The majority view, however, is that commercial sex harms these individuals and, more importantly, society at large. The ban against prostitution is said to denounce the exploitation of sexual gratification. Prostitution laws are intended to protect public health and welfare including the suppression of sexually transmitted diseases , protect minors who might otherwise become involved in the sex industry, thwart other associated forms of crime, and curb the incentive to exploit women.
In some states, prostitution is considered a form of disorderly conduct. In most the crime includes offering or agreeing to, or actually engaging in, a sexual act in exchange for money. Statutes typically describe the contemplated sexual activity vaguely. They use terms such as " lewd acts ," but invariably describe intimate physical contact of some form.
They require that the defendant intend to receive compensation, either directly or through a third party, in exchange for that contact.
In many states, the government must prove only that the prostitute offered or agreed to engage in sexual conduct for compensation, regardless of whether she or he intended to follow through on that offer or agreement. The only requirement is that the offer or agreement not be in jest.
In some states, though, the prosecution must prove that the defendant specifically intended to engage in the sexual act in exchange for money. In those states a prostitution violation requires some act showing that the defendant intended to follow through on the offer or agreement to partake in sexual activity.
An example of such an act is touching the patron's crotch after offering intercourse. In all states where prostitution is illegal, the intentions of the would-be client are irrelevant—the alleged prostitute can be convicted even if that client doesn't actually intend to participate in any sexual contact.
Were the law otherwise, police sting operations to uncover and prosecute illegal sexual activity, which are vital to enforcing laws against prostitution, would be pointless. In addition to pimping and pandering, there are several prostitution-related crimes that involve third parties.
State laws relating to the sex trade typically prohibit certain categories of behavior that foster prostitution. These include:. In addition, federal law prohibits transporting a person across state lines with intent that that person engage in prostitution or any other criminal sexual activity. Why are these examples socially acceptable, even encouraged, but prostitution is seen as so appalling?
The difference is that in all of these other situations, it is easy for people to pretend that the women involved are not actually selling their bodies directly. Prostitution does not allow the general public to have the benefit of these pretenses. Rather, the industry is honest about how sex and money are directly related. And for many individuals, this is an uncomfortable notion.
It is even more uncomfortable for some people to believe that women should be allowed to have the control over their bodies that would permit them to engage in prostitution voluntarily; they cannot allow themselves to believe that women would choose such a profession.
Yet rather than recognize this reality, those who oppose the legalization of prostitution march forth with arguments about concern for the safety of women. They fail to realize that criminalizing prostitution does not help sex workers, and their arguments lead to legislation that harms women while operating under the morally-driven guise of wanting to protect them.
Legalize prostitution, impose strict regulations, and construct comprehensive support systems that allow sex workers to do their jobs safely. The desire to protect women from sexual abuse will always be valid, and if anything is a desire that should be more widespread in the United States.
If you are uncomfortable with the idea of women having sex for money, then you should also have a problem with pornography, exotic dancing, and people dating for money. The nation's leading progressive law journal. Founded in Check out what's happening this week in civil rights and civil liberties in our weekly news roundup!
Today on the Amicus Blog: How are jails and prisons handling the coronavirus pandemic at this point? David S. The submissions period closes on Oct Make sure you submit to our student writing email, not Scholastica! The women would still have to work in clandestine spaces and in often isolated ways in order for their clients to meet them and avoid prosecution. By criminalising men the law would effectively support a culture that defines prostitution as part of a criminal underworld where violence and danger are an inherent and expected part of the job.
To this end, whilst Shifting the Burden's interest in the relationship between the law and culture and how this affects sex workers is a positive move, there is still a long way to go before sex workers are no longer marginalised by the law.
As with previous inquiries, Shifting the Burden concludes that the laws surrounding prostitution need to be changed. In particular the report is concerned that sex workers should be dealt with outside the criminal justice system as much as possible so as not to hinder their attempts to exit prostitution. In many ways, this can be seen as progress. Moreover, Shifting the Burden represents progress in addressing the impact of prostitution policy on broader cultural perceptions of sex workers.
For example, it openly acknowledges the law's stigmatising effect on sex workers, how this makes them more vulnerable to violence and how it makes it harder for those who want to leave prostitution. Consequently, policy makers can focus on discussing the ways in which criminalisation has been unfair and harmful to sex workers, but shifting the moral focus to the role of male client risks continued marginalisation of prostitution and sex workers. The UK seems to following suit: Shifting the Burden recommends the criminalization of the purchase of sex, and it is possible a Bill will be tabled in the near future.
This is a highly controversial move. Dozens of organizations came together to campaign against the European Parliament vote and the Shifting the Burden Report, including the Global Alliance against the Trafficking in Women.
These groups argue that criminalizing clients would only serve to drive the sex industry further underground and make it significantly more difficult for organizations to find and help the women who need it. They presented extensive, research-based evidence to Gavin Shuker, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade to show that criminalizing the purchase of sex would not reduce prostitution, trafficking, or exploitation and would increase stigma and vulnerability for everyone in the sex industry.
Despite this, the UK Parliament is seriously considering enacting such legislation. It starts from the perspective that prostitution is inherently exploitative, and that the demand for bought sex is the primary cause of prostitution. The debate over who should be held morally and criminally responsible for prostitution is one that stretches back into at least the nineteenth century.
Indeed, the new proposals to criminalize clients are frequently presented as the culmination of an over century-long struggle by feminists to overturn the double standard in prostitution law.
But it is worth looking back at the legislation, debates, and hidden histories of the early twentieth century to throw light on contemporary assumptions about the sources of exploitation and the role played by demand in the sex industry. The idea that men were more morally responsible for prostitution than women was one of the keystones in the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain CD Acts.
These Acts, passed in the s, required that suspected prostitutes in ports and garrison towns be registered and forcibly inspected for venereal disease, and inspired an unprecedented attack on what came to be called the double standard of sexual morality.
Why, asked repealers, were poor women held responsible for venereal disease and prostitution, when men were just as frequently the cause, source and spread of it? Men and women came together to demand the repeal of the Acts, and the movement blossomed into a wider campaign to end the government regulation of prostitution in Britain, Europe, and the Empire, which lasted long after the initial Acts in Britain were repealed.
Caught up in the campaign against the CD Acts was the call to criminalize men who bought sex as well as, or instead of, the women who sold it. Influential organizations such as the National Vigilance Association made several attempts to introduce legislation to criminalize the purchase of sex during and after the First World War, seeing this as important step in ending the double standard of sexual morality and improving the overall moral standard of society.
These proposals, like those today, met with strong opposition. Why, given the legacy of the campaign against the sexual double standard, did many early twentieth century feminists and social reformers oppose the criminalization of clients?
It is helpful to understand that campaigns against the double standard of sexual morality and the government regulation of prostitution were rooted as much in the principles of civil rights as they were morality.
Leading figures in the CD Act repeal movement, such as Josephine Butler, cautioned campaigners not to replace government regulation with criminalization, which infringed equally upon human rights and stigmatized women. Women who sold sex in the early twentieth century also engaged in these debates, and the patchy evidence suggests that they did not see their clients as the enemy, however much they may have disliked them personally or found sexual activity with them distasteful.
Rather, it was the poor wages they were offered elsewhere, the mistreatment they experienced at the hands of the police and immigration officials and, most of all, the stigmatization they were made to feel by society for having chosen or having been forced to sell sex. In the early twentieth century, these voices are just echoes, left behind in scarce police reports, rare autobiographies, and sociological investigations. In the present day, unlike in the early twentieth century, sex workers groups are organized and vocal, and turning these echoes into a shout.
But, just as in the early twentieth century, lawmakers, radical feminists, and moral reform organizations do not seem to be listening. The legal stigma of selling sex might be removed by a law that criminalizes clients and only clients, but the social stigma of engaging in the sex industry - even if it is claimed to be a choice made by an adult woman - still remains.
This law does little to address the more than century-old concerns of women who sell sex, who report that the chief problem they experience in prostitution is its marginalized, making it more difficult for women to seek support and potentially exit the industry. Redefining demand and challenging criminalization in the early twentieth century.
While prohibitionists were unsuccessful in convincing the State to criminalize the purchase of sex in Britain in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, they did get laws against third-party largely male exploitation enacted. These pimps, traffickers, and brothel keepers were largely considered the most heinous participants in the commercial sex industry. However, there were several important dissenting voices.
In The English Review in , outspoken feminist Teresa Billington Greig expressed a deep concern for legislation based on exaggerated claims of exploitation that ignored the more systematic and complex factors that contributed to women leaving their homes and selling sex. The result, no matter who in the sex industry was targeted by the law the prostitutes, the pimps, or the clients was the same: darker alleys, more isolated furnished rooms, more abandoned lots, and more abuse and violence.
George Bernard Shaw was equally scathing of the campaign against white slavery, but from another perspective. The people most morally responsible for prostitution, he argued, were not the women who sold sex, the men who bought sex, or even the third parties who made money from it. Instead, it was the industrialists and businessmen who forced women to accept such low wages for their labour.
It was also, crucially, the affluent middle classes who demanded cheap labour and cheap products in their homes. The very glaze on your basin and tea-cup has in it the lead poison that you offer to the decent woman as a reward for honest labour, meanwhile the procuress is offering chicken and champagne.
There is plenty of evidence that shows women are particularly affected by this exploitation of labour. Just like those who seek to criminalize the purchase of sex today, Shaw insisted that it was indeed demand that caused prostitution, but the most significant demand was ours, the demands of consumer society, not that of male clients or third party exploiters.
The burden does need to be shifted, but this should be a burden of responsibility, not criminalization. The UK Government should strongly consider making better provisions to protect low-wage workers, especially foreign ones; and it should reconsider granting asylum and the legal right to work to women seeking to escape from domestic violence and poverty abroad. It should also invest heavily in programmes designed to help sex workers who wish to leave the trade, domestic violence shelters, and drug addiction treatment centres; and make education and housing affordable to women on low incomes.
Most of all, child care should be made affordable for all families so no women needs to do something she considers degrading in order to feed, clothe, and house her children. Caslin sees the criminalization of clients as a welcome cultural shift towards no longer blaming women but rather targeting men for prostitution.
However, I have found in my research that any form of criminalization pushes prostitution further underground and makes it more dangerous, especially for the most vulnerable women in the sex industry. The criminalization of prostitution whether for women selling sex or men buying it increases the associated risk which is invariably experienced by sex workers. Moral reformers have long positioned prostitutes as victims rather than villains; historians tend to date this shift to the later eighteenth century.
0コメント