Natasha Distiller crossfire
Khadija Magardie’s article, “Put an end to prostitution by removing the demand” (August 18 to 24) contains a number of interesting legal and moral assumptions that warrant exploration. Decriminalising and regulating the adult commercial sex-work industry are important steps towards dealing with the violence and exploitation that occur in the industry. Decriminalisation will also enable better control of the organised criminal activity that currently facilitates the exploitation of women and children and the trafficking of drugs, activities that are linked in the public mind with the industry. Magardie is correct in assuming that decriminalisation will not “get women out” of the sex industry. However, decriminalisation has the potential to make it easier for those who wish to leave the industry to do so. Sex work exists in all countries, regardless of socio-economic conditions, and sex workers come from all classes, races and education backgrounds. Just as it is impossible to stereotype sex workers, so it is impossible to stereotype clients. Clients are not solely “men who cruise the streets looking for bodies of pre- pubescent girls”. Magardie invokes the assumption that clients are sexually and emotionally deviant. In fact, international research indicates that their socio-demographic profile is that of “ordinary men”. There are many reasons why clients use the services of sex workers, and sex workers offer a variety of services, including talking. Magardie is unquestionably correct in calling for the prosecution of men who sexually abuse under-age children, whether on the streets or in any other forum. Children are legally protected against sexual abuse and would continue to be protected if adult commercial sex work were decriminalised. What the decriminalisation of sex work would facilitate would be better control of the industry to ensure that under-age sex workers are identified and assisted by the relevant state bodies and NGOs. To continue to criminalise the industry – whether through the criminalisation of sex workers or clients – is to continue to facilitate an industry that operates beneath the law. The people involved in the industry are therefore more vulnerable to abuse, to organised crime, and those men who would use the commercial sex industry to find children to abuse will continue to be able to do so. Magardie explores the arguments that “prostitutes … exist anyway”, and are subject to a range of abuses under the current system. To offer protection to sex workers on this basis is not convincing to her, because, she asks, “to what extent does this notion of a prostitute as a worker like anyone else influence male perceptions about women in general?”. She says that to allow the existence of a category of woman-as-sex-object (although this incorrectly stereotypes the kind of services offered by sex workers) implies that all women are at risk of “slipping” into this category. One could just as easily ask, as Carol Smart does in her book Law, Crime, and Sexuality (1995), what are the implications for all women that a category of women who do not conform to social-sexual norms is created and punished by law? How are all women being controlled by the threat of criminalisation and stigmatisation if they presume to use their bodies in the ways they choose, and not in the ways they are told they should by society?
Further, if one is to interrogate the implications for society of prostitution as a form of work, with the assumption that prostitution automatically degrades the women (and men, presumably) who engage in the trade, a number of vexed questions arise. Should we also then be criminalising the other forms of often informal, potentially exploitative labour performed mostly by economically disadvantaged women, like farm work? What about domestic work, where women may be subject to sexual and economic abuse?
This is not to say that one evil justifies the tolerance of other evils. Rather, it is an attempt to ask why in a world where so many people, particularly women, have to do whatever they can to survive, sex workers should be singled out as the primary symptom of a capitalist, patriarchal world. Even if we conclude that sex work does belong in a category of its own, and that its existence should ideally be abolished, what then? Magardie is in agreement that sex workers themselves should not be criminalised. She correctly identifies that as long as there is a demand, there will be a supply.
However, as with other criminalised industries, it is obvious that criminalising a demand will not make it go away. To criminalise clients is to keep the sex industry where it currently is. And ultimately that means the continued abuse of sex workers. Decriminalisation is not a “free for all”. Rather, maintaining the crimi-nalisation of the sex industry creates this “free for all” at the expense of the women and men who, for whatever reasons, will continue to make a living selling sex. This is an intolerable situation in a country striving towards a society where human dignity is respected and human rights are upheld. Natasha Distiller is advocacy co-ordinator of the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce