[Reader-list] Liberal position on sex work

[Rana Dasgupta]

 From the Economist.




Sex is their business

Sep 2nd 2004
 From The Economist print edition


Attitudes to commercial sex are hardening. But tougher laws are wrong in 
both principle and practice






TWO adults enter a room, agree a price, and have sex. Has either 
committed a crime? Common sense suggests not: sex is not illegal in 
itself, and the fact that money has changed hands does not turn a 
private act into a social menace. If both parties consent, it is hard to 
see how either is a victim. But prostitution has rarely been treated as 
just another transaction, or even as a run-of-the-mill crime: the oldest 
profession is also the oldest pretext for outraged moralising and 
unrealistic lawmaking devised by man.

In recent years, governments have tended to bother with prostitution 
only when it threatened public order. Most countries (including Britain 
and America) have well-worn laws against touting on street corners, 
against the more brazen type of brothel and against pimping. This has 
never been ideal, partly because sellers of sex feel the force of law 
more strongly than do buyers, and partly because anti-soliciting 
statutes create perverse incentives. On some occasions, magistrates who 
have fined streetwalkers have been asked to wait a few days so that the 
necessary money can be earned.

So there is perennial discussion of reforming prostitution laws. During 
the 1990s, the talk was all of liberalisation. Now the wind is blowing 
the other way. In 1999, Sweden criminalised the buying of sex. France 
then cracked down on soliciting and outlawed commercial sex with 
vulnerable women—a category that includes pregnant women. Britain began 
to enforce new laws against kerb-crawling earlier this year, and is now 
considering more restrictive legislation (see article). Outside a few 
pragmatic enclaves, attitudes are hardening. Whereas, ten years ago, the 
discussion was mostly about how to manage prostitution and make it less 
harmful, the aim now is to find ways to stamp it out.

The puritans have the whip hand not because they can prove that tough 
laws will make life better for women, but because they have convinced 
governments that prostitution is intolerable by its very nature. What 
has tipped the balance is the globalisation of the sex business.





The white slave trade
It is not surprising that many of the rich world's prostitutes are 
foreigners. Immigrants have a particularly hard time finding jobs that 
pay well; local language skills are not prized in the sex trade; 
prostitutes often prefer to work outside their home town. But the free 
movement of labour is as controversial in the sex trade as in any other 
business. Wherever they work, foreign prostitutes are accused of driving 
down prices, touting “extra” services and consorting with organised 
criminal pimps who are often foreigners, too. The fact that a very small 
proportion of women are trafficked—forced into prostitution against 
their will—has been used to discredit all foreigners in the trade, and 
by extension (since many sellers of sex are indeed foreign) all prostitutes.

Abolitionists make three arguments. From the right comes the argument 
that the sex trade is plain wrong, and that, by condoning it, society 
demeans itself. Liberals (such as this newspaper) who believe that what 
consenting adults do in private is their own business reject that line.

 From the left comes the argument that all prostitutes are victims. Its 
proponents cite studies that show high rates of sexual abuse and drug 
taking among employees. To which there are two answers. First, those 
studies are biased: they tend to be carried out by staff at drop-in 
centres and by the police, who tend to see the most troubled 
streetwalkers. Taking their clients as representative of all prostitutes 
is like assessing the state of marriage by sampling shelters for 
battered women. Second, the association between prostitution and drug 
addiction does not mean that one causes the other: drug addicts, like 
others, may go into prostitution just because it's a good way of making 
a decent living if you can't think too clearly.

A third, more plausible, argument focuses on the association between 
prostitution and all sorts of other nastinesses, such as drug addiction, 
organised crime, trafficking and underage sex. To encourage 
prostitution, goes the line, is to encourage those other undesirables; 
to crack down on prostitution is to discourage them.



Brothels with brands
Plausible, but wrong. Criminalisation forces prostitution into the 
underworld. Legalisation would bring it into the open, where abuses such 
as trafficking and under-age prostitution can be more easily tackled. 
Brothels would develop reputations worth protecting. Access to health 
care would improve—an urgent need, given that so many prostitutes come 
from diseased parts of the world. Abuses such as child or forced 
prostitution should be treated as the crimes they are, and not discussed 
as though they were simply extreme forms of the sex trade, which is how 
opponents of prostitution and, recently, the governments of Britain and 
America have described them.

Puritans argue that where laws have been liberalised—in, for instance, 
the Netherlands, Germany and Australia—the new regimes have not lived up 
to claims that they would wipe out pimping and sever the links between 
prostitution and organised crime. Certainly, those links persist; but 
that's because, thanks to concessions to the opponents of 
liberalisation, the changes did not go far enough. Prostitutes were made 
to register, which many understandably didn't want to do. Not 
surprisingly, illicit brothels continued to thrive.

If those quasi-liberal experiments have not lived up to their 
proponents' expectations, they have also failed to fulfil their 
detractors' greatest fears. They do not seem to have led to outbreaks of 
disease or under-age sex, nor to a proliferation of street prostitution, 
nor to a wider collapse in local morals.

Which brings us back to that discreet transaction between two people in 
private. If there's no evidence that it harms others, then the state 
should let them get on with it. People should be allowed to buy and sell 
whatever they like, including their own bodies. Prostitution may be a 
grubby business, but it's not the government's.