Prostitution: Encyclopedia II - Prostitution - Politics

Prostitution - Politics

Prostitution - Legal issues

Roughly speaking, the possible attitudes are:

• abolition: "prostitution should be made to disappear"
  • "prostitution is immoral and prostitutes and their clients should be prosecuted": the prevailing attitude in much of the United States and Muslim countries;
  • "prostitution is a sad reality of exploitation of the prostitutes, especially women, but prostitutes should not be criminalized", the current situation in Turkey.
    • "the clients of prostitutes exploit the prostitutes": prostitutes are not prosecuted, but their clients are prosecuted, the current situation in Sweden.
    • prostitution is legal, but discouraged, while pimping is prohibited, the current situation in the United Kingdom and France among others;
• regulation: prostitution may be considered a legitimate business, or at least an unavoidable evil; prostitution and the employment of prostitutes are legal, but regulated (with respect to health etc. concerns).
• legalization: "prostitution is a victimless crime, and should be made completely legal so that it is no longer an underground activity, allowing the normal checks and balances of society and existing laws to apply"
• decriminalization: "prostitution is inevitable, but exploitative; laws should target violent pimps and traffickers, not prostitutes." Proponents of this view often cite instances of government regulation under legalization that they consider intrusive, demeaning, or violent, but feel that criminalization adversely affects prostitutes.

In some countries, there is controversy regarding the laws applicable to prostitution. For instance, the legal stance of punishing pimping while keeping prostitution legal but "underground" and risky is often denounced as hypocritical; opponents suggest either going the full abolition route and criminalize clients or making prostitution a regulated business.

Many countries have sex worker advocacy groups which lobby against criminalization and discrimination of prostitutes. These groups generally oppose Nevada-style regulation and oversight, stating that prostitution should be treated like other professions. In the United States of America, one such group is COYOTE (an abbreviation for "Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics") and another is North American Task Force on Prostitution. An international prostitute's rights organization is the International Committee for Prostitute's Rights.

Other groups, often with religious backgrounds, focus on offering women a way out of the world of prostitution while not taking a position on the legal question.

Prostitution - Feminism

Since most prostitutes are women, prostitution is a significant issue in feminist thought and activism. Feminists object to the widespread violence against women in the sex trade, as well as the moral stigma used against prostitutes themselves, and many object to laws that punish prostitutes. Regarding prostitution itself, however, there is a great deal of disagreement among feminists, with many supporting overall decriminalization and others backing laws that target pimps and clients.

In the latter camp, authors such as Andrea Dworkin, herself an ex-prostitute, argue that commercial sex is a form of rape enforced by poverty (and often overt violence by pimps). This belief, characteristic of radical feminists and "second wave" feminism, sees the violence associated with prostitution as stemming from the inhumane nature of prostitution itself, and proponents therefore reject the idea that prostitution can be reformed. Sweden's 1999 law forbidding the purchase (but not sale) of sex was driven by this view. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and other organizations in this camp tend to support efforts to "bring women out of prostitution" and to target clients, pimps, and traffickers.

Other feminists tend to present prostitution as a profession with extremely poor working conditions that can nevertheless be improved. In this view, there is nothing intrinsically violating about the sale of sex; efforts to help prostitutes should focus on their day-to-day conditions. Activists in this camp tend to call for decriminalization as a starting point, arguing that prostitution is so violent in part because it is confined to society's margins. Many note, for example, that closing brothels pushes more people into working on the street, which increases vulnerability to crime. Some activists in this camp support efforts to help prostitutes retain more of their earnings by eliminating pimps or systems of bribery; others support community-driven policing efforts to ensure that violent clients, pimps, and traffickers are rooted out.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Politics", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki