histories of abuse. They were victims, they were exploited, they are victims of child abuse, and instead they were treated as criminals.

Wistrich said the women would seek permission to appeal in relation to some of their unsuccessful grounds of challenge.

Karen Ingala Smith, the chief executive of Nia, a charity for women and girls escaping male violence, said: “We feel strongly that these women should never have been convicted in the first place. Prostitution is symptomatic of women’s continued inequality and discrimination and a form of violence against women. These women were exploited and coerced and yet it is their lives, not those of their buyers and pimps, that were blighted with convictions. They should not have had to take up this fight, but they did and it is to the benefit of all those exploited in prostitution”

