Beware the new trend of decriminalizing prostitution
By Valerie Hudson, Mercator.
The research team I work with is currently knee-deep into categorizing the legal approach that each nation takes with regard to prostitution. This project has really opened my eyes to the wide variety of approaches taken. For example, in some countries, buying sex is perfectly legal but providing that sex for money is strictly illegal. In other cases, we’ve seen countries do abrupt legal U-turns as they discover that the approach they are taking is making things worse.
In other words, there’s a lot of complexity here, and the legal approach taken depends on how you view prostitution. You can tackle this from the philosophical level, of course — is prostitution merely another form of work? Is prostitution inevitable, ineradicable? Is this a “my body, my choice” situation? Or is prostitution one of the only socially sanctioned gross human rights violations remaining?
While the philosophical debate rages, at a different level of analysis — outcomes for women who engage in prostitution — there is no controversy. It’s appropriate to focus on women in prostitution, because it’s estimated that females make up more than 80 percent of prostitutes. Decades of research show that women in prostitution fare far worse on pretty much every imaginable physical and mental health outcome measure.
To give but one example, the homicide rate for prostitutes is 229 per 100,000, which is higher than the highest workplace homicide rates of any regular occupation, such as liquor store workers (8 in 100,000), taxi drivers (27 in 100,000) and U.S. soldiers (counting combat-related deaths: 27 in 100,000 between 1980-2010). Yes, you read that right — prostitutes are almost 10 times more likely to be killed than soldiers in combat. There is literally no category of “work” with a homicide rate as high as prostitution. This should tip us off that this is not “work,” but in fact a form of socially sanctioned violence.
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