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Reality of legalized prostitution
November 7, 2004
Mothers and children go shopping for swimsuits in a store across the street
from a brothel. Brothels are located on residential streets and vibrant
shopping districts. Children walk past brothels on their way to school.
Brothel owners are featured in mainstream newspapers as business entrepreneurs.
Brothels are listed on the national stock exchange, their shares traded on the
secondary market. Flush with cash and legitimacy, sex entrepreneurs lobby
politicians, judges, prosecutors and the police for more favorable laws and
enforcement policies.
The sex industry has growing influence over the media, shaping society’s -
especially young people’s - ideas about the acceptable norms and desirable
goals of sexual behavior. Men accept that buying women for sex is an ordinary
consumer choice and frequently and openly visit brothels.
This is a picture of Victoria, Australia today where brothel prostitution has
been legal since 1984. Victoria is now a society in which prostitution is
accepted and has become an integral part of the fabric of the community.
This was not always so in Victoria. Nor was this culture of prostitution what
the citizens of Victoria thought they were bargaining for when they voted to
legalize brothel prostitution in 1984.
When the issue of whether or not to legalize prostitution was being debated,
the arguments put forward for legalization were: (1) that legalization would
allow the regulation of the prostitution industry; (2) that legalization would
prevent the industry from expanding; and (3) that legalization would curtail
street prostitution and that in legal brothels, prostituted women would be
safer and have more rights.
These arguments are very similar to those being put forward by the
"pragmatists" in Korea who oppose Korea’s new anti-prostitution laws as
idealistic, unrealistic, and therefore, misguided.
However, the example of Australia should give the proponents of legalization
pause. Unlicensed brothels are still numerous and out of control in Victoria.
Legalization had the opposite effect of curbing and controlling the growth of
the sex industry.
As reported by Victoria’s legal brothel owners’ association, today in Victoria,
illegal brothels outnumber legal brothels 4 to 1. An explosion in the illegal
prostitution industry has also been observed in New South Wales, where brothel
prostitution was decriminalized in 1995. These results are not surprising in
that legalization creates heightened local demand, leads to an influx of sex
tourists, and overall, creates a more favorable "business’’ environment, laying
the foundation for a thriving prostitution industry, both legal and illegal.
In Australia, instead of containing the harm of prostitution, legalization
dramatically multiplied it, while at the same time, creating a culture where
the sex industry is legitimized and mainstreamed.
Trafficking in women and girls remains a serious and growing problem, as
"businessmen," faced with limited local supply, respond to the ever growing
demand for women and girls’ bodies by turning to more vulnerable populations
overseas.
Nor did regulation make prostitution significantly safer or less degrading for
prostituted women in legal brothels. Research conducted at one of Melbourne’s
legal brothels sheds some light on the reality of prostitution in legal
brothels:
"All the women waited in the lounge. Men came in one at a time to make their
selection and the women had to compete to be chosen. Then they went up to the
room (and there) had to try to control the encounter. Men would sometimes want
an `all around the world’ i.e., access to any orifice in any way and the right
to touch any part of the woman’s body. The woman must then struggle to restrict
him whilst not losing the booking. Men might twist nipples and shove fingers up
the woman’s anus. When women came down from bookings, one would shower for 10
minutes in very hot water to get the dirt off her body. Before a booking one
woman would come out in goose bumps. Her skin was crawling at the thought of
what she would have to endure.’’ (Ingrid Barclay, University of Melbourne).
The essence of what men buy in prostitution is the right to degrade, penetrate
and violate, at will, women’s bodies. Legalizing and instituting this right
does not sanitize prostitution or violence and degradation against women. The
violence of prostitution is made even more explicit in sadomasochism brothels,
a burgeoning area of the prostitution industry. Professor Sheila Jeffreys of
the University of Melbourne states that in Australia, the sadomasochism
industry has become a highly profitable sector with its own clubs, equipment,
porn and brothels. Customers of sadomasochist brothels in inner Melbourne are
overwhelmingly married and middle class, and come from the suburbs.
Those who oppose imposing penalties on brothel operators and buyers while
protecting prostituted victims - Korea’s new approach - say they believe this
approach is too "idealistic’’ and moralistic. However, a pragmatic study of the
Australian model suggests that, in fact, those who hope to curb and control the
sex industry through regulation may be the idealistic ones. For pragmatic
reasons, as well as for reasons based on the values and principles of human
dignity and equality, legalization appears to be an undesirable route.
Hilary Sung-hee Seo works as a counsel with Coalition Against Trafficking in
Women (CATW) in New York City. She is a human rights attorney practicing in New
York, focusing on violence against and sexual exploitation of women. The CATW
is a non-governmental organization that promotes women's rights. For more
information, please visit the group's Web site: www.CATWinternational.org.
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