Sex for sale: could it be safer?

by W. Eric Martin

Supporters and opponents of prostitution both agree on one point: the world's oldest profession should be decriminalized. So why hasn't it happened?

Cities' efforts to eliminate prostitution generally take one approach: after enduring searches and ridicule from the police, prostitutes pay a fine and return to work the same evening. To pay the fine, they serve more customers, increasing their risk of being assaulted or arrested again. The police stay busy and city leaders trumpet arrest totals傭ut nothing permanent has been accomplished.

Prostitutes would love to avoid this legal treadmill, but efforts to gain support for their rights as sex workers through groups like the National Task Force on Prostitution and COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) have gone nowhere. They've even talked of unionizing, but their first goal remains repealing laws against solicitation.

Although many people sympathize with prostitutes, response from the politicians who have the power to change these laws has been minimal. The best chance for change came in 1996, when the San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution issued a report calling for city departments to stop prosecuting prostitution crimes. Two-thirds of the public who responded to a newspaper survey supported this conclusion, but so far nothing has changed in that city.

Few favor legalization of prostitution, in which the government authorizes the right of prostitutes to work. In brothels in Nevada, for example, a prostitute must service any clients who choose her, can only walk around town during specific hours and can't have non-paying visitors during her three-week work period.

"Legalization would 'normalize' what in my opinion is rape, battery and human rights violations," says Melissa Farley, Ph.D., a research and clinical psychologist and director of Prostitution Research and Education, a project of the San Francisco Women's Centers. "It makes no sense to turn the state into a pimp in order to collect taxes." Prostitutes' rights groups also reject legalization as they would merely be trading ostracism and persecution for unreasonable restrictions on how they live.

Decriminalization is more straightforward様aws criminalizing the sale of sexual services between consenting adults would be eliminated. Laws currently prohibiting sex with minors, assault, extortion and rape would provide prostitutes with a legal recourse they can't currently access due to their outlaw status. Right now, says Rachel West, spokeswoman for the US PROStitutes Collective, "Violent men know they can get away with their crimes because the women are criminalized."

"Laws against prostitution aren't effective; they only hurt the people who work as prostitutes," says Norma Jean Almodovar, president and founder of ISWFACE (International Sex Worker Foundation for Art, Culture and Education用ronounced "ice face") and author of Cop to Call Girl. This belief, held by both supporters and opponents of prostitution, makes decriminalization the best solution to the problems facing prostitutes, such as sexual violence, extortion by the police and criminal records that affect subsequent employment opportunities.

Rachel West believes that decriminalization would give prostitutes more control over their income and working conditions. Instead of the current pimp/madam-dominated system or a Nevada-style legalization in which the brothel managers and owners control the women, prostitutes would have more choices about how and where they work, what they charge, who they do business with and a hundred other questions that face legitimate businesses.

In addition to encouraging economic self-determination, decriminalization would loosen up funds for legal protection and social services for prostitutes. "What happens in most cities is that their law enforcement resources go into a criminalization process: arrests, court time, decoy operations, police stakeouts, and street sweeps," says Lori Nairne, who works with Legal Action for Women. "But the poverty, the welfare cuts, the lack of child care services葉he reasons why the majority of women go into prostitution葉hose problems don't get addressed."

Nairne, who served with West on the San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution, says that the city spends $7 million per year arresting and prosecuting women money that could go towards housing, food, clothing, and child care that might keep women from entering prostitution in the first place.

Opponents of prostitution would embrace this redirection of funds, but they reject the rosy image of prostitutes hanging out their shingles and filing for franchises. "Prostitution will not become an accepted practice," says Evelina Giobbe, executive director of the Commercial Sexual Exploitation Research Institute in Minnesota. "Women will still have pimps and still get AIDS; children will still be involved."

Melissa Farley agrees with Giobbe. "Decriminalization would mean that access of customers and pimps to run and control women in prostitution would be completely opened up. It would expand and increase prostitution a good deal." To combat this, Farley recommends adopting the principles of a new Swedish law aimed at reducing the spread of the commercial sex industry. "I'd love to see no criminalization of the victim in prostitution and have the sexual exploiters in prostitution葉he pimp and the john様abeled and prosecuted as criminals," she says.

Farley argues for this approach because she can't imagine decriminalization changing the balance of power between privileged, moneyed men and poor women and children. "When women have no money and a customer offers three times as much to not use a condom, the women don't use condoms," says Farley.

You're not likely to hear the next crop of presidential candidates championing the cause of prostitutes, but local politicians tend to be more open to change. And Lori Nairne stresses that regardless of national and state law, cities can choose not to enforce particular laws if they believe the money would be better spent elsewhere.

Much of the delay in decriminalization, however, is an issue of perceived morality. People feel that sex for hire is somehow inherently bad or wrong, even among consenting adults.

"The problem boils down to changing the way people think about the act," says Almodovar of ISWFACE. "Unfortunately, what would happen if we eliminated solicitation laws today would be similar to what's happened with abortion. The morality (issue) that makes abortion unacceptable to some people has not changed and that's why the freedom to have an abortion is slowly being eroded."

Like Almodovar, Melissa Farley sees herself working for this goal in the long-term. "People didn't imagine that slavery would ever end in the U.S.," says Farley. "Slavery looked nice for some people, and I would say the same thing about prostitution. But the institution itself is a crime against women."