Not a big one for honours, unsurprisingly (whose idea was it that we remove all references to the empire in the honours, and allow the option of being presented them by the Speaker? I like that), but if we have to have them in their current form, then I’m glad that they’re going to good people.

Prof Averil Millicent Cameron, CBE, Prof of Late Antique and Byzantine History, Univ of Oxford and Warden, Keble College, for serv to classical scholarship.

Ms Susan Catherine Leather, MBE, chair, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Auth, for serv to the regulation of infertility treatment and embryo rsrch.

Ms Julie Therese Mellor, chair, Equal Opportunities Commission, for serv to equal opportunities.

I didn’t make lectures very often at Oxford, but I did hear Averil Cameron a few times, which was great and may have contributed to me getting some marks at all from the GH1 and 2 papers; being one of the first woman heads of a formerly all-male Oxford college endears her to me too. Suzy Leather has a reliable way of winding up the anti-choice and anti-gay brigade at the HFEA; Julie Mellor was unfailing an articulate spokesperson for women’s equality in any number of arenas until she stood down earlier this year. And now they’re all Dames.

Meanwhile, Chris and Tim are getting excited about an award for services to bats in Oxfordshire…

(thanks Tim W for the link to the full lists)

Once again we’re debating the pay gap today, folks. Start here (and by the way, go Margaret Prosser!) and make sure that you pootle over to Harry’s Place where the commenters are discussing the issue in a notably ill-informed way (poor dears, they get a bit confused when the issue’s not Iraq). I love the EOC for the way they keep on going on this issue: now we have to make sure our government gets some backbone and actually delivers for women.

Imagine the picture: Jo and I were lying in bed on Saturday night, listening to the midnight news and trying to get to sleep so that present-opening time would come sooner (note to any kids reading: yes, grown-ups love Christmas too, just as much as you, we just hide it better and feign indifference). Half asleep, there comes on the news the item that a Lib Dem has urged Santa Claus to swop his reindeer for a more environmentally-friendly bus. To be honest, I thought the quantities of red wine and Bailey’s coffee I had consumed had made my sleepy brain ellide two unrelated news stories. But no: Tom Brake MP did put out a press release calling for just that!

Good to see that the Government hasn’t caved in to calls to make red light districts legal under the guise of “toleration zones”. After all, what happens where you set them up is that some women work in them and receive some measure of protection and support, but others are forced, perhaps through fear of identification, to work outside the zone with no protection at all. The zones become a magnet for organised crime and drug dealing, and British police begin colluding with gangs of people smugglers who have enticed women to the UK with the promise of work or the threat of violence.

My opinions are formed by my experience observing an excellent harm reduction project, now defunct, in the Brick Lane area. The workers used to joke blackly about the tourists on their Jack the Ripper walking tours, who failed to realise that they were passing through one of London’s busiest red light areas, where women were beaten up by pimps and punters every week. I chatted to women using the outreach workers as an early warning system about known violent customers and prostitutes who were missing; women who spoke of punters bargaining them down to two or three pounds, and they took it because someone else would if they wouldn’t; women who couldn’t speak to us for fear their pimps would see they weren’t working; women with weeping sores on their mouths and infected abcesses from injecting, who nonetheless still got plenty of custom.

I’m not talking about middle class women “working” from a suburban bedroom, but about women selling sex on the streets, from “massage parlours” and bedsits. I can’t see prostitution as a choice, just as another form of violence against really vulnerable women. The current vogue amongst leftist women is to urge that prostitutes unionise: I’m unconvinced of the value of this, not least because it might expose women to greater violence from their pimps, and I don’t like the message that prostitution is a job like any other. I believe in women’s autonomy, but that’s hard to reconcile that with my belief that most prostitution is not a choice, but something women are forced into by lack of choice.

Of course, despite what many local communities blighted by prostitution on their streets understandably think, the real problem is not the women selling sex but the men who pay for sex. Let’s ASBO a few kerb-crawlers, put their photos in the paper, and see whether they come back for more.

It’ll be interesting to see what their full response to the Paying the Price consultation proposes when it’s published next month. I think our priority has to be offering opportunities for women to exit prostitution. In the short-term this means a harm-reduction strategy, plus a well-funded network of easy-access women-only hostels, both wet and dry, and drug treatment programmes that are available immediately, with no waiting list, as appointments tomorrow or next week mean nothing to women with chaotic lives. It means ratifying the UN Convention on Trafficking and treating women who have been trafficked as victims, giving them secure immigration status and the right to remain in the UK, so we have some chance of getting convictions. It means not criminalising prostitution, as we do at the moment. Unbelievably it is still possible to prosecute young people selling sex if they “persist” in doing so, according to government guidance. Though I generally support the use of ASBOs to clean up areas, asbo’ing women to stop them selling sex results, in the breach of the order, in sending them to prison for an offence no longer punishable by imprisonment.

In the long term, it means taking a long hard look and action to stop at the patterns of grooming of young vulunerable women, who are captivated by older boyfriends who flatter them, treat them, and get them selling sex. And it means tackling domestic violence, drug abuse and women’s homelessness, no easy feats. But above all, it means accepting that prostitution is not the romanticised “world’s oldest profession”, and it doesn’t always have to be with us, if we decide to make a determined effort to end the exploitation of women and children.

Typical. I go away and Norm puts up his profile of me! If you’re visiting for the first time, welcome. You may wish to start here. Oh, and although Norm has linked my favourite song to something by a fella called James Blunt (?), it’s actually the song Beautiful written by Linda Perry, and made famous by Christina Aguilera; I prefer the Alex Parks version.

PS, a few days later: seems the fellas over at Laban’s aren’t very keen on me, really. Nor’s someone called Adloyada, either: I’ve ended up in her guest Britblog round-up, and she seems to think I care which type of faith faith schools adhere to. I don’t, not really: scrap the lot of them - if parents want their kids to learn about their faith, as well they might, they can send them to Sunday school / Arabic school / Hebrew school etc after school hours or at the weekend.

Christmas greetings to all readers!

Mary was a teenage mum
She gave birth in a byre
‘Spite poverty and prejudice
Her babe was the Messiah!

(picture and doggerel courtesy of the lovely Jane Tomlinson, who understood and sympathised when I lost the argument to have “Mary was a teenage mum” corporate Christmas cards at work, and created this for me instead. Go buy her real art! I’d like to point out that we were talking about this before the Guardian women’s page got in on the act.)

So, dear readers, this is it for several days as Jo and I head off to spend quality time with my family. Happy Christmas!

How many times did you study Hitler and the second world war at school? In 13 years, I studied it three times - at primary school, when it was about children being evacuated and how it felt to live through the Blitz, and then pre-GCSE and at GCSE, centring both times on the war in Europe. I was just lucky that we were one of the few schools in my area not to require further study of that same period at A-level, though instead we studied the Tudors for the third time.

So well done to the QCA for speaking out for a broader history curriculum. If it really is the case that 40% of students arrive at secondary school hating history already, then it must be urgent.

I wonder if they can do anything about my own history teaching bugbear - the way children are taught about the Romans as if they came to Britain from nowhere, ruled for a while with reference to nowhere else and after a while left to go nowhere? It’s like teaching the history of the British empire with reference only to events in Sri Lanka!

… the first lesbian or gay couple to get married in Oxfordshire yesterday. Lovely photo here.

Make them breed only daughters.

Being missed in the current debate about revising the definitions of the offences of murder and manslaughter is the relationship with domestic violence and abuse, so this seems like a good time to link to Justice for Women.

I’m slightly out-of-touch with the debate (by two or three years), but when I last wrote on this topic, the women’s movement were lobbying hard for change for two reasons. Men who killed their female partners often argue for diminished responsibility or provocation on grounds that she was nagged or was having an affair, and get the charge of murder reduced to manslaughter, destroying the reputation of the dead woman in the process and making it almost impossible to convict a husband of murdering his wife. But where a woman snaps and kills her violent partner, assumptions about provocation based on gender (e.g. that women, being on the whole physically weaker, may delay their reaction) mean that women get convicted of murder rather than manslaughter.

Some of the stories are horrific:

In 1989, after 10 years of severe violence against her, Kiranjit Aluwhalia threw petrol over her husband’s feet and set it alight whilst he was sleeping. He died some days later. She was arrested and charged with murder, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.