Whose rights are we talking about: legalised prostitution

At the beginning of the 21st century governments worldwide are confronted with an unprecedented escalation of the global sex industry. An intrinsic component of this new world sex market is the trafficking of millions of people, mainly women and girls, for commercial sexual exploitation.

The US Government has intimated that after drug dealing, trafficking of humans is tied with arms dealing as the second largest criminal industry in the world, with the majority of people trafficked for sexual exploitation. Increasingly governments are opting for legalisation of prostitution as the solution to this crisis.

Uncritiqued, the arguments proffered by pro-prostitution advocates for treating prostitution as “work” appear persuasive. They argue that a legally regulated industry will contain industry expansion, eliminate organised crime and help eradicate sex trafficking and child prostitution.

Pro-prostitution lobbyists also propose that legalisation allows occupational health and safety (OHS) conditions to be introduced into the prostitution “work environment”, a means of protecting both women and the buyers (the consumer), and in turn the wider public health.

Much of the discussion around legitimising the industry also draws heavily on sexual liberal discourses and the belief that prostitution is about sexual autonomy and choice.

In this context a woman’s right to equality and safety is translated as a woman’s right to be prostituted. This latter view fits easily with a neo-liberal vision of a laissez faire economic system and the freeing up of the market place where prostitution is reduced to simply a matter of supply and demand. But just whose rights are being protected when women and girls become just another sought-after consumer good in the market place?

In 1984 the Victorian Labor Government under John Cain introduced legalised prostitution, one of the first governments in the world to do so. Victoria’s experience allows us to put the spotlight on the real consequences, particularly for women, of treating prostitution as a job just like any other. Not only does legalisation not control prostitution’s harms, it produces many of its own making. The purported benefits of for women in prostitution of legitimising the trade are a myth.

State endorsement of prostitution greatly expands the legal, as well as illegal, sectors of the industry, with the latter four to five times that of the regulated trade.

Economic analyst IBIS Business Information, in its forward prediction to 2010 revealed that “sexual services”, ranks highest of all personal service industries in terms of revenue. It forecasts that the sector’s revenues will increase to about $2.475 billion by the end of the decade. This equates to a 6.8 per cent annualised rise at a time when the GDP is growing at about 3 per cent.

The impact of this untoward expansion on community living is vast. Brothels and other sex-orientated businesses are now a prominent feature of Melbourne’s urban landscape. Although zoning laws restrict sex businesses from locating in residential localities, the state’s planning laws allow licensed brothels in business centres and on local shopping strips close to residential areas.

Communities are powerless to prevent the encroachment of the sex industry into their daily lives as municipal councils have minimal options to refuse to locate a brothel if its owner is a legitimate licensee.

Those who benefit most from Victoria’s highly lucrative prostitution culture are sex entrepreneurs (pimps and brothel owners), the government and male buyers. The financial returns to sex businesses became apparent when Victoria hosted the world’s first stock market-listed brothel, the Daily Planet, a demonstration that it is now economically viable and publicly respectable to be a brothel owner. Under its new name (Planet Platinum Limited), the company has expanded into tabletop dancing and a chain of Showgirls Bar 20 Strip Clubs aimed at both the Australian and Asian markets.

The freedom to market prostitution operations as excellent financial investments, has far-reaching implications. Indeed that the financial stability of many investors in the Australian financial market could become inherently connected with the survival of a profitable and expanding prostitution industry has not been addressed by the Victorian Government. At the time of the Daily Planet’s original float the company’s directors were reported as having suggested that the shares would be an excellent retirees’ investment because they were bank guaranteed and offered a 5 per cent fully franked dividend.

The irony is that the State’s lawmakers when formulating Victoria’s principal prostitution legislation made it an indictable offence, with a ten-year maximum sentence, for a person to “live … or derive a material benefit from, the earnings of prostitution”.

The Victorian Government too of course can be accused of pimping. It benefits financially through taxation, licensing and prostitution tourism. Financial experts estimated that an increase in licensing fees in 2004, for example, would earn the government about an extra $1 million a year.

The real boon comes, however, through the integration of prostitution into our casino culture and hospitality industry. When the Crown Casino relocated into its new premises in Melbourne’s tourist trade complex of Southgate a decade ago, a new prestigious brothel - The Boardroom - was set up adjacent to the gambling complex, the first of six brothels to do so. These are located in what was termed the City’s “new re-energised area”, part of Agenda 21, a state-sponsored strategy to revitalise Victoria’s economy.

According to IBIS Business Information 2006 report, on Sexual Services in Australia, Melbourne is now “probably considered Australia’s brothel and tabletop dancing capital”, an image which they suggest is a big drawcard for such events as the Commonwealth Games and the Formula 1 Grand Prix.

As the industry expands so does the demand for prostitution. Victoria’s legalised prostitution system guarantees male buyers a regulated system that provides a steady supply of registered, health-checked women for their sexual use. At a minimum there are at least 60,000 visits to brothels and escort prostitution businesses in Victoria every week and Victorian men spend $7 million per week on prostitution. This is in an adult male population of around 1.8 million.

The legal and commercial reality of prostitution has meant that Victorian men, who prior to its legalisation may never have considered using prostitution, are now comfortable in purchasing a woman or girl for sexual gratification.

In bleak contrast to the above gains, women in prostitution remain vulnerable to poverty, discrimination, and violence irrespective of legalisation. Despite the pro-prostitution rhetoric that women “choose” prostitution as a satisfying career option, overwhelmingly women continue to enter and be entrapped in prostitution through a lack of other viable economic options.

Women are also often seasoned into prostitution because of histories of sexual abuse (surveys suggest between 50 and 90 per cent). They also experience a higher incidence of drug addiction than women not in prostitution, although research into drug and alcohol usage reveals that drug use is initiated or intensifies as women attempt to anaesthetise the pain of physical injuries and verbal abuse inflicted on them in prostitution.

The working conditions for prostituted women in legal brothels and licensed escort agencies are largely determined by the dominant position of employers and the market place. While legalisation has seen a substantial increase in demand for prostitution and a boost in total revenue, this has coincided with an oversupply of sexual services, and so women must compete for buyers.

Women continue to be coerced either overtly (rape and assault), or through economic necessity to meet the demands of both brothel owners and buyers to provide whatever sexual acts are demanded.

Male buyers in Victoria will not use condoms, with one in five men having admitted to unsafe sex. Men have also become more demanding and violent about the type of sex they want. The demand for oral sex, for instance, has been replaced by the demand for anal sex and the market for sado-masochistic practices is expanding.

One Melbourne-based advocacy group for women in prison reported that despite claims that legal brothels supposedly provide a safer working environment, many prefer to work alone and risk violence at the hands of buyers than be subjected to violence by both buyers and brothel staff and security.

The government in its principal prostitution legislation recognised that prostitution was at best a constrained choice and provided for exit programs to be funded from industry licensing fees. The Prostitutes Collective of Victoria disclosed that about seven out of ten women in the state’s industry wanted to leave. However, no exit program has ever been created.

Most funding for the industry goes to safe sex programs which is more about consumer protection as opposed to the needs of prostituted women.

Some women who are determined to increase their employment options through education support themselves during this process by working in prostitution. Australia-wide 10 per cent of those in the industry are students. But higher education and training costs have simply intensified women’s economic marginalisation as does Australia’s Workplace Agreement system and the nation’s current housing and rental crisis.

In these circumstances the notion of “choice” becomes nonsensical as it ignores the power imbalance between the buyer, the seller and the bought. Any analysis of prostitution must consider the exploitation of women’s vulnerability.

Pro-prostitution advocates continue to promote the idea that legal prostitution businesses provide optimal conditions for creating a safe system of work. However, both government and sex worker organisations’ OHS literature state clearly that prostitution is a high-risk occupation in terms of violence and coercion, irrespective of whether it is legal or not.

Sexually transmitted infections, sexual harassment, physical and mental abuse, unwanted pregnancies and rape remain among the workplace hazards listed in OHS guidelines.

Options for dealing with these dangers are ludicrous and tragic. Mandatory testing is demanded of prostituted women, but male buyers who form a high risk category for STIs are not. Most women fall back on safe sex programs and the use of condoms and other prophylactics as protection against STIs. Yet the OHS literature makes clear that condom breakage and slippage are inevitable, highly dangerous and the consequences are immediate. That is assuming that a woman can negotiate safe sex, which, as suggested above, is often impossible.

Risk prevention strategies to guard against violence include panic buttons in rooms, video surveillance to screen clients and ultimately when these fail, self-defence courses. The real problem is that legitimising prostitution as work in Victoria has allowed violence that would be unacceptable or a crime in any other workplace to be normalised as just sex and part of the job. No occupational health and safety strategy can deal with this reality.

A further failing of Victoria’s legalised system is the myth that the prostitution industry can be neatly categorised into a well-regulated business where law enforcers can effectively deal with any clandestine operations. As I suggest above about 80 per cent of the industry remains illegal. Sex exploiters indiscriminately traffic women into both legal and illegal brothels, the former often used as a warehouse for the illicit trade.

Victoria also has among the highest child prostitution rates in the country. Trafficking, underage sexuality and organised crime cannot be uncoupled from prostitution per se.

One of the most crucial factors in understanding sex trafficking, for example, is that victims of trafficking are brought into Australia to serve a ready market of male buyers. Sex exploiters’ main concern is to ensure a supply of women and girls to maintain their profits. This tolerance has also led to higher levels of street prostitution together with escalating violence against women and girls on the street as well as harassment of women and girls who live in the vicinity.

What alternatives then exist to this disturbing situation? In 1999 the Swedish Government introduced legislation that recognises that prostitution exists because of male demand and women’s poverty, aggravated by economic and social disparity between countries, races and classes and by women’s histories of sexual violence and abuse. It also does not differentiate between sex trafficking and prostitution but understands that the latter is a precursor for such trafficking.

Sweden’s law prosecutes men who buy women (and men) for sex. At the same time it decriminalises prostitution for women providing substantive economic and social strategies to enable women to escape their oppression. Of course for other governments to follow suit they must be prepared to challenge the presumption that men have a right to purchase and use women sexually for their own needs - the male sex right.