The scars of prostitution : Forms of legalization ignore intrinsic harms.

Op-Ed in the Toronto Star, October 31, 2011 (online edition) © Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2011 The challenges to prostitution and its harms have entailed claims of abuse and exploitation on behalf of some, victimization and subordination by others. As with other sweeping claims, such as alleging that capitalism is inherently exploitative or that many people in industrialized countries benefited from colonialism, this one is highly contested. The Swedish parliament in 1998 recognized prostitution to be a form of sex inequality related to gender-based violence, which typically exploited and harmed the prostituted person, and thus decided to criminalize purchasers while decriminalizing prostituted persons. The harms were understood to be intrinsic to prostitution. In taking this action, Sweden rejected the route taken by nations that legalized certain forms of prostitution on the grounds that the harms could be controlled and alleviated. As opposed to jurisdictions where the prostituted person herself/himself is made into a criminal, Sweden situated the Sex Purchase Law in the context of sex inequality and gender-based violence — not among offences against morality and public order. Unsurprisingly, Sweden’s decision has also been highly contested, but Norway and Iceland followed with similar laws and it is being considered in many more jurisdictions. In their opinion article in the Star on Oct. 20 regarding the Ontario Superior Court’s recent decision to strike down a number of criminal laws on prostitution, Lisa M. Kelly and Katrina Pacey claim that the Swedish Sex Purchase Law is ineffective and harmful. In fact, there is considerable evidence to the contrary. Compared with Sweden, in two neighbouring countries where the purchase of sex was legal in 2008, the per capita population of prostituted persons was estimated to be about 15 times higher in Denmark and about 8 times higher in Norway. Prior to the Swedish law there were estimated to be 2,500 to 3,000 prostituted women in Sweden — that number was down to 600 by 2008. As for the shift from street prostitution to online advertising, that is hardly unique to Sweden, but rather a consequence of modern technology observed worldwide. Supporters of the prostitution industry repeat allegations that street prostitution became more dangerous with the criminalization of the purchaser. The official 2010 Swedish report on the law, corroborated by other accounts, found these claims to be unfounded. Similar claims promulgated outside Sweden often originate in an unpublished piece in English where the Swedish author did not mention that her sample of up to 20 women was deliberately composed of persons who mostly said they had a positive view of prostitution because, she thought, so many voices saying the opposite were heard. Kelley and Pacey submit there is a diversity of experience in prostitution. Although true in the sense that each person’s life experience is her/his own, time and again studies in Canada and elsewhere have shown that a majority of prostituted persons have been subjected to child sexual abuse or serious neglect. Prostituted people usually belong to groups suffering social, political and legal disadvantage — poverty, racism and, of course, sexism. It is common for them to have been teenage runaways and to suffer homelessness. The resulting position of vulnerability and lack of acceptable alternatives to prostitution is reflected in the fact that 89 per cent of 854 persons in nine countries, including Canada, reported that they wanted to escape prostitution but said they could not. Considering also the well-documented violent abuse by many purchasers, it is not surprising that two-thirds of that same sample, regardless of their country’s laws, met clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress symptoms equal to that of treatment-seeking veterans of war and torture. While the Ontario Superior Court suggested that PTSD “could be caused by events unrelated to prostitution,” such as sexual abuse prior to entering, a Korean study in 2009 found that prostitution was strongly related to PTSD even when controlling for childhood abuse. Public inquiries in Germany, New Zealand and several studies in other jurisdictions where the purchase of sex is legal, corroborate that legalization does not address the increased demand for unsafe and dangerous sex acts, nor the abuse and deplorable industry conditions. This is to be expected since the purchasers’ money drives the business — not the needs of prostituted persons. The Ontario Superior Court repeatedly referred to a study on Nevada brothels implying the opposite without noticing how its authors admitted their access to prostituted women in brothels was facilitated by the Nevada Brothel Association and its attorneys. Other researchers are regularly denied entry. Sex purchasers harm prostituted persons immensely. In 2011, Sweden clarified its law so that prostituted persons can claim damages against purchasers for their violation of the prostituted person’s dignity and equality. Moreover, these clarifications support prostituted people’s entitlements under national public law to assistance from local social welfare agencies, as victims of crime. This model provides a means for making real choices to exit prostitution. By contrast, if Canada follows the Ontario Superior Court the purchasers and pimps are indeed, as stated by theAboriginal Women’s Action Network, given “the legal right to abuse women without consequence and to benefit from women’s inequality.” Max Waltman is a PhD Candidate at the department of political science, Stockholm University (Sweden), and has published in Women’s Studies International Forum and the Political Research Quarterly.

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