Prostitution as violence against women

And whose bears the blame for this vulnerability? It is "the feminists". That is, if we are to believe the president of the Scarlet Alliance. According to Elena Jeffreys, those feminists who are opposed to the prostitution of women constitute a form of "extreme oppression":

Anti-sex work feminists have chosen to campaign against our workplaces, lobby for the criminalisation of sex workers and our clients, applaud the closure of services that support us, rally to imprison the migrants among us, stigmatise every aspect of our work, discredit our political organising, undermine our demands, belittle our leadership and pathologise us through unethical and harmful research.

It is unclear just who "the feminists" are in this case, although Elena Jeffreys elsewhere names Mary Lucille Sullivan and Sheila Jeffreys. But neither of those women, nor any other anti-prostitution feminists I know of, lobby for the criminalization of sex workers, and much less do they "applaud the closure of services that support us", or "rally to imprison the migrants among us" (the latter is an utter calumny).

The single claim that Jeffreys makes that is accurate in the litany above is that anti-prostitution feminists lobby for the criminalisation of the acts of those she calls "clients". Most anti-prostitution feminists whom I know favour what is often referred to as the Swedish model (or Scandinavian model). This model criminalizes the "client", with the overall aim of achieving equality between men and women through the abolition of prostitution. The 1999 Swedish Act Prohibiting the Sale of Sexual Services does not place women sex workers at risk of any legal repercussions. The framework of the Swedish measures is the legislation on the gross violation of a woman's integrity, in which prostitution is defined as "a form of male violence against women and children". That is, in the Swedish framework, prostitution is that violence. The violence is not incidental to prostitution. The Swedish act names those responsible for that violence, and the stigma it creates for women sex workers, as "clients" and pimps.

As far as we know, Allen Gormely, Joel Rifkin, Robert Shulman, Kendall Francois, Gary Ridgway, Peter Sutcliffe, Steve Wright, Stephen Griffiths, were not feminists. Least of all, abolitionist feminists. It also seems extremely unlikely that the killers of the women in New Mexico and in Long Island are feminists.

To take another example, in Australia. Neither Ben William McLean nor Phu Ngoc Trinh claimed to be a feminist in their 2005 conviction (upheld on appeal) for the murder of two Thai women, although they did try on a variety of other lame excuses. McLean attempted to shift the blame onto the Hell's Angels motorcyclists, while Trinh made a similar move by referring to a shadowy "Asian gang". McLean and Trinh had prostituted the two women for sex and then thrown them into the crocodile-infested Adelaide River near Darwin; the women died by drowning, indicating that they were probably alive when they were bound and dumped in the river.

These killings were barbaric aspects of the prostitution of the women, but not incidental to it. The less barbaric aspects are the various facebook groups and video games in which young men (and women) both perform and incite outrageous harassment of what is often called "your hooker". Again, I am not sure how this is the fault of feminists, who seem to be screeched off such sites with great vehemence and profanity if they dare to leave a critical comment.

The stigma and the danger under which women are prostituted are real, and grave. That is, they are real and grave aspects of the violence against women and children that prostitution is defined by. The practitioners of that violence and the purveyors of that stigma are not feminists, but those who participate in and profit from prostitution in its subordination of women (including it must be said, women pimps and madams).

If there is any doubt on this point, listen to those who materially profit from the institution of prostitution. For example, in 2004, Sarah (Kiki) Marbeck, claimed to have had an affair with David Beckham. David Wade, the pimp who ran the Miss Fleiss Escort Agency in Sydney, claimed about Ms Marbeck:

I know how this girl works. She is vicious. She could extract the marrow out of your bones….

She is the most vicious, dirty, low-class person you will ever come across in your entire life and she set him [Beckham] up. This girl is a legend in her own lunchtime. This is the biggest scam. The guy is innocent. (Martin Wallace, "Beckham accuser worked as callgirl", Courier-Mail, 15 April 2004, p. 5).

Not every pimp is as forthright about what he thinks of "his girls" as was David Wade. Not every man murders the women he prostitutes for sex. But let's be clear about where the violence of prostitution and the stigma of sex work really come from.