This neoliberal policy
Amnesty made it official yesterday.
Amnesty International has formally adopted a policy calling for the legalization of prostitution around the world. The organization’s senior director for law and policy, Tawanda Mutasah, said:
“Sex workers are at heightened risk of a whole host of human rights abuses including rape, violence, extortion and discrimination. Far too often they receive no, or very little, protection from the law or means for redress.”
He fails to mention that, under legalization, these human rights abuses are amplified, nor does he consider how or why the law would address said abuses, once sanctioned under law.
It’s a bizarre thing to say. Sex workers are at heightened risk of a whole host of human rights abuses including rape, violence, extortion and discrimination, so let’s legalize pimping and johnning. Wut? The rape and violence and extortion are inherent in the “sex work.” Making it legal to rent a woman doesn’t change that.
This neoliberal policy, in the works for some time but now formalized, was developed, in part, by pimps and traffickers. Despite the fact that the system of prostitution exists in direct conflict with the human rights of women and girls, and despite ample evidence to show that legalization only increases abuse and exploitation, Amnesty International pushed forward with this policy, effectively abandoning any semblance of respect for women.
I get that there are plenty of libertarian feminists who think pimping should be legalized, but does Amnesty not get that there are plenty of sex workers who think it shouldn’t?
Silly Abe Lincoln with his Emancipation thing-a-ma-jig…. dragging the entire country into a bloody civil war when a better solution was staring him right in the face: if he’d really wanted to help the Southern slaves out, he should’ve just made slavery legal.
I mean, just think of how much better off those slaves would’ve been under legalized slavery. What enslaved person in their right mind would seek freedom, if presented the luxurious alternative of being owned by another person in a legally regulated fashion?
Ironically, that’s exactly they did do after Reconstruction failed – they came up with all sorts of grotesque “vagrancy” laws and similar that simply re-enslaved the former slaves, but this time without the need to protect the capital investment and with that hideous veneer of “legality.”
Nice precedent ya got there, Amnesty.
*Sighs, crosses another institution off the list of folks getting money the day I win the lottery, and for whom I will never volunteer.* At least Planned Parenthood is still fighting the good fight.
‘The rape and violence and extortion are inherent in the “sex work.” Making it legal to rent a woman doesn’t change that.’
Neither does making (or keeping) it illegal.
Miss the point much?