Calling prostitution ‘sex work’ doesn’t make it less harmful. Michelle Panayi explains why Australia must take seriously calls from a high-ranking United Nations expert for a rethink on the way we allow society to treat many women and young girls.
Australia must act on this warning given that prostitution is mostly called “sex work” which normalises it, and full decriminalisation or legalisation of prostitution exists in the majority of states and territories.
The Special Rapporteur’s report on Prostitution and Violence Against Women and Girls highlights that prostitution is a system of violence which reduces women and girls to commodities and says in effect that all women have a price.
In addition, the report says that payment and/or promise of payment is the most visible sign of a person being purchased rather than freely giving consent, and that many survivors referred to it as “paid rape”.
Furthermore, violence, poverty, manipulation, lack of physical and mental safety, discrimination, and lack of real alternatives serve as coercion. And international law has established the issue of “irrelevance of consent” within the framework of trafficking crimes and the exploitation and prostitution of others.
The Special Rapporteur also highlights that the term “sex work” wrongly depicts prostitution as an activity as dignified and worthy as any other work, fails to take into account the serious human rights violations involved, and “gaslights” victims and their experiences.
Countries that have legalised or fully decriminalised prostitution have, according to the report, increases in the demand for prostitution, recorded higher rates of sex trafficking, violence, abuse and rape and increased prospects for money laundering and drug trafficking. I add that the 2015 NSW parliamentary inquiry into brothel regulation found that a substantial section of the industry had gone underground under full decriminalisation.
The Special Rapporteur rightly asserts that the equal participation of women in society is impossible to achieve when prostitution is normalised as it dehumanises women and girls, and is fundamentally based on unequal power relations between women and men.
[T]he perceived right of men to purchase a sex act normalizes the violence inflicted on women through prostitution. It also reinforces sexist views including that women are simply receptacles for men’s sexual “needs”. As such there is also a strong correlation between men’s use of prostitution and rape.
It is the Equality or Nordic model as it sometimes called which exists in countries such as Sweden, Iceland, France, Ireland, and Canada, that the Special Rapporteur’s report says should be adopted by all nations.
This holistic model decriminalises prostituted persons and focuses on funding specialist exit programs to help them leave this industry and addresses the underlying causes of prostitution. And it criminalises the sexual act buyers, pimps, and brothel owners.
The Special Rapporteur’s report makes numerous other findings and recommendations that States should adopt. This includes that pornography is filmed prostitution and its consumption is linked to male violence against women and children, such as rape. And so countries should criminalise the possession, production, and hosting of it.
Source: Blind Eye: We Should Heed UN Report Warning Against Australia Becoming A ‘Pimp State” – New Matilda