Prostitution - a risky business

After five years, Queensland's fledgling legal brothel sector has failed to bring illegal prostitution in from the cold.

According to a government-initiated review by the Crime and Misconduct Commission, illegal prostitution continues "unabated" in Queensland with illegal prostitution making up 75 per cent of the sex trade.

The report, Regulating Prostitution (pdf file 678KB), details failures in the health checking system for workers, a botched exit program to assist women out of the industry, and a blossoming illegal escort sector.

All of the above was supposed to be fixed or curbed by the Prostitution Act, 1999. A reluctant reformer of the sex trade, Premier Peter Beattie sounded genuine five years ago when he told a community gathering in Toowoomba he wished men would not use prostitutes.

The problem would be dealt with in Queensland by the nation's most restrictive brothel laws, limiting venues to five rooms and a regime of strict health and safety checks, he said.

But now, because of the Prostitution Act's failure to curb the illegal industry, the CMC is considering recommendations to legalise escort prostitution from legal brothels and to water down the once trumpeted health checks, a move that can only reduce safety for workers and clients alike.

Now that brothel owners have been legitimised, this once despised section of society's underbelly is now free to lobby for changes to their industry out in the open. Recent CMC public hearings in Brisbane into legalising escort services became a surreal forum for this new group of Smart State entrepreneurs - the predominantly male licensees of Queensland's legal brothels.

In a long-since banished era of civil society, these men were called 'pimps'. But in Beattie's Queensland the profiteers of the trade in women's bodies have been brought in from the shadows and been given a seat at the table.

Crying foul against illegal escort operators who are advertising in newspapers and the Yellow Pages with impunity, the licensees told CMC chair Robert Needham they simply couldn't compete.

Their submissions to the CMC boil down to: "Give us more girls so we can make more money."

Smugly, they assume they have won the argument for legalised prostitution. It goes like this. Prohibition does not work, prostitution will always be with us. We might as well try and make it legal and safe.

Gullible politicians and media have swallowed this line. But try that logic with the prohibition on car stealing, drink driving or pedophilia. Technically, none of these prohibitions has worked. But they minimise social harm and teach the young what is right, another banished concept in today's postmodern world.

The real shame is that in the rush to legitimise the profiteering by men of women selling their bodies for sex, 18-year-olds considering their work options - serving fries at McDonalds or the more lucrative sex trade - are not told of the dangers.

Despite the CMC and the government claiming a safe, legal industry has been created, the CMC inquiry heard of faked health certificates and that Queensland Health didn't have the resources to check more girls for sexually transmitted infections - STIs. (Apparently it's no longer politically correct to refer to the health consequences of promiscuous behaviour as sexually transmitted diseases - STDs).

With the incubation period for gonorrhoea two to eight days and syphilis two to eight weeks, how can anyone have confidence that reducing health checks from six weeks to 12 weeks, as recommended by the CMC, will keep anyone safe?

One former sex worker wrote to the CMC saying, "I estimate that 3-4 condoms out of a box of 24 would break, even though the condoms were of good quality". Surely this is playing Russian roulette with HIV-AIDS. Why aren't our daughters told this before they sign up at Beattie's brothels to help pay their way through university?

If we must persist with a government-sanctioned sex trade, then there should at least be proper warnings given to young women considering this as a job.

The government is yet to adequately explain how any standard workplace health and safety or public liability issues could be addressed to accommodate the impossibility of any reasonable measure of safety in the sex trade.

What Premier Beattie is not telling us is that other countries have recognised the error of legalising brothels. The Blair Labour Government in Britain recently released a discussion paper on prostitution, Paying the Price. It says: "Experience in both Australia and Europe suggests that licencing schemes have failed to deliver the safe working environment that they set out to achieve."

Sweden, often noted for its progressive social reform, has also recognised this after decades of liberal prostitution laws. In 1999 the Swedish Parliament decided enough was enough. It changed the law to recognise that all forms of prostitution constitute abuse of women. It turned the gender power tables, making it a crime for a man to buy sex from a woman. Public money was channelled into helping women get out.

By targeting the demand end, prostitution in Sweden is now decreasing, according to the Blair Government's discussion paper.

With Beattie publicly hinting that escorts from brothels will be legalised, it seems Queensland's new "prostitution industrialists" are set to cash in on the back of information-poor women working on their backs.