Whose rights are we talking about: legalised prostitution

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.