The surge in prostitution that accompanied the 2006 Football World Cup in Germany is forcing the South African Police Service to reconsider its usually sporadic approach to policing the sex industry in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
The parliamentary portfolio committee on safety and security is awaiting a strategy from the police on how to address prostitution during the international sporting event after police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi raised the issue in Parliament earlier this year.
Selebi told the committee in March that the government would have to develop innovative ways to address public drinking and prostitution during the World Cup.
His widely reported comment that a ‘special dispensation†should be considered to legalise prostitution and public drinking during the event sparked outrage among several MPs.
The chairperson of the committee, Makhotso Sotyu, said that Selebi had been responding to questions about how the training budget would be used to prepare the police for the World Cup. The questions had to do specifically with crowd control and not prostitution.
Sotyu said that Selebi gave an example of how German police managed prostitution during the 2006 World Cup by reportedly allowing designated taxis to drive people to areas where sex workers were available.
‘We would not even think of legalising prostitution. We are not even dreaming about that,†she said.
Parliament was not discussing the matter and expected the police to develop a strategy to address prostitution during the World Cup, she said.
Senior Superintendent Vish Naidoo, police spokesperson for the 2010 World Cup, said that Selebi’s point had been to get the committee to consider the matter seriously. He said that measures to address prostitution might include legalising it or creating red-light districts.
He said that this would enable the police to prosecute crimes associated with prostitution, such as the verbal and physical abuse of sex workers.
Naidoo acknowledged that the police tended to prioritise other crimes over prostitution. ‘We have to attend to our priorities and currently our priorities are all contact crimes,†he explained. He said that very often prostitution was dealt with by the police in the course of policing other crimes such as robbery and assault with intent to commit grievous bodily harm.
Naidoo’s comments were echoed by a state prosecutor. who said that the prosecution of prostitutes had declined since the early Nineties, when there had been a greater focus on brothels. He said the police now dealt sporadically with prostitution, tending to go after sex workers in response to specific complaints.
The prosecutor said that the Sexual Offences Act envisioned two scenarios, either involving sexual transactions in a brothel or a prostitute on a street corner. In the former scenario, both the persons rendering the services and the clients could be prosecuted, while in the latter, only the sex worker would be prosecuted.
For a first offence, a conviction would probably result in a fine of no more than R4 000. Repeat offenders might receive a prison sentence of no more than two years.
He said that in ‘99% of cases†the clients did not go to jail and often turned state witness to help prosecute the brothel owners.
In the case of foreigners involved in prostitution cases, he said, most of the time prostitutes solicited foreigners with the intention of robbing them.