JAC Online

Prostitution = Violence & Exploitation
by Captain Danielle Strickland

A recent Salvo periodical article ‘prostitution, exploitation or work?’ asks some important questions that have some significant answers.

I’m writing from the UN Commission on the Status of Women and there are literally hundreds of global NGOs and women’s groups who strongly oppose the legalisation of the sex industry. In Australia this is a classic case of social justice exposing cultural prejudice. Let me explain.

What is it?

Fourteen years ago, the government of Victoria passed the first legislation to legalise the sex-industry largely influenced by organised crime and police corruption. The combination of those two evils left the women who were prostituted on the street in a terribly exploitable position. To remedy this and to address the growing numbers of prostituted persons the Prostitution Control Act was passed in 1994.

FROM THE VICTORIAN WEBSITE:[1]

Victoria has a progressive approach to the regulation of prostitution based on a harm minimisation framework that promotes public health, protects sex workers from violence and exploitation and the community from amenity impacts. The Prostitution Control Act 1994 (the Act) is the main statute governing prostitution in Victoria.

Besides having no measurable goals or regular governmental reviews let’s briefly analyse this ‘progressive approach’:

Promotes Public Health. This supposedly includes regular health checks – which oddly enough are done on the women not the men who abuse them. I suppose it’s a complimentary service for men in the name of public health. Of course, there are also the 2000 plus ‘sex workers’ who ‘work’ out of their own premises and don’t require or qualify for the same requirements or health checks as brothel ‘workers’. The other conundrum is that women who don’t pass the health checks (some of the most vulnerable and marginalized) don’t qualify to ‘work’ in a registered brothel and become even easier prey for traffickers, illegal operations and street prostitution. An effective ‘harm minimization’ suggestion would be to promote public health disallow prohibiting sex with prostituted persons altogether. 

Protects Sex Workers from Violence and Exploitation:  This is connected to the organised crime element that the legislation aimed to curb. Again, there is no evidence that this has happened. Shiela Jeffreys, a professor at Melbourne University and the author of several books regarding prostitution and it’s effects on women, suggests that illegal brothels now outnumber legal ones four to one. In Amsterdam (the only other country that has passed this sort of legislation) the problem of organised crime is only escalating – legal brothels open for organised crime rings loopholes for exploitation.

The other element overlooked when this legislation was passed in 1994 was the complexity of human trafficking. With over a million people trafficked every year across borders (80% of them women and children), prostitution takes on a new exploitative nature. It is noteworthy that many of the sex-trafficked women found in Australia were ’working’ in registered brothels. One brothel owner in Brunswick was charged with trafficking and slavery and her sentencing upheld by the high court for slavery. She still owns and operates the legal brothel on Brunswick street. I’ve visited.

The other stark reality of prostitution is what they do for ‘work’. Prostitution is not pretty – disguised by new terminology around workers rights we can easily forget what their ‘job’ really is. But to be brutally honest, bondage, rape, and all sorts of degrading sexual activities are required many times, and daily. How do you protect a ‘worker’ from violence that is implicit in the ‘job’? I’ve been in many legalised brothels that have posted signs saying they protect the women who ‘work’ there. In one, it was suggested to the ‘customer’ that if he was interested in any kind of sex-acts that would leave marks on the body or bruising in any form he would be required to pay more money. Nice ‘protection’! Even the mandatory panic buttons (panic buttons being necessary ought to give us a hint of the violence inherent in the ‘work’) don’t ensure safety. Most prostituted persons are raped or sexually assaulted often and repeatedly.

Give Diginity to Women: I’m not sure how selling your body for sex gives any woman anywhere dignity. There is a cultural myth (propelled by the ‘sex industry’) that women can’t wait to sell themselves over and over again everyday in a defiant and free manifestation of some sort of liberated human right. The only problem with this propaganda is that they can’t get Australian women to sign up. The only way the sex ‘industry’ keeps its flow is with marginalised, poor, women from developing world countries whose choices are limited to poverty or prostitution. Some ‘liberation’! I’ve been visiting brothels for the last year and every person I’ve met has been ashamed of their work. Some of them have texted me messages referring to their place of work as ‘the bad place’ or similar language. This isn’t coming from me – it’s coming from them. This isn’t a society stigma – in the land down under that stigma has long been removed – this is the reality of being degraded by men everyday of your life. Consider your daughter, wife or friend telling you she aspires to becoming a prostitute – what would you tell her? I would strongly exhort her to avoid it (do everything possible to change her mind!). What makes the young women ‘working’ in the local brothel less worthy of valuable and dignified work than our own friends and daughters?

Protects community from amenity impacts: So they’ve limited some signage, made condoms necessary, covered brothel windows, and removed the premises 200 meters from a local school and at least 100 meters from a residential neighbourhood. If prostitution is such great, dignified work – why cover it up? Amsterdam didn’t. I’d be more inclined to protect the Australian girls and young women that are coming of age in a culture saturated with sex. ‘Sex-po’ and the new ‘sex party’ politicians would love to see brothel and escort work be at your child’s school ‘careers night’ soon. As a matter of fact, it was only a few months ago that an Australian Cosmo Magazine featured the ‘diary of a call girl’, glamorizing the life and work of an escort and at the end of the article an advertisement for young Australian women – “want to try the sex industry? Give us a call and we’ll help get you started.”[2]

The protection seems to be rooted in hiding prostituted women, all the while promoting what they do as dignified. This is hypocrisy.

Let’s really protect the rights of women by suggesting a change in legislation that does three things (this is based on Sweden’s approach to prostitution that has been adapted by many countries since…).

What do we do about it?

1. decriminalize prostitution (sometimes people think that abolitionists are for the criminalization of prostitution – this is a mistake... we do NOT think that women should be re-victimized by being treated as criminals. We see them as the victims in the power imbalance at work in prostitution.

2. criminalize the men who buy sex. If men stopped purchasing sex (and society stopped validating their ‘right’ to do so – human trafficking and sexual exploitation would be over tomorrow). It’s a simple thing to look at the root of the problem. In the case of prostitution, women aren’t the problem – it’s men who insist of using money to purchase power and abuse women sexually.

3. increase funding for exit programs and re-training for women. 64% of women survey in Australia working in the ‘sex industry’ would do something else if they could (the other 36% are probably lying; the comparable numbers in Amsterdam are 75% and 25%)[3]. That’s a sobering statistic. For all the rhetoric of dignified work the ones who are doing the ‘work’ are not happy. And I can imagine why. Society owes it to women to offer options. If we are going to use a rhetoric of choice it ought to be a valid one. To have an uneducated, abused, orphaned, economically challenged woman ‘choose’ prostitution is like having a hungry child choose food. It’s a given. The choice is an illusion. Let’s make it real.

How do we say it?

1.      Education. We start educating people on the realities behind the rhetoric of prostitution. We start calling prostitution what it is -exploitation. We stop hiding women behind invisible barriers of language and nuance.

2.      Demand. We start empowering men to act like real men. Real men don’t abuse women. Real men don’t buy sex. Keeping men accountable for their part in the systemic mistreatment of women is essential to stopping the world’s oldest oppression.

3.      Legislation. Changing the legislative situation in Australia will be key to this approach.  We can do this.

4.      Relationship. Maintain relationships with women caught in prostitution. One essential key to The Salvation Army’s support of this legislation was the idea that it would give us further access to women in brothels. The tragedy of the theory is that it was never put into practice. There has been no outreach to brothels by The Salvation Army with the exception of one Corps-based visitation in the whole Territory. Not one exit programme was created. The women went away to ‘work’ and we went away and forgot about them. The St. Kilda’s Crisis Centre is dealing mostly with street prostituted persons who are also addicted and face multiple complex problems and that’s where harm minimization comes in… the brothel ‘workers’ are a different group. It’s a tragedy that some people suggest standing up against harmful legislation will alienate us from the very group we are trying to help when we’ve demonstrated the opposite is true in so many other ways. Alcoholics come to us for help, gamblers know we are on their side against the industry, and slaves know that being against slavery is not a condemnation but their potential salvation. Prostitution is the same.

We are in an era of change.  Since the start of 2008 we have seen changes for which many have been fighting many years and for which many others had long ago given up hope.  The Australian government had formally apologised to indigenous peoples.  The Canadian government followed suit (and backed it up with some serious cash).  A major chocolate company has decided to go fair trade.  These advances build faith and hope, and more importantly, resolve to fight for righteousness and justice in our world.  Incidentally, this is not some sideshow of the great commission.  And, not coincidently, righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne (Psalm 97).  The Salvation Army ought to be on the vanguard of this fight.