City government has been making a lot of noise and patting itself on the back for its anti-prostitution campaign in an area off Wilkinson Boulevard. In May the police dramatically declared the area a Prostitution Exclusion Zone, meaning that since June 1, prostitutes and johns arrested in the PEZ are barred from re-entering the neighborhood. Beginning in August, the johns (who need only offer money for sex to get busted — no purchase necessary) will need to complete a class about sexually transmitted diseases, addiction and respect for women, which no doubt will be about as effective as the safe driving class people take to get out of a traffic ticket.
The city’s campaign is the kind of window dressing local officials everywhere love. A neighborhood is “cleaned up,” citizens praise the officials for “taking back our streets,” and everyone looks the other way while the women simply move somewhere else. Meanwhile, the people who have the most to lose, the prostitutes themselves, are just as much at risk of getting STDs as before, just as likely to be violently assaulted and just as beholden to their pimps.
Twenty-five years ago when I had all the answers, I thought, “What possible business is it of the government if a woman decides to rent out her body, so to speak, for pay?” I even knew how to solve the whole problem: legalize prostitution and regulate it as some European countries do, kind of like we regulate alcohol and tobacco sales.
Over time, I learned two things. One, despite my generation’s best efforts, America’s deep-seated puritanical streak isn’t going anywhere. Given our taboo-laden, Calvinist legacy, there is no way the US will treat sex as a commodity, subject to rational controls and taxes — at least not anytime soon. Two, the European countries that decriminalized prostitution began to have second thoughts when things didn’t turn out the way they expected.
Nonetheless, something has to change. The way we deal with prostitution now — incarcerating women, most of whom according to every available study, want to do something else for a living; and chasing johns from one place to another, printing their names in the paper and giving them light sentences — is nothing short of ridiculous. Not to mention that at the end of the day, prostitution is still with us.
There’s more going on when a man buys a prostitute’s services than just an exchange of money for sex, and almost none of it is beneficial to the woman. Prostitutes, obviously, are more likely to get, and spread, sexually transmitted diseases than people in any other profession. Most of the women are at times violently attacked by customers or, perhaps worse, they become the quasi-slaves of pimps. And then there’s the whole nasty issue of worldwide human trafficking which is fed by the enormous demand for prostitutes.
What’s called for is a tectonic shift in our thinking. One thing we know for sure is that prostitution will continue ad infinitum — not even politicians are big enough liars to say otherwise — so common sense dictates that we treat it as the everlasting fact of life it is. We have to finally give up the medieval impulse to punish women for “luring” men into sex, and adopt a more rational and, yes, more moral, approach — one whose primary task is lessening the effects of prostitution such as STDs and the exploitation of women.
If we ever get serious and quit pretending prostitution can be eradicated, we can learn a lot from those aforementioned European countries’ experiments, especially Sweden’s recent, drastic policy changes.
Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and others have experimented at various times with decriminalizing prostitution. Most of these efforts involve regular medical exams for the working girls, a licensing procedure, and a relatively heavy tax. These policies have raised a lot of tax revenue, and rates of venereal disease and violence against prostitutes have dropped.
Two big problems have cropped up, however. When prostitutes are found to have an STD and their licenses are temporarily revoked, many of them simply start working illegally. The other problem is that much of the vast profit generated by global prostitution goes into the coffers of human traffickers, no doubt the lowest form of homo sapiens.
When the Swedes realized legalization hadn’t done away with the pimp-and-trafficker problem, they revolutionized their approach. In 1998, Sweden recriminalized prostitution, but with an emphasis on prosecuting pimps, brothel owners and traffickers. The johns are arrested, but the women are left alone (other than being given counseling and help in getting out of the business). The result so far is amazing: a 50 percent drop in the number of prostitutes and a 75 percent decline in sex buying.
It’s unrealistic to think that American officials these days, beholden as they are to the religious right, would consider taking the Swedish approach, but the Swedes’ success speaks for itself. At some point, when US voters elect leaders who aren’t puppets for preachers, those new officials can take a closer look at a solution to one of the world’s oldest problems that is actually working.
CL intern Lauren McLeod helped conduct research for this column.
This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2005.
