How to Stop Prostitution
Stop criminalizing the victims.
The policy behind the prohibition of prostitution is to stop the exploitation of women. Sometimes people argue - correctly, I think - that prostitution exploits and harms all women, even those who are not prostitutes. But it seems like people often buy the theory that we should be concerned about the prostitutes themselves. The argument goes that particular women - the poor, the uneducated, and the minorities - are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation because they have few other options for survival. In order to protect these women from taking this "easy out," we as a society outlaw prostitution.
If this argument is followed to its logical conclusion, it makes no sense to make criminals of those women who succumb to the very harms that the law wants to protect them from. The prostitutes are the victims. Punishing them would be like punishing slaves, on the theory that forced labor is illegal.
I had this revelation when a friend told me that teen sexting is a felony: child pornography. That is, a teenager who takes salacious photos of herself on her cell phone can face up to 2 years in prison. When I heard about this, it occurred to me that something was wrong. True, the teen was the one holding the camera and committing the act we want to discourage; but it was also true that the whole point of having that law was to protect that teen. While the prohibition made sense, I thought there should have been a better way to sanction that activity, other than jail time.
Another analogy might be certain parts of immigration policy. For example, the T visa pardons those illegal immigrants who enter the US as a result of trafficking, and the U visa pardons those illegal immigrants who were the victims of serious crimes. The purpose of these laws is not to establish that sometimes, it's okay to enter the country illegally. Neither visa really addresses the immigrant's wrongful acts, and to be fair, it seems like in a lot of cases the immigrant is partially responsible for his or her own exploitation. Instead, these visas address a completely different policy goal, which is to stop activities that hurt people. Lawmakers determined that this policy is best served by encouraging the victims to come forward and cooperate with the police. The victims are given visas so that they can do this better, and not because they somehow "deserve" to be in the country because of their sufferings. The thorny issue that their immigration was in all other respects illegal is tabled in service of a goal separate from immigration policy per se.
This area of the law strikes me as being particularly enlightened and instructive. In an ideal world, surely there wouldn't be illegal immigrants any more than there would be trafficking or crimes. But ours is not an ideal world, and we can recognize that the existence of an undesirable act does not mean that we need to criminalize every one involved in it. Some people should be held accountable, and others should not.
The same holds true for prostitution. By subjecting the victims of the undesirable act to criminal liability, we discourage them from coming forward and reporting their exploiters. Pimps and johns are able to intimidate them into silence because these women are, in the eyes of the law, guilty. Instead of equating the victims with their exploiters, we should do for prostitution what we did in the T and U visas, and give the victims an incentive (or at least take away a disincentive) to further law enforcement efforts. We should attach criminal liability only to pimps and johns - those participating in the exploitation that the law means to prohibit.
Freeing the prostitutes from such liability would not only encourage prostitutes to report their victimization; it would also discourage johns from initiating the activity in the first place. Even if there were a prostitute who was perfectly capable and willing to sell her body in the ideal capitalist market of autonomous buyers and sellers, the john would have reason to rethink the transaction if he alone were to face adverse consequences. He would no longer be able to hide behind the prostitute's mutual guilt. This outcome would advance the other half of anti-prostitution policy: to halt the exploitation of all women through the commodification of the body. Thus, even if we were in a world where we could argue that prostitutes are not victims of their socio-economic disadvantages, and thus not in need of protection or undeserved pardon, we can still effectively stop an activity that society has deemed harmful.
The policy behind the prohibition of prostitution is to stop the exploitation of women. Sometimes people argue - correctly, I think - that prostitution exploits and harms all women, even those who are not prostitutes. But it seems like people often buy the theory that we should be concerned about the prostitutes themselves. The argument goes that particular women - the poor, the uneducated, and the minorities - are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation because they have few other options for survival. In order to protect these women from taking this "easy out," we as a society outlaw prostitution.
If this argument is followed to its logical conclusion, it makes no sense to make criminals of those women who succumb to the very harms that the law wants to protect them from. The prostitutes are the victims. Punishing them would be like punishing slaves, on the theory that forced labor is illegal.
I had this revelation when a friend told me that teen sexting is a felony: child pornography. That is, a teenager who takes salacious photos of herself on her cell phone can face up to 2 years in prison. When I heard about this, it occurred to me that something was wrong. True, the teen was the one holding the camera and committing the act we want to discourage; but it was also true that the whole point of having that law was to protect that teen. While the prohibition made sense, I thought there should have been a better way to sanction that activity, other than jail time.
Another analogy might be certain parts of immigration policy. For example, the T visa pardons those illegal immigrants who enter the US as a result of trafficking, and the U visa pardons those illegal immigrants who were the victims of serious crimes. The purpose of these laws is not to establish that sometimes, it's okay to enter the country illegally. Neither visa really addresses the immigrant's wrongful acts, and to be fair, it seems like in a lot of cases the immigrant is partially responsible for his or her own exploitation. Instead, these visas address a completely different policy goal, which is to stop activities that hurt people. Lawmakers determined that this policy is best served by encouraging the victims to come forward and cooperate with the police. The victims are given visas so that they can do this better, and not because they somehow "deserve" to be in the country because of their sufferings. The thorny issue that their immigration was in all other respects illegal is tabled in service of a goal separate from immigration policy per se.
This area of the law strikes me as being particularly enlightened and instructive. In an ideal world, surely there wouldn't be illegal immigrants any more than there would be trafficking or crimes. But ours is not an ideal world, and we can recognize that the existence of an undesirable act does not mean that we need to criminalize every one involved in it. Some people should be held accountable, and others should not.
The same holds true for prostitution. By subjecting the victims of the undesirable act to criminal liability, we discourage them from coming forward and reporting their exploiters. Pimps and johns are able to intimidate them into silence because these women are, in the eyes of the law, guilty. Instead of equating the victims with their exploiters, we should do for prostitution what we did in the T and U visas, and give the victims an incentive (or at least take away a disincentive) to further law enforcement efforts. We should attach criminal liability only to pimps and johns - those participating in the exploitation that the law means to prohibit.
Freeing the prostitutes from such liability would not only encourage prostitutes to report their victimization; it would also discourage johns from initiating the activity in the first place. Even if there were a prostitute who was perfectly capable and willing to sell her body in the ideal capitalist market of autonomous buyers and sellers, the john would have reason to rethink the transaction if he alone were to face adverse consequences. He would no longer be able to hide behind the prostitute's mutual guilt. This outcome would advance the other half of anti-prostitution policy: to halt the exploitation of all women through the commodification of the body. Thus, even if we were in a world where we could argue that prostitutes are not victims of their socio-economic disadvantages, and thus not in need of protection or undeserved pardon, we can still effectively stop an activity that society has deemed harmful.
posted by Rex at 2:18 AM
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