What does legalization of prostitution mean?
Legal prostitution is state-sponsored prostitution. Legal prostitution means that the state of Nevada legally permits the buying and selling of women in prostitution. Nevada’s counties collect taxes from the sales of women to men who buy them (johns or tricks).
In Nevada legal prostitution, the counties are the pimps, collecting taxes. In legal prostitution the john is welcomed as a legitimate consumer. Since we know that prostitution always harms women, the legalized buying and selling women is in effect the promotion of and profiting from women’s poverty, childhood sexual abuse, sexual harassment and sexual exploitation.
Similar in effect to legal prostitution, decriminalized prostitution is even more extreme. It means that all laws regarding prostitution would be removed. In other words, buying a woman would be the social and legal equivalent to buying toilet paper. Prostitution in all its forms - street, brothel, escort, massage - would be legally permitted. Pimps and traffickers the world over would become Nevada’s new businessmen, Johns would be welcomed consumers.
Regardless of its legal status, prostitution is extremely harmful to those in it. Legalization of prostitution does not decrease the physical and the emotional safety of women in prostitution. Wherever legal prostitution exists, nearby illegal prostitution increases.
There is no way to make prostitution “a little bit better” any more than it is possible to make domestic violence “a little bit better.” Prostitution is a profoundly harmful institution. Who does it harm the most? The woman who is prostituting is hurt the worst. She is hurt psychologically as well as physically. There is scientific evidence for this.
Should we arrest women in prostitution? No.
Almost all women in prostitution are there as a last resort, they don’t “choose” prostitution the way someone chooses a career as an x-ray technician.
81% of the women in the Nevada legal brothels prostitution urgently want to escape it. For information based on research interviews of the women in the legal brothels see Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections which can be ordered at www.nevadacoalition.org
Let’s focus on the real predators: the johns who assume that they are entitled to buy women for sex. These are the perpetrators of sexual exploitation and abuse who should be arrested, not the women who are bought.
Let’s shut down the legal brothels and instead offer women, men and children in prostitution real choices.
Women tell us that they need stable housing, social services, medical treatment, and job training in order to get out of prostitution. That’s what they should receive – not more restrictive coercion in the legal brothels which many women describe as “little prisons.”
MYTHS AND FACTS
| MYTH: Legalization of prostitution will stop illegal prostitution |
FACT: Legalization of prostitution in Nevada, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands has resulted in an increase in illegal, hidden, and street prostitution. Decriminalization and legalization promote sex trafficking. Germany and the Netherlands are currently reconsidering whether to get rid of legal prostitution because of these social problems. |
View entire fact sheet
