WANT some ideas on how to turn Oxford into a sleazy, drug-ridden ‘red-light’ kind of city, where women are debased? Easy!

Just get a bar to apply for a licence for lap-dancing with extended opening hours, and get the application dealt with by a licensing officer who seems not to care, understand or know much about Oxford. He will approve the application.

Once the lap-dancing venue is up and running, and well advertised, the lap-dancers do their thing for the male customers – teasing them, getting them sexually aroused and probably frustrated by the ‘no touching the dancers’ rule.

This could alert the pimps and prostitutes who know that when customers leave the pub they will be easily tempted to pay for the services of the prostitutes without much persuasion.

Prostitutes also attract kerb-crawlers – men who drive around in cars looking for prostitutes in nearby streets but sometimes hassle ordinary women. Sadly, a number of prostitutes are forced to sell their bodies because they are addicted to drugs and need quick money to support their habit.

This in turn attracts drug-pushers into the area to sell their wares to the addicts. Therefore the area becomes littered with used condoms and needles.

Drug-pushers often carry guns or knives to protect themselves during drug wars. Before you know it, you’ve got a sleazy, drug-ridden, red-light area.

A lap-dancing club was allowed to open in Cowley Road. Fortunately its opening hours were curbed thanks to the gallant protest of the Muslim community from the nearby mosque who said the club was an insult to their women and their religion. And many other people in the Cowley Road community agreed with them.

However, the same results do not seem to have come about with St Ebbe’s Church, which is opposing Thirst Lodge’s application for its lap-dancing hours to be extended.

Thirst Lodge is right on the church’s doorstep. Why then is this church’s voice not heard?

The presence of the lap-dancing club offends them and what their church stands for, just as the club in Cowley offended what the mosque stands for.

Our city needs to be protected for all, not just those who have religion, but all the women and men who come here.

Let our city remain a decent place to visit and live in; don’t let it be turned into a red-light sleazy place similar to Soho.

And if prostitutes are really needed, why not provide a legalised brothel where they can be protected and men could also be safe from disease? It could be put somewhere discrete where it will not cause offence.

PAMELA WEBBER, Bullingdon Road, Oxford