The Decriminalisation and Regulation of Prostitution.

[SmellsLikeTeenStrop]

I've been doing a bit of reading on this, since the disabled deserve sex thread.

Would I be right in thinking that the decriminalisation and regulation of prostitution does more to protect men - the pimps and the johns, than it does to protect the women in prostitution?

I'm looking at Nevada as an example. Prostitution is legal, but only in licensed brothels. A woman can still be charged for working on the streets. A woman working in a state licensed brothel must register as a sex worker, is subjected to weekly STI testing but interestingly, the customer is not required to prove is freedom from STIs by producing a recent certificate of health.

For the privilege of working in a state licensed brothel, women must hand over a large percentage of their earnings to the brothel owner, she usually has to pay for any extras such as condoms, toiletries and even bed linen. She can be fined for falling asleep during her shift, or appearing late for a line-up. She's often required to live 'on site' for days or weeks at a time and is not permitted to leave the brothel grounds.

This is all apparently legal in Nevada.

How does this set up benefit the women who are prostitutes?

But it hasn't worked in Holland, or New Zealand, or Australia.....

Legalisation never does work in a patriarchical society and the people paying the cost in human misery are always women.

Like I said on the other thread, you cannot divorce prostitution from the rules of market economics where the buyer always has more power than the seller. You also can't legislate in a vacuum and pretend that prostitution is disassociated from other crimes against humanity.

Garlic, there are more 'gangsters', human traffickers and money launderers in Amsterdam now using legalised brothels as a shop-front for their nefarious activities than at any other time pre-legalisation. The 'history' as you quote it - is factually incorrect.

Thing is with prohibtion of drugs or booze, and it all going wrong, the thing being prohibited is a substance.

I really don't think that the arguments in favour of eg legalising drugs can be applied to prostitution, where the commodity is people, or rather bits of people.

charbon What is your solution then?

And yes I know that the drugs trade and many other industries are running on hideously exploited people.

But the end user isn't face to face and genital in genital with that exploited person.

Criminalise the purchase of sex, like Sweden did in 1999. Most of the opponents to the legislation were sex-workers who falsely predicted that the laws would 'drive prostitution underground'. All subsequent studies have failed to find evidence of a sinister and dangerous 'underground' movement, although it would be naive to say categorically that it doesn't exist in some form. But in nothing like the proportions that were feared and interestingly, nothing like the proportion of underground prostitution that exists in societies who have legalised it.

SQ: so raising awareness of workers' rights is important and progress is being made, though slowly, WRT fashion, food, technology - the things we enjoy should not be made available to us only by slave labour. More people are starting to think about where their new shoes/out-of-season veg/fancy new phone came from, and whether people involved in bringing it to them were doing so in horrible exploitative conditions. While there is currently a degree of cognitive dissonance among people who pay for sexual services, that at least means that they want the providers of those services to be doing so willingly and don't want to be buying services from someone who is being abused and enslaved and exploited, so there is plenty of potential for working towards sex work becoming a safe, fair profession from the customer viewpoint.

Is it the case that most people buying sex (usually men) are concerned about ethical goods etc?

I will admit readily that I have no first hand or even third hand experience of this (bar being taken for a prostitute once by a man working in a late night petrol station ) but I would imagine that the majority of men buying women for sex are simply not interested?

Apols for rambling. On this and porn I have no fixed ideas about what must or mustn't be, it's all on gut feeling.

I mean, a lot of the men buying sex are face to face with the horrible expolitative conditions. Cognitive dissonance (sp) not required.

It's impossible to resolve neatly. I suppose what we had 'worked', sort of, for a while but the trafficking & co-related drugs trades have made a bad thing worse. I find the Swedish experiment interesting, but don't really believe it will do anything but drive trade underground.
feministire.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/swedish-police-stats-show-more-not-less-prostitution-and-trafficking/
It still remains to be seen, I guess.

I've never thought it would be great to have legalised, licensed, regulated brothels. But, as I don't think anything will eliminate the trade for the foreseeable future, I guess I'd rather try to make sure hookers are protected and receive appropriate well-being services.

Maybe the original idea in the UK (and the current one?) - that women can work as prostitutes, from their own premises, but not in brothels, and that pimping or otherwise gaining money from prostitution is illegal, and kerb crawling is illegal, starts to sound ok from a practical perspective.

It's the controlling prostitutes bit which is a big problem. That is illegal in the UK.

The punters control them obv but that is different.

I can see SGBs point that if it were a proper service industry with standards and pay and all the rest of it then that would be one thing
But that SAFs point that is not how it would pan out is the way it is in the here and now

You know, SQ, I think it does ...

The Swedish project has, amongst other things, publicly blamed the customers for the problems of prostitutes. I don't think anyone's done that before, at least for a few thousand years. It would be interesting to know whether the raw number of punters has changed since the campaign started.

Fuck knows how you'd find that out, though!

Garlic - it's not an experiment in Sweden. It's been the law for 13 years and has already been the subject of numerous reviews.

On another point, it really is stretching credibility to pretend that there are great swathes of 'ethical consumers' of women, or that this is the motivating factor behind a man paying an independent prostitute or one who works in a legalised brothel. Men make these transactions because they believe it is safer for them both in relation to their health, their liberty and the risk of detection by partners and law-enforcers.

Many are deluded enough to think that the sex provided will be of a 'higher standard' than is normally available, either from their unsuspecting partners or from street prostitutes. They certainly don't spend the time that they've paid for asking a woman about her life and her choices, in order to reassure themselves that a woman is there of her own free will - and if they did, a woman who needed to get paid would lie rather than face the risk of losing a payday or repeat business, lest a man's conscience got in the way.

I think that criminalising the buying of sex sounds like a good thing.

Re sweden - good for them. I wonder though. People don't go to sweden for booze, and now they don't go for prostitutes (if they ever did). there is a huge market within europe of men moving around to buy women / drugs / etc. Sweden might just have pushed it off their patch. Still good for them I say - so much more healthy for the local population in all sorts of ways.

But then countries are like people - sweden can afford to say no to drugs and hookers - the tourist £££ isn't that important.

charbon good post and there is the normalisation thing.

30 years ago men who used prostitutes in the UK kept really quiet about it. It was seedy, they knew it was wrong.

Now use of prostitutes is much more open and becoming almost normal. Legalising it and providing "approved" areas to purchase sex from "clean" women will only increase demand surely.

Here are details of the Swedish law and some of its outcomes:

action.web.ca/home/catw/attach/Ekberg.pdf

www.vancourier.com/Feminist+lawyer+outlines+Swedish+prostitution+success/4398890/story.html

The law has been so successful it has been copied by Iceland and Norway (which is why it is not called the Nordic model) and is being considered by a number of other countries including France and Sweden.

Garlic you were wondering about laws being radical, well the Swedish laws attacking the demand side are radical feminist given that they strike at the heart of men's self-awarded right to inflict harm on women through the institution of prostitution.

Here is also an article by Sheila Jeffreys about how legalisation of prostitution has been a failure and has caused extreme harm to women:

sisyphe.org/spip.php?article697

"now called the Nordic model"

YY, I'm not under a whole lot of illusions about this issue. I also read the punters' review sites now and again (usually when I feel like not bothering with feminism!) and have been closely involved with prostitutes at all ends of the market - including small children. If we're discussing the most hopeful way to make the best of a bad situation, I feel we have to look into what's worked - to some extent - for the workers, and how to improve/protect that.

It makes me sick seeing prostituted women being called "hookers" in a feminist section. Please could you curb that kind of misogyny Garlic.

sorry, my reply was to a post of charbon's further up.

can't keep up!

A small child who is being sold to people shouldn't be described as a prostitute surely?

Nyac I used the word hookers too.

We've had masses of debates on prostitution in this section. Why are we going over the same old ground?

Although it was in a certain context. I think.