Should prostitution be legalised? Or what...

Manach wrote: »

If the issue is with human trafficking, then more resources and laws should be enabled to deal with this root cause. If the state is implying that there is a moral issue to be addressed here, this speaks loudly about their abandonment of any form of cohesive policy given the sea-change in traditional Western morality over this generation to the current progressive permissiveness.

Women are thus forced to experience exploitation on the streets, illegally, or from sex
“businessmen” in brothels. For women in legal brothels, managers and owners demand
up to 50% to 60% of takings. This is in the face of strong competition among prostituted
women for “clients” as increasing numbers of women enter prostitution, and as men have
an excess of sexual services on offer for them to buy. Legalisation, then, makes it harder
for women to earn a living through prostitution.
.....

Those who defend prostitution and call for legalisation often say that it is consensual and
women “choose” this “work.” What does this “consent” consist of? Many women engage
in two forms of work to make enough money to survive. One third of prostituted women
working in brothels in Victoria earned less than 500 Australian dollars, with only one in
five earning more than $1,000 per week (The Age, 28 Feb, 1999). Thus a woman who
waits tables in the daytime, protected perhaps by a sexual harassment policy, against men
grabbing her breasts, will be considered to have “consented” at 5 p.m. to much more
violating acts in the licensed brothel. In fact the “consent” is likely to take the form
simply of dissociation.
......

Legalisation was supposed to get prostituted women off the streets. Street prostitution
remained illegal. It was thought that women would choose to work in brothels. In fact
street prostitution still exists because it is related to wider social problems. Women who
are homeless, seriously drug addicted, under age, or who want to avoid being exploited
by sex “businessmen” continue to work on the street and suffer severe violence there.
The government’s Advisory Committee on prostitution determined that women are the
vast majority of street prostitutes, though there are also boys and transsexuals. Women
remain in the industry for between 10–15 years, “entrenched in a life cycle of
prostitution, drugs and prison.” A Victorian study called Off Our Backs in 1996
confirmed that 80 percent of street prostituted women are heavy drug users, with a
$A100–500 a day drug problem. Forty–six percent are mothers with children in
protective care.
Street prostituted women, because of the illicit nature of their work, are doubly
vulnerable to rape, battery and murder from the men who use them and from male passers
by. Statistics produced by the Prostitutes’ Collective of Victoria prior to the passing of
the 1994 Act reveal that reported rapes of prostituted women averaged 2 per week, with
one assault per night and 2 murders over the last year. Street prostituted women are
harassed by police and gutter crawlers. However, when prostituted women are
criminalised they cannot demand police protection or claim legal recourse for robbery or
coercion, for they thereby expose themselves as implicated in a criminalised trade.

...

Conclusion
Opposition to men’s prostitution abuse, and challenging the social acceptance of the
prostitution industry, is aided in many countries by the existence of a prostitution
survivors’ movement that speaks out about what prostitution really means for women. It
was the speaking out of survivors that empowered the feminist challenges to other forms
of violence: domestic violence, rape, child sexual abuse. In a country like Australia, and a
state like Victoria, where prostitution abuse has been so normalised, it is particularly hard
for survivors to speak out against it. One resource run by and for prostitution survivors
does exist -- Linda’s House of Hope, in Perth, West Australia (see Linda’s House of
Hope, Compass, ABC TV, 29 April, 2001). As the prostitution survivors’ movement
develops, it will be easier to change the climate of acceptance that has allowed the
industry to flourish in Victoria and elsewhere, and gain an effective solution to the
problems of prostitution outlined here.
The reality is that prostitution cannot be made respectable. Legalisation does not make it
so. Prostitution is an industry that arises from the historical subordination of women and
the historical right of men to buy and exchange women simply as objects for sexual use.
It thrives on poverty, drug abuse, the trafficking in vulnerable women and children.
Prostitution teaches men how to mistreat women and damages the lives of both the
women who are used, the women whose partners, sons, brothers and workmates are the
abusers, and the status of all women in the state. Legalisation causes the business of
A generation of men in Victoria have now learned that it is acceptable to treat
women as objects for their sexual use.
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sexual exploitation to flourish. As more and more women and children are drawn into the
industry, and more and more men become abusers, the profits from the abuse become an
indispensable part of the state’s revenue. The sex “businessmen” network with judges
and politicians, and float their brothels on the stock exchange. Once prostitution is
legalised, ending it becomes much more difficult, as a lobby of “respectable”
businessmen would have to be put out of business, and the government would have to tax
the rich instead of living off women’s bodies.
Ultimately the best way forward in Victoria would be to follow the example of Sweden
where model legislation in 1998 penalises the men who “buy sexual services” and
decriminalises the women. In combination with generous services to support prostituted
women in getting out, this would be effective. Unfortunately it will take some time to
create a social understanding of prostitution in Victoria that will make this possible.
Countries that have not yet gone down the path of legalisation are in a position to develop
policies to end the harms of prostitution. Legalisation compounds the harms of
prostitution rather than relieving them. It is not the answer.
SOURCE- http://action.web.ca/home/catw/attach/AUSTRALIAlegislation20001.pdf