Prostitution a Victimless Crime?
This webpage has a good article and cites scientific research.
To believe prostitution has no victims, one must ignore these statistics published in Farley's Fact Sheet:
78 percent of 55 women who sought help from the Council for Prostitution Alternatives in 1991 reported being raped an average of 16 times a year by pimps, and were raped 33 times a year by johns.
62 percent reported having been raped in prostitution.
73 percent reported having experienced physical assault in prostitution.
72 percent were currently or formerly homeless.
92 percent stated that they wanted to escape prostitution immediately.
83 percent of prostitutes are victims of assault with a weapon.
75 percent of women in escort prostitution had attempted suicide.
67 percent meet diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In short, the victims of prostitution are mostly the prostitutes themselves. It just may be that they no longer have the ability left to "consent" to be a willing participant in their so-called victimless crime.*I would push for one change: the buyers should always be prosecuted along with the sellers, regardless of the purpose the investigation.
*Alec Baldwin (OF ALL PEOPLE) agrees that prostitution should always be a crime.
posted by S. at
12:04 PM
2 Comments:
Prostitution, gambling, drugs and alcohol are all industries with victims and bad people ready to take advantage of those victims. But if ending the ban on booze has shown us anything, it's that taxing and regulating these industries is the solution. Ending prohibition was the way to put gangsters out of business. Eventually the industry was in the hands of companies that provided jobs, tax revenue, and resources for those abusing the product.
Keeping prostitution illegal only makes for dangerous conditions for the prostitute. All who claim the act is immoral and therefore should remain illegal are just doing the "holier than thou" dance. They probably have their own skeletons in the closet. By choosing the status quo, victims and those who prey on the victims, they are the cruel ones.
By
Anonymous, at 12:08 PM, March 13, 2008
The end of prohibition is beginning to remind me of so many other knee-jerk examples trotted out in support of everything--some of the Founders owned slaves, therefore everything they did or said is flawed; the Depression ended during WWII; therefore the massive war build-up was the solution; Margaret Sanger saw abortion and birth control as a way to control the growth of undesirable races, therefore legalized abortion is legalized eugenics... OH, wait! No one says that (even though it's true).
To get to the point, laws give the stamp of approval to actions. If a democratically elected legislature in a well-functioning republic chooses to make prostitution illegal, they are saying "we don't approve." And why would we? Again, it is not a victimless crime. It hurts everyone involved, and many more who are not.
This 'holier than thou' dance you speak of-- speak for yourself. There remain many of us in the world who always have been and always will be faithful to our spouses.
Given your rationale, why not make all drugs legal, and in all doses, and for all ages? How about removing all restrictions on so-called adult entertainment? Where does it end?
Can anything remain illegal if the criteria for all laws is that those who support them cannot have ever broken them? If we have skeletons in the closet, we are no longer allowed to comment on the sins we discovered to be so much more horrible than we thought?
Finally, I do not choose the "status quo, victims, and those who prey on victims." I would prefer a set of laws much stricter than the status quo, laws that punish the Johns much more than the women. Destroy the demand and the supply will go with it.
By
S., at 2:21 PM, March 13, 2008
Post a Comment
<< Home