Britain announced plans Wednesday to outlaw prostitution involving women forced into the sex trade through illegal trafficking.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith wants to criminalise paying for sex `controlled for another person`s gain` in England and Wales after rejecting a total ban on prostitution because of insufficient public support.

Under current laws here, buying or selling sex is not illegal but other activities related to prostitution, such as soliciting, kerb-crawling and pimping are.

`It is my proposal that men should actually think twice about paying for sex. The reason they should do that is that actually the majority of women don`t want to be involved in prostitution,` Smith told BBC radio.

`Trafficked women don`t have a choice, men do ... If there was not a demand for sex with trafficked women, there would be less trafficking.`

The plan is strongly opposed by the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), which represents sex workers and wants laws surrounding the trade to be loosened.

`Workers don’t benefit from criminalisation -- the ECP has been inundated by women who have been raided, arrested and charged and face imprisonment for running safe, discrete premises where no coercion is taking place.

`Anti-trafficking legislation is being used to justify these raids... how can women who want to get out of prostitution find another job if they have a criminal record?` it said in a statement on its website.

Britain`s laws on paying for sex have been in the spotlight for several years, particularly since the murder of five prostitutes by a serial killer in Ipswich, eastern England, in 2006.

That year, the government proposed relaxing the law by allowing groups of women to work together in brothels. A previous plan to introduce prostitution tolerance zones was ditched.

Smith said the new plan was partly inspired by the system in Sweden, where paying for sex is banned outright.

Research from Exeter University says there are around 80,000 prostitutes in Britain, of whom 20,000 have come from abroad.