Desperate people will consent to a lot of things
The BBC did a backgrounder piece by Naomi Grimley on Amnesty and the decriminalization of sex work yesterday.
It’s not often that a liberal newspaper like The Guardian rails against an organisation like Amnesty International.
But last week the paper ran a stinging editorial questioning the wisdom of the human rights group.
It said Amnesty would make a “serious mistake” if it advocated the decriminalisation of prostitution – a decision the group’s international council will vote on later on Tuesday.
Women’s groups and Jimmy Carter have said similar things.
Amnesty’s leaked proposal says decriminalisation would be “based on the human rights principle that consensual sexual conduct between adults is entitled to protection from state interference” so long as violence or child abuse or other illegal behaviour isn’t involved.
But you could call anything consensual and make it ok that way. Desperate people “consent” to do dangerous work, because they need to survive. Desperate people sometimes even “consent” to selling themselves into slavery, because they need to survive. Desperate people “consent” to living in neighborhoods near toxic landfills and the like. Consent isn’t always completely free.
Germany is one of the countries which liberalised its prostitution laws, together with New Zealand and the Netherlands.
One of the main reasons the Germans opted for legalisation in 2002 was the hope that it would professionalise the industry, giving prostitutes more access to benefits such as health insurance and pensions – just like in any other job.
…
But there are many who argue that the German experiment has gone badly wrong with very few prostitutes registering and being able to claim benefits. Above all, the number one criticism is that it’s boosted sex tourism and fuelled human trafficking to meet the demand of an expanded market.
Figures on human trafficking and its relationship to prostitution are hard to establish. But one academic study looking at 150 countries argued there was a link between relaxed prostitution laws and increased trafficking rates.
Other critics of the German model point to anecdotal evidence of growing numbers of young Romanian and Bulgarian women travelling to Germany to work on the streets or even in mega-brothels.An investigation in 2013 by Der Spiegel described how many of these women head to cities such as Cologne voluntarily but soon end up caught in a dangerous web they can’t easily escape.
But it’s good for the people who make the profit.
No kidding.
This was consensual, too — but still repugnant. Something being consensual doesn’t automatically make it ok.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3254074.stm
As you say, people who are desperate will consent to things that are demeaning or violating. We need to protect the vulnerable from exploitation. Prosecute the pimps and customers.
It’s a good point that simply legalizing something doesn’t give dignity or humanity to people doing it.
However, criminalizing something is really just a justification for society to do things to you without your consent. Sex work may be associated with many issues, but adding that on top of it does not seem moral or just.
There needs to be legal protection for prostitutes but the Amnesty International attempt seems to be going about it the wrong way.
Yes but nobody thinks about criminalizing dangerous work.
There are a lot of abuses going on. But generally, we make a distinction between the abuse and how the person is abused. The abuse in the textile industry, is not used to argue we should prohibit making clothes or the exchange of clothes for money. The abuse in the fruit sector, is not used to argue we should prohibit growing fruit or against the exchange of fruit for money.
But the abuse in the sex industry, is used to argue a prohibition against sex in exchange for money. So I wonder, is sex that different or is it about the hang up we as a society have about sex.
Neither clothes or fruit are people.
I see both sides of this issue. If legalization promotes trafficking and other direct exploitation, that’s certainly evil. And I think it’s uncontroversial to say that many women are driven into that work by economic hardship and/or lack of choices.
On the other hand, women involved in prostitution are stripped of any legal protection whatsoever. They can’t report robbery, assault, or rape, without also confessing to a crime for which they WILL be punished, even though their rapist almost certainly will not be. They also can’t report these crimes because in many cases it’s the police who are raping them (or extorting “free services” in exchange for not arresting them, which is just fancified rape). In a society where no charge of rape is taken seriously, and any sexual history whatever automatically invalidates a charge of rape, it’s TRULY open season on prostitutes.
I think the lesser of evils is to decriminalize prostitution, while increasing the penalties for trafficking, pimping, etc. Simultaneously, we should be doing something about the (mostly economic) hardships that leave some women with few alternatives to prostitution.
It’s a separate question whether any woman would work as a prostitute if she had other options. Some women claim that they would, in fact, do exactly that, because they like the work. I have no firsthand knowledge. If a woman who is NOT trafficked, is NOT desperate, is NOT under compulsion by a pimp, or poverty, or anything else, chooses to have sex for money, I think it’s entirely her business.
It makes me very uncomfortable to theorize that any woman who voluntarily engages in prostitution is actually debasing herself “whether she realizes it or not.” That’s uncomfortably close to saying that women who make THIS choice are mentally ill, and the evidence that they’re mentally ill is that they make THIS choice. One reason it makes me uncomfortable is that I’ve heard this precise argument before–but not about prostitution. It was in church, and the argument was made about any woman who made any choice other than marital monogamy in which all resulting pregnancies are always carried to term.
“A woman who has casual sex is harming and debasing herself, whether or not she ever realizes it.”
“A woman who chooses to have sex with her boyfriend is debasing and harming herself, even if she only realizes it years later, or never.”
“A woman who chooses to abort is doing psychological damage to herself that she may not recognize for years later. She may never realize that later inevitable difficulties trace back to that decision, but they do.”
Yeah. No.
I’d guess this is a somewhat complicated issue because the current system doesn’t work either (which doesnt mean that this particular solution wont make it worse). It was my impression that the Dutch sex industry had it better (can’t remember where I read it) – if true I wonder why this failed for Germany.
But it’s good for the people who make the profit.
Yay for the free market.
But the persons sewing the clothes and picking the fruit are. People picking fruit, don’t sell fruit. They provide the service of moving the fruit from the tree to a box.
People can provide all kind of goods and all kind of services. There is the possibility that the situation in which they have to provide these goods or services are abusive. But it is only when sex is involved that we tend to take the step that the provision of the service itself is (inherently) abusive.
Axxyaan, similar arguments are used for drug prohibition. I.e., that the drug is inherently harmful, and its sale is inherently coercive (because addition). The argument is more compelling in the case of prostitution, because people consistently treat the woman as the “product” being “sold,” rather than the sexual service itself.
You occasionally see that angle used with servants, or fruit pickers–that they’re selling “themselves” rather than their services. But again it’s more compelling in the case of prostitution, because the “service” involves intimate bodily contact.
Yeah. I’m like A Masked Avenger in that I’m sort of two minds on the question.
I don’t believe that attitudes sex workers will improve until we stop attaching morality to this sex (particularly our prurient obsession with female virginity). Also, making another pitch for sex workers for a female clientele. Women like to get lucky too.
On the other hand, decriminalization is the best way to protect sex workers.
I don’t like the content of the Amnesty document though.
Consent doesn’t mean anything. Spain signed a piece of paper giving up Cuba in 1898. It’s called the Paris treaty. Spain agreed to each and every one of America’s conditions and none of Spain’s proposals and amendments made it to that piece of paper we signed. The reason being, America had more and bigger guns than us.
What matters is who gets their way. In this case, it’s just who has the resources to impose their will. Either the prostitutes who want to be prostitutes or the prostitutes who don’t want to be prostitutes. Who’s got more “guns”?
Axxyan, sex *is* different. Sexuality is a major, if not *the* defining factor in women’s subordination to men. Girls and women grow up learning, in so many ways, that our role is always to be sexually pleasing to men. This impacts the lives even of women who are lesbian or celibate.
You seem to be saying, “in a society without sex hang ups, men would be free to buy ‘sex’ from women with no stigma attached.” Gee, no thanks.