Melissa Farley
Violence Against Women, Vol. 10, No. 10, 1087-1125 (2004)
With examples from a 2003 New Zealand prostitution law, this article discusses the logical inconsistencies in laws sponsoring prostitution and includes evidence for the physical, emotional, and social harms of prostitution. These harms are not decreased by legalization or decriminalization. The article addresses the confusion caused by organizations that oppose trafficking but at the same time promote prostitution as a justifiable form of labor for poor women. The failure of condom distribution/harm reduction programs to protect women in prostitution from rape, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and HIV is discussed. The success of such programs in obtaining funding and in promoting prostitution as sex work is also discussed.
INTRODUCTION
Can the physical, social, and psychological harms of prostitution be controlled or decreased by decriminalization, regulation, or other state monitoring? Is there any way to make prostitution safer? Is it possible to protect the human rights of those in prostitution? Does legalization or decriminalization decrease the dangers of prostitution?
In May 2003, prostitution was decriminalized in New Zealand (NZ) by a one-vote majority of its Parliament. Throughout this article, examples from NZ will be used to analyze arguments that decriminalizing prostitution would make prostitution safer for thewomen in it. Four of the five reasons proposed for the decriminalization of prostitution in NZ had to do with public health. In the law’s language, these were to safeguard the human rights of sex workers, to protect sex workers from exploitation, to promote the welfare and occupational safety and health of sex workers, and to create an environment that is conducive to public health. It was also alleged that the law would protect children from the exploitation of prostitution (New Zealand Justice and Electoral Committee, 2001).2
Underpinning laws that legalize or decriminalize prostitution is the belief that prostitution is inevitable. This notion is advanced from different quarters: from pimps and johns,3 governments, public health officials, and from sexologists and evolutionary psychologists. Pimps have, for example, promoted legalized prostitution with the following arguments:
Why make a married man who is looking for nothing more than an alternative to masturbation, get busted in a sting, have his name and picture be published in his local paper and have to explain everything to his wife? Isn’t that destructive to society? Why have a legion of free-lance STD-spreaders when you could control and regulate sex-field workers’ health? Why consume law enforcement time and resources to the tune of hundreds-of thousands of dollars per year instead of collecting at least an equal amount in real estate and income tax withholding? It only makes sense. (Patrick, 2000, p. 12)
Public statements by pimps emphasize that prostitution is here to stay, with Dennis Hof in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Heidi Fleiss in Sydney, Australia, repeating the mantra that “boys will be boys.”4 A Canadian attorney defended legal prostitution stating that prostitution “is a bottomless market” (Young, 2003). These stereotypes about men not only normalize and trivialize prostitution but are also good business strategy, relieving johns of any doubts regarding the social acceptability of their sexual predation while at the same time inviting them to spend their money.
Prostitution has been proposed as development policy for newly industrializing and developing countries. Often, those promoting prostitution are sex industry businessmen and government officials. Sex businesses such as escort prostitution, massage brothels, strip clubs, phone sex businesses, and Internet prostitution have been described by Lim (1998) as the sex sector of a state’s economy. In some countries, profits from the sex sector are included in estimates of its economic activity. For example, in the Netherlands, the sex industry constitutes 5% of the GDP (Daley, 2001). Women in Dutch prostitution tell us that although legalization of prostitution was promoted as a way to improve their lives, they view it primarily as a way for the State to tax their earnings (Schippers, 2002). Often they do not think that their health has benefited or that they are offered more protection under legalized or decriminalized prostitution.
Some social scientists define the predatory behaviors of men buying women in prostitution as normal, maintaining that prostitution is simply part of human nature (Ahmad, 2001; Fisher, 1992; Masters & Johnson, 1973; Pheterson, 1996; Scambler & Scambler, 1995). This definition of normalcy is then reflected in public policy that defines prostitution as a form of labor (sex work), where prostitution is considered an unpleasant job but not different from other kinds of unpleasant jobs, such as factory work. From this perspective, prostituted women are viewed as simply another category of workers with special problems and needs (Bullough & Bullough, 1996; Kinnell, 2001; Nairne, 2000). The World Health Organization (WHO) defined prostitution as a dynamic and adaptive process that involves a transaction between seller and buyer of a sexual service (World Health Organization, 1988). WHO has since recommended decriminalization of prostitution (Ahmad, 2001). Much of the health sciences literature has viewed prostitution as a job choice (Deren et al., 1996; Farr, Castro, DiSantostefano, Claassen, & Olguin, 1996; Green et al., 1993; Romans, Potter,Martin, & Herbison, 2001; UN/AIDS, 2002). Yet the notion that prostitution is work tends to make its harm invisible.
Where did the idea that prostitution is work originate? In 1973, the U.S. organization COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) declared that prostitution was legitimate service work. In the 1980s, COYOTE capitalized on the AIDS epidemic as a health crisis, keeping its organizational focus on increasing its customer base but shifting its strategy to educational outreach in addition to advocacy of decriminalization of prostitution (Jenness, 1993). These goals are reflected in the activities of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective (NZPC), one of many COYOTE offshoots that
provide union-style organizing for those in prostitution. When prostitution is understood as violence, however, unionizing prostituted women makes as little sense as unionizing battered women.
Political parties have also adopted platforms defining prostitution as work. For example, the Green Party has championed prostitution as labor and those in prostitution as sex workers. A NZ Green Party member described the decriminalization of prostitution as a way of protecting prostitutes’ rights as workers (Sue Bradford, Green Party public speech in Auckland, New Zealand, June 26, 2003). However, another sponsor of the NZ decriminalization bill admitted, “it’s going to be the owners or the operators [of brothels and other sex businesses] who are going to be the long-term beneficiaries [of decriminalization]” (Else, 2003, n.p.). In this statement, the politician seems to acknowledge that workers’ rights in prostitution are a political fantasy. While appearing to promote public health, the NZ law keeps the names of brothel owners secret, thus making public health inspections of brothels an impossibility. The outraged mayor of Auckland, New Zealand, wrote, “This so-called legitimate profession remains partly hidden behind a veil of secrecy [under the new law]” (Banks, 2003, n.p.). In fact, the law protects the privacy of pimps and generally represents the interests of johns.
Support for legalized prostitution comes from many who believe that legalization will decrease the harm of prostitution, like a bandage on a wound. People are genuinely confused about how to address what they intuitively understand to be the harm of prostitution. They ask,“Wouldn’t it be at least a little bit better if it were legalized? Wouldn’t there be less stigma, and wouldn’t prostitutes somehow be protected?” For example, NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark was quoted as saying that prostitution is “abhorrent” while at the same time supporting her Labour Party’s prostitution decriminalization bill as a way to reduce the harm of prostitution (Banks, 2003). People are confused by the illogic of vaguely written public policies that claim to reduce the harm of legalized prostitution. For example, the NZ Accident Compensation Commission (ACC) establishes risk assessments for various occupations, setting amounts for what employers must pay to cover medical and rehabilitation claims. Prostitution has been categorized by the ACC as a safer job than child care attendant or ambulance staff (Dearnaley, 2003).
Legal strategies to promote prostitution as work may be framed as issues of prostitutes’ human rights, further confusing 1090 VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN / October 2004 people. COYOTE proposed that to deny women the “right to prostitute” was to violate their civil rights (Jenness, 1993). For example, a 1993 Sex Workers Action Coalition (SWAC) flyer noted that the group opposed legislation against pimping because it violated the rights of prostitutes. SWAC further argued that even though johns could be seen to be “taking advantage of a prostitute’s economic vulnerability,” they opposed enforcement of antiprostitution laws against johns (SWAC, 1993). These strategies are best understood as attempts to remove all obstacles to conducting the business of prostitution. Laws against sex predators—pimps and johns—are seen as barriers to business operations.
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