Prostitution - a risky business

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.