Rare News Desk
Last week at the International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia, researchers presented a paper for the medical journal Lancet which estimated that the legalization of prostitution could reduce HIV rates 33 to 46 percent.
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Rates of the virus are greatly increased in several high-risk groups, including female sex workers who are 14 times more likely to have it.
Sex work has different levels of restrictions in the countries — India, Canada, and Kenya — that researches studied sex workers’ HIV rates in, but the paper concluded that all of those restrictions endanger the workers.
This was particularly apropos in Canada, where a currently-debated law would outlaw “advertising” sex, but critics say it simply outlaws prostitution. In India, the actual act of selling sex is allowed, but just about everything else involved in the trade is not permitted. Kenya has a large sex worker contingent – much of it is underage and all of it illegal.
The report focused on three different foreign countries, but there is no reason why the overriding conclusion that sex work should be legalized wouldn’t translate to the U.S.
The Washington Post summed up some of the difficulties that sex workers face while trying to keep safe in these countries. These difficulties include law enforcement taking condoms away from prostitutes to use as evidence, which leads to these women no longer carry condoms for fear of prosecution or arrest. This is a direct health risk for the sex workers and their clients, but there are myriad other aspects to prohibition that endanger people.
Lazily equating trafficking with prostitution – something common in media reports – removes the one factor that matters, consent to the activity of selling sex. One has to ask, if saving women from the (overhyped, but real) danger of trafficking is the goal, what good is outlawing prostitution doing to further that goal?
The best thing to do to help people who have been actually coerced into prostitution is to remove the disincentive to report their suffering to the authorities.
The so-called Swedish model, which decriminalizes sex work, but outlaws solicitation, is often recommended by some liberals when this issues comes up. It is seen as a human rights-savvy compromise.
Several European nations and Canada are considering moving towards variations on this theme, but that might be ill-advised. Prostitutes who are looking for work, but who honestly choose this scandalous method of making money are restricted unnecessary by these laws.
In places where sex-for-money is technically legal, like India, running a brothel is often outlawed. This pushes workers onto the streets, or in other hidden, more potentially dangerous avenues for turning tricks. They, and the johns who pay them, may still need to hide from law enforcement, once again putting the women at danger from disease or assault.
Safety concerns aside, however, the most compelling argument in favor of legalized prostitution is not related to health or safety. The reason it should be done is because individuals own themselves, and the state does not.
Even the Swedish model is condescending and treats individuals like children unable to consent to an economic exchange. And outlawing prostitution or solicitation for fear of women being kidnapped, raped, or abused by vicious traffickers is still equating something voluntary with violent acts, which are criminal because they harm other people and take away their choices.
In the U.S. we have plenty of sex for sale: there’s movie stars in barely-there underwear on the cover of Maxim, there’s nude modeling, stripping, and there’s hardcore pornography.
The difference between prostitution and porn is what exactly? The cameras? Sex is legal. Exchanging money is legal. Exchanging money for sex is permitted, provided you film it. So what possible justification for barring prostitution is there?
One need not approve of prostitution to admit that its prohibition is not helping women. It has been called the oldest profession for a reason. It is not going away simply because it is outlawed.
As with narcotics and illegal jitney cabs, a prohibition on a good or service invariably leads to a black market that provides just that. As long as that market involves a voluntary good or service, there is simply no reason for it to be barred.
The legalization of adults engaging in legal prostitution is long overdue in the United States, a land which in theory allows individuals to do what they wish provided it harms nobody else.
Prostitution’s continued lawless status in nearly all of the U.S. is a bizarre, puritanical hold-out that is bad for public health and worse for individual rights.
