To the delight of civil libertarians and libertarians alike, the Canadian courts have been leading the world in dealing with conflicts between privacy principles and morality legislation. I am serving as an expert in the review of Canadian polygamy laws in British Columbia. In the meantime, the Ontario Superior Court may allow three prostitution laws to die this Saturday.
In September, the Court struck down the laws. The federal government is charging that this is nothing short of a “social experiment unprecedented in this country.” However, it is also a frank acknowledgment that consenting adults came engage in sex for money as a consensual choice. Currently, an individual can have sex with any number of partners but can be arrested if they accept anything of value in exchange for sex. They can receive gifts as part of a “relationship” no matter how fleeting but not as payment.
The Court previously noted that criminal laws force prostitutes in the shadows where they are easy prey for abuse and even homicides. Once legal, protections and regulations can apply to the world’s oldest profession. With the demise of the laws, street walking will be legal.
Source: Star
Jonathan Turley
@Swarthmore: It is a human rights issue for me, too. I think a human has the right to voluntarily do for pay any act s/he has the right to do voluntarily for free. That includes engaging in sexual activity.
@Kay: What do “happy hookers” have to do with it? Do you think that dishwashers, waitresses, janitors, Walmart cashiers or farm laborers or garbage collectors or gas station attendants or night security men come home “happy” or feel successful? I do not, I have done a few of those jobs as a teen and I have known people that have done all the rest; and low skill jobs just suck, it is only the people that haven’t spent a few years doing them, and answering to assholes, that find them romantic or honerable or empowering. They suck.
If you demand that all jobs produce happy workers, our unemployment rate is going to be about 75% and civilization will collapse. Whether hookers are HAPPY has nothing to do with anything. In return for money to pay my bills I have chosen to do jobs I knew would be boring, physically miserable and might endanger my health. I have known through social contacts many nurses and medical technicians that have done the same.
Whether somebody will be happy in life is not a reason to outlaw a profession. As for successful: For a lot of people paying the rent and getting food on the table and clothing in the closet for their kids is how they **define** successful, and I imagine many a voluntary hooker is doing exactly that.
Prostitution is a human rights issue to me not a religious issue. Europe has been quietly folding up the districts where prostitution became quasi legal. Violence, illegal prostitution, and drug use actually increased in the those areas.
Again, I have to agree with Buddha here…
Correction: SB “threat of arrest”…
And that would an enforcement issue, not a decriminalization issue. Human trafficking is a proper crime of focus, not the alteration of making life both safer and have more options to escape prostitution without prostitutes themselves facing criminal penalties. That human trafficking is a multinational criminal activity beyond the scope of one country to fight on their own is without question. The question is how to provide a way out of that life for the victims that doesn’t punish them further. That would be to provide them with legal recourse for abuses.
http://www.slate.com/id/2186243/
The first excerpt relates to the thread of arrest “by police officers demanding sex from prostitutes.”
The second addresses the Swedish model which has made it “legal to sell sex but illegal to buy it.” (Has this already been discussed here? I may have missed it..)
I’m not saying that the Swedish model is the answer, but it may be that we’ll have to take another approach…
Catharine MacKinnon’s (University of Michigan law professor)remarks are interesting.
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begin excerpt
http://www.slate.com/id/2186243/
There was also a “surprisingly high prevalence of police officers demanding sex from prostitutes in return for avoiding arrest.”
That looks like another argument against the bans on prostitution—presumably women wouldn’t be caught in this particular trap if they weren’t worried about going to jail in the first place.
end excerpt
“…lately there’s another favorite model. In 1999, Sweden made it legal to sell sex but illegal to buy it—only the johns and the traffickers can be prosecuted.
This is the only approach to prostitution that’s based on “sex equality,” argues University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon.
It treats prostitution as a social evil but views the women who do it as the victims of sexual exploitation who “should not be victimized again by the state by being made into criminals,” as MacKinnon put it to me in an e-mail. It’s the men who use the women, she continued, who are “sexual predators” and should be punished as such.” (end 2nd excerpt)
Sex for Sale: Legalized Prostitution Hurts Human Trafficking Victims
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chelsealyn-rudder/sex-for-sale-legalized-pr_b_769779.html
“In 2000, the Netherlands, historically one of the most hospitable countries for commercial sex, formalized its prostitution policy by lifting its ban on brothels. At the time, advocates felt that regulating brothels would provide better protection to vulnerable women, particularly migrant trafficking victims. Unfortunately, regulating brothels was not enough to stymie the impact of global human trafficking on prostitution in the Netherlands. Instead, licensed brothels became a magnet for human trafficking. Having found that regulation had not curbed trafficking the city of Amsterdam decided to purchase former brothels, and in some instances loan them out to up and coming designers and photographers. In 2008, Job Cohen, Mayor of Amsterdam, told The New York Times, “We’ve realized this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but that big crime organizations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings and other criminal activities.” Amsterdam has a reputation as an open-minded city. Its traditions may be too avant-garde for some, but Amsterdam’s regulated sex industry was attracting a criminal element that was beyond the scope of the atmosphere of tolerance that it is famous for.”
I don’t see the problem. A woman has rights to be sellabit, what’s left she can give away for free. 🙂
kay,
You believe what you like about Nevada. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. Your moralizing mind is made up. The fact is that when money is involved with laws, no matter their nature, will have criminals seeking to circumvent them. Laws about alcohol production haven’t stopped moonshiners. Laws against drugs haven’t stopped the drug trade. But by all means, because there are some criminals in Nevada, let’s return to the days when all prostitution was banned and run by the Vegas mob. It was so much better then when if a gal was abused and complained to the authorities, she was laughed at, arrested and then mysteriously ended up being coyote chow out in the desert once released.
Morality laws don’t work because they are
1) founded in belief, not fact, logic and/or ethics,
2) morals are not universal absolutes and
3) you cannot criminalize behaviors rooted in our genetics – and prostitution is related to a primary drive namely sex – and expect anything but failure.
Your “solution” is simple moralizing that leaves vulnerable people vulnerable to not just criminals, but to the justice system itself. Compounding punishment upon the prostitutes instead of easing their burden doesn’t help anyone but the criminal actors running the current operations.
For every argument you’ve made about negative outcomes, there have been multiple logical counters that show legalization mitigates damages to the class of people in question: prostitutes. So you respond with “I believe”. I don’t care what you believe and your “proof” is woefully inadequate. Your “points” do nothing but illustrate that laws and regulations will always see criminal elements seeking to circumvent them. No more, no less . . . and no big shock if you have a realistic view of human nature. Argument by moralization is not only weak and ineffective because its based on beleif, it’s unattractive and says more about the speaker than the subject. It’s also paternalistic and fails to account for free will. Or maybe you’re just a member of the Cotton Mather Fan Club.
Christian moralists can be as free to keep their hands off the law just like any other moralist. The place for morals is in church, not the law. The law is the realm of ethics and facts. The fact is you are seeking to punish the very people you claim to want to help. Out of a sense of “moral” outrage.
Yeah. That’s real productive. Counter-productive that is.
Unless you like leaving criminals in control of an activity that is going to continue regardless of your moral objections or laws to the contrary. Keeping prostitution a crime leaves the money and the power in the hands of criminals while punishing the prostitutes. Just like Prohibition did and the Drug War does. “Moral laws” are enablers of criminal activity, not prevention or mitigation of damages.
James
1, November 26, 2010 at 6:38 am
Yes Blousie, go figure eh, this is also the Provence that allows females to go topless but you never see any except at a gay pride parade……go figure eh…….lol……had to really admire Ms Jacobs who took that challenege to court and fought it an won, the girls got guts as she stood up for her rights to do so, weird eh, but that’s Canada for yeah eh??????
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Well James, I wasn’t really thinking Canadian law so much as just the law in general but touché, I guess?
Kay, anon nurse, SwM, Canadian Eh,
Kay’s list from Nevada and the Steinem link are definite inducements to rethink my opinion on removing the criminality from prostitution.
Canadian Eh’s words (November 24, 2010 at 11:00 pm)also gave me pause as she explained why she had changed her mind on legalization. I was especially intrigued with: “It makes a lot of sense for safety reasons ( disease prevention and making police services available to prostitutes for their own personal safety )and economically.”(Canadian Eh) as those are my reasons.
But then she goes on to explain why she had changed her mind and I found those reasons very powerful.
At one point I thought legalizing the practice would help remove some of the power that the “bad guys” had and now I’m beginning to suspect that just the opposite would result.
kay Tony said we would move to the left if the republicans won the fall election. That’s all you need to know.
It is already shown in Nevada that legal prostitution increased illegal prostitution and that it increased prostitution overall both legal and illegal.
Show us your happy hookers. With all the legal hookers in Nevada, there should be at least some willing to go on record as happy hookers. Tony said he knew a hooker who was a “spokesmodel”. Let’s hear or read her speech not yours no offense.
I notice all of the bloggers against legalized prostitution are blaming the victims of crime instead of the perpetrators of it.
They are INSISTENT in their claims that the illegal activities enabled by OUTLAWING voluntary prostitution are due to prostitution itself. They confuse cause and effect. The fact is that the sex slave industry requires violent coercion, the people enslaved are not engaging in voluntary prostitution.
Anybody with access to the Internet should find it clearly obvious that some women do engage in sexual activity for money voluntarily. As I mentioned earlier, I know at least one call girl that I am certain was never coerced to take up her profession; she worked as a restaurant hostess and as a spokesmodel and in other minimum wage jobs before making a very deliberate and voluntary choice, in her twenties and as a single mother of two, to engage in sex for money.
It should be obvious that outlawing voluntary prostitution forces some of the women **willing** to be prostitutes out of the market, and forces others to operate without the safety net of courts and police protection available to store keepers and other business women. These facts are what **enable** the illegal sex trade.
In my life I have made money with just my body, as a teen laborer washing dishes and unloading trucks and doing grunt farm work in the corn fields. As an adult I am a knowledge worker; but I refuse to forget how I got here, I will not demean the value of low skill physical labor or the mental ability or outright choices of those that perform it.
Prostitutes use their bodies to earn a living, perhaps because they have no skills and no time to acquire skills to do anything else. What is demeaning or degrading is in the eye of the beholder; there are many sewer workers covered in shit that do not feel demeaned at all because they chose to be covered in shit in order to make a good living for themselves and their family.
Prostitution is no different; what you see as demeaning and degrading can be viewed by them as a rational choice, and just like the sewer worker, a sacrifice they are willing to make in return for a better life for the ones they love.
Forced prostitution is enslavement and rape and it is already against the law. Stop spending money enforcing laws against prostitution and start spending it instead on stopping enslavement and rape. That job will be made easier by letting safe and voluntary prostitution remove much of the demand for unsafe and illegal prostitution.
Re slavery, Sexual exploitation has always been a big motivator for slavery including slavery in the US as practiced until emancipation.
James: That argument doesn’t work for legalizing DUI.
BIL: I don’t believe that goals 1-4 were accomplished in Nevada. Please send an example of 5 in Nevada. The indirect costs to local governments would probably exceed the tax benefits. That’s why we don’t tax the dumping of toxic wastes in our water supplies.
Smom,
I submit that it will have no net effect on the slavery issue. They are tangentially related, not primarily related.
kay,
1) Increased safety for those in that lifestyle in daily operation.
2) Greater control over public health issues.
3) Greater control over distribution and the attendant property value issues.
4) Greater protection for schools because we can keep the legal businesses segregated from school zones.
5) The ability of those in prostitution to have legal recourse when abused without exposing themselves to criminal liability.
6) Last, because it’s least, taxation.
Banning the behavior will simply not work as an operation of human nature, but mitigating the damages of said behavior will help those who need help: the prostitutes. Criminalization does not help the prostitutes. It helps the criminals currently running operations by creating the excess profits often seen coupled with illegal trade and giving them yet another lever to apply against the prostitutes: “Who are the cops going to believe, hooker?”
kay,
You stop jailing people for prostitution.