Cruel lies hide the bitter truth

25.06.2003
Comment by MELISSA FARLEY*

Despite public campaigns promoting prostitution as a reasonable job for poor women, a worldwide trend has begun to define it as a human rights violation.

Intrinsic to prostitution are violations of human rights - sexual harassment, economic servitude, educational deprivation, domestic violence, racism, being treated as if you are worthless because you are poor, vulnerability to frequent physical and sexual assault, and being subjected to body invasions that are equivalent to torture.

Wherever prostitution occurs - in brothels, massage parlours, on the street or in strip clubs - women rent out the most intimate parts of their bodies to anonymous strangers.

For the vast majority of the world's women, prostitution is the experience of being hunted, being dominated, being sexually assaulted, and being physically and verbally battered. Being paid does not erase the trauma; it just makes you feel as if you have no right to protest.

Decriminalisation normalises all aspects of prostitution - pimping, procuring, buying sex acts and selling sex acts.

It is a cruel lie to suggest that decriminalisation will protect the health of those in it. There is no evidence for this.

But there is much evidence that prostitution causes great physical and emotional harm. It is not possible to protect the health of someone whose job means that they will be raped on average once a week.

A Canadian commission found that the death rate of women in prostitution was 40 times higher than that of the general population.

Prostitution always involves the threat of danger. Pimps film prostitutes in massage brothels without their consent and sell the videos online. Their lives have been threatened if they object to this.

The customer is the most underground part of the sex industry.

The reform bill naively proposes that educating the prostitute about safe sex will protect her health. But it's not the prostitute, it's the customer who avoids using condoms, thereby threatening her life.

When laws welcome pimps and customers, they quickly move in as legitimate consumers. Decriminalisation of prostitution will significantly increase the sex industry in New Zealand.

Wherever state-sponsored prostitution occurs, there are increases in legal and illegal prostitution, including increased trafficking and increased child prostitution.

This has occurred in the Netherlands, Germany and Australia. Already, pimps from the Australian brothel chains are looking to New Zealand for new business partners should this law pass.

Under the proposed bill, prostitution would be zoned by local ordinance - most likely into the neighbourhoods of those who cannot afford the legal battle of keeping it out of their backyards.

Prostitution would be socially invisible to those who can afford to keep it away from their homes and businesses.

Decriminalising it mainstreams the sex industry, but it does not offer prostitutes safety or dignity.

Prostitution is an institution that discriminates against women, against the young, against the poor and against ethnically subordinated minority groups.

How will New Zealand's human rights law protect prostitutes from sexual harassment when the job of prostitution itself is sexual harassment and exploitation?

Do people in prostitution have the right to make a living wage in a way that is not dangerous, humiliating and life threatening? Do they have the right not to be in prostitution?

In the words of one person who was in it, prostitution is paid rape.

It cannot be fixed, or made safer, or a little bit better. It is a particularly vicious institution of inequality of the sexes, with additional power inequity based on poverty and racism.

The solution to the violence of prostitution is not to ignore the voices and needs of those currently in it. If the Human Rights Commission is serious about protecting, rather than exploiting, those in prostitution, it must have economic alternatives.

Eight hundred and fifty people - 89 per cent of those asked - in prostitution in nine countries told us they wanted to get out.

To do so, they needed stable housing (77 per cent), job training (75 per cent), and treatment for addictions (45 per cent).

Their priority was not to legalise or decriminalise prostitution.

MPs should vote against any law that would normalise prostitution as a reasonable job for poor women by zoning it, legalising it, or decriminalising it. Instead, independent researchers - not decriminalisation advocates - should conduct a national survey of the needs of people in prostitution.

Laws should address the concerns of those in prostitution rather than the interests of those who buy and sell them.

* Melissa Farley is a San Francisco psychologist and prostitution researcher.