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The Negative Effects of Prostitution

Categories: Prostitution

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

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Physical and mental health consequences, social stigma and discrimination, perpetuation of gender inequality.

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9.4 Prostitution

Learning objectives.

Summarize the history of prostitution in the United States.
List the reasons that lead many people to dislike prostitution.
Explain the problems that streetwalkers experience and why these problems occur.

Prostitution , the selling of sexual services, is yet another controversial sexual behavior. Many people, and especially those with conservative, religious views, believe prostitution is immoral because it involves sex for money, and they consider prostitution a sign of society’s moral decay. Many feminists believe that prostitution is degrading to women and provides a context in which prostitutes are robbed, beaten, and/or raped. These two groups of people might agree on little else, but they both hold strong negative views about prostitution. Regardless of their other beliefs, many people also worry that prostitution spreads STDs. All these groups think prostitution should remain illegal, and they generally prefer stricter enforcement of laws against prostitution.

Other people also do not like prostitution, but they believe that the laws against prostitution do more harm than good. They think that legalizing prostitution would reduce the various harms prostitution causes, and they believe that views about the immorality of prostitution should not prevent our society from dealing more wisely with it than it does now.

This section presents a short history of prostitution before turning to the various types of prostitution, reasons for prostitution, and policy issues about how best to deal with this particular sexual behavior. Because most prostitution involves female prostitutes and male customers, our discussion will largely focus on this form.

History of Prostitution

Often called the world’s oldest profession, prostitution has been common since ancient times (Ringdal, 2004). In ancient Mesopotamia, priests had sex with prostitutes. Ancient Greece featured legal brothels (houses of prostitution) that serviced political leaders and common men alike. Prostitution was also common in ancient Rome, and in the Old Testament it was “accepted as a more or less necessary fact of life and it was more or less expected that many men would turn to prostitutes” (Bullough & Bullough, 1977, pp. 137–138). During the Middle Ages and through the nineteenth century, prostitution was tolerated as a necessary evil, as legal brothels operated in much of Europe and were an important source of tax revenue. As the dangers of venereal disease became known, some cities shut down their brothels, but other cities required regular medical exams of their brothels’ prostitutes.

Prostitution was also common in the United States through the nineteenth century (Bullough & Bullough, 1987). Poor women became prostitutes because it provided a source of income at a time when they had few other options for jobs. Some prostitutes worked for themselves on streets and in hotels and other establishments, and other prostitutes worked in legal brothels in many US cities. During the Civil War, prostitutes found many customers among the soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy; the term hooker for prostitute comes from their relations with soldiers commanded by Union general Joseph Hooker. After the Civil War, camps of prostitutes would set up at railroad construction sites. When the railroad workers would visit the camps at night, they hung their red signal lamps outside the prostitutes’ tents so they could be found if there was a railroad emergency. The term “red-light district” for a prostitution area originated in the red glow that resulted from this practice.

Many US cities had legal brothels into the early 1900s. Beginning in about 1910, however, religious groups and other parties increasingly spoke out about the immorality of prostitution, and in addition claimed that middle-class girls were increasingly becoming prostitutes. Their efforts succeeded in shutting down legal brothels nationwide. Some illegal brothels continued, and among their number was a San Francisco brothel run during the 1940s by a madam (brothel manager and/or owner) named Sally Stanford. Her clientele included many leading politicians and businessmen of San Francisco and nearby areas. Like other earlier brothels, Stanford’s brothel required regular medical exams of her employees to help prevent the spread of venereal diseases (Stanford, 1966). Despite or perhaps because of her fame from being a madam, Stanford was later elected mayor of Sausalito, a town across the bay from San Francisco.

Prostitution in the United States Today

A prostitute standing next to a platform at the subway station

Estimates of the number of prostitutes in the United States range widely between 70,000 and 500,000. Streetwalkers comprise about one-fifth of all prostitutes.

Eric Parker – Prostitute 3 am – CC BY-NC 2.0.

No one really knows how many prostitutes we now have. Prostitutes are not eager to be studied, and because their work is illegal, the federal government does not compile statistics on their numbers as it does for physicians, plumbers, teachers, and hundreds of other legal occupations. One well-analyzed estimate put the number of female prostitutes at 70,000 and further concluded that they engage in an average of 700 acts of prostitution with male customers annually, or almost 50 million acts of prostitution overall each year (Brewer et al., 2000). However, other estimates put the number of prostitutes as high as 500,000, with many of these prostitutes working part-time, whether or not they also work in a legal occupation (Clinard & Meier, 2011).

Regardless of the actual number, prostitution is very common. The GSS asks, “Thinking about the time since your 18 th birthday, have you ever had sex with a person you paid or who paid you for sex?” In 2010, 11.9 percent of men and 1.7 percent of women answered “yes” to this question. These figures translate to about 13.5 million men 18 and older who have engaged in prostitution, usually as the customer, and 2.1 million women.

In 2010, police and other law enforcement agents made almost 63,000 arrests for prostitution and commercialized vice (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2011). Most of these arrests were of prostitutes, but some were of customers. Women accounted for almost 69 percent of the arrests in this entire category.

Types of Prostitutes

Several types of prostitutes exist. At the bottom of the prostitution “hierarchy” are streetwalkers (also called street prostitutes ), who typically find their customers, or are found by their customers, somewhere on a street. They then have a quick act of sex in the customer’s car, in an alleyway or other secluded spot, or in a cheap hotel. Although streetwalkers are the subjects in most studies of prostitutes, they in fact compose only about one-fifth of all prostitutes (Weitzer, 2012).

The remaining 80 percent of prostitutes generally work indoors. Call girls work as independent operators in their homes or fairly fancy hotels and charge a lot of money for their services, which include sex but also talking and dining. Their clients are typically businessmen or other wealthy individuals. Many call girls earn between $200 and $500 per hour, and some earn between $1,000 and $6,000 per hour or per session (Weitzer, 2009). Escorts work for escort agencies, which often advertise heavily in phone books and on the Internet. They may operate out of an apartment rented by their agency or come to a client’s hotel room or other location. Although they may actually act as an escort to a dinner or show, typically their services include sexual acts. They, too, are generally well paid for their work, but do not earn nearly as much as call girls because they have to give at least 30 percent of their earnings to their agency.

Call girls and escorts rank at the top of the prostitution hierarchy (Weitzer, 2009). Below them, but above streetwalkers, are three other types of prostitutes. Brothel workers , as the name implies, are prostitutes who work in brothels. The only legal brothels in the United States today are found in several rural counties in Nevada, which legalized prostitution in these counties in 1971. Workers in these brothels pay income tax. Because their employers require regular health exams and condom use, the risk of sexually transmitted disease in Nevada’s brothels is low. Massage parlor workers , as their name also implies, work in massage parlors. Many massage parlors, of course, involve no prostitution at all, and are entirely legal. However, some massage parlors are in fact fronts for prostitution, where the prostitute masturbates a man and brings him to what is often termed a “happy ending.” A final category of prostitution involves prostitutes who work in bars, casinos, or similar establishments ( bar or casino workers ). They make contact with a customer in these settings and then have sex with them elsewhere.

The lives and welfare of streetwalkers are much worse than those of the five types of indoor workers just listed. As sociologist Ronald Weitzer (2012, p. 212) observes, “Many of the problems associated with ‘prostitution’ are actually concentrated in street prostitution and much less evident in the indoor sector.” In particular, many streetwalkers are exploited or abused by pimps, use heroin or other drugs, and are raped, robbed, and/or beaten by their clients. A good number of streetwalkers also began their prostitution careers as runaway teenagers and were abused as children.

In contrast, indoor workers begin their trade when they were older and are less likely to have been abused as children. Their working conditions are much better than those for streetwalkers, they are less likely to be addicted to drugs and to have STDs, they are better paid, and they are much less likely to be victimized by their clients. Studies that compare indoor prostitutes with nonprostitutes find that they have similar levels of self-esteem, physical health, and mental health. Many indoor prostitutes even report a rise in self-esteem after they begin their indoor work (Weitzer, 2012).

Explaining Prostitution

By definition, prostitution involves the selling of sex. This means that money is the key feature of prostitution. As such, money is also the major motivation for women who become prostitutes, as most of them come from low-income backgrounds. For indoor workers, and especially call girls, prostitution is a potentially well-paying occupation. Streetwalkers hardly get rich from prostitution and suffer the many problems listed earlier, but prostitution still provides them a source of income that they are unlikely to receive through legal occupations because they have few marketable job skills.

Despite this financial motivation, most women do not become prostitutes, and scholars have tried to understand why some women do so. Because prostitutes are not eager to be studied, as noted earlier, we do not yet have studies of random samples of prostitutes, and probably never will have such studies. As also noted earlier, most studies of prostitutes involve streetwalkers, even though they compose only about 20 percent of all prostitutes. Several of these studies cite high rates of child abuse in the backgrounds of streetwalkers, but other studies find that their rates of child abuse are similar to those of women from similar sociodemographic backgrounds who are not prostitutes (Weitzer, 2009). Although some studies find certain psychological problems among streetwalkers, it is unclear whether these problems existed before they became streetwalkers or developed (as is very possible) after they became streetwalkers. Methodologically, the best way to clarify this causal question would be to randomly assign young women to become prostitutes or not to become prostitutes, and then to study what happens to their psychological health afterward. For many reasons, this type of study would be highly unethical and will never be done. In the absence of studies of this type, it is difficult to determine what exactly prompts some women to become prostitutes.

A man covering himself up with a pillow after a night with a prostitute

Customers of prostitutes tend to come from the same kinds of social backgrounds as do noncustomers. They have certain motivations for wanting to be with a prostitute, but many noncustomers have the same motivations yet still do not pay for prostitution.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 2.5.

There is an old saying that “it takes two to tango.” Prostitution obviously cannot occur unless a customer wants to pay for the services of a prostitute. Despite this essential fact of prostitution, there are very few studies of why men choose to become customers. The implicit message from this lack of studies is that it is normal for men to have sex with a prostitute but abnormal for women to charge these men for this sex. The few studies we do have do not find any substantial differences between customers and noncustomers (Weitzer, 2009). Just as men come from various social backgrounds, so do the men who choose to have sex with a prostitute.

Customers do have certain motivations for choosing to pay for prostitution (Weitzer, 2009). These motivations include (1) the desire to have sex with someone with a certain physical appearance (age, race, body type); (2) the lack of a sexual partner or dissatisfaction with a sexual partner, including a desire to have unconventional sex that the partner does not share; (3) the thrill of having sex with a prostitute; and (4) the desire to have sex without having to make an emotional commitment. Although one or more of these motivations may be necessary for a man’s decision to seek prostitution, they do not entirely explain this decision. For example, many men may not have a sexual partner or may be dissatisfied with a partner they do have, but they still do not decide to pay for a prostitute.

Sociological Perspectives

Beyond explaining why individual women and men are more likely than others to pay for sex or to receive pay for sex, the three sociological perspectives outlined in Chapter 1 “Understanding Social Problems” —functionalist theory, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism—offer more general insights on prostitution. Table 9.5 “Theory Snapshot” provides a summary of these insights.

Table 9.5 Theory Snapshot

According to functionalist theory , prostitution exists because it serves several important functions for society generally and for certain people in society. As we have already mentioned, it provides a source of income for many women who otherwise might be jobless, and it provides a sexual alternative for men with the motivations listed earlier. Almost eight decades ago, sociologist Kingsley Davis (1937) wrote that prostitution even lowers the divorce rate. He reasoned that many married men are unhappy with their sex life with their wives. If they do not think this situation can improve, some men start an affair with another woman and may fall in love with that woman, threatening these men’s marriages. Other men turn to a prostitute. Because prostitution is generally impersonal, these men do not fall in love with their prostitutes, and their marriages are not threatened. Without prostitution, then, more men would have affairs, and more divorces would result. Although Davis’s hypothesis is provocative, there are no adequate studies to test it.

According to conflict theory , prostitution reflects the economic inequality in society. Many poor women feel compelled to become prostitutes because of their lack of money; because wealthier women have many other sources of income, the idea of becoming a prostitute is something they never have to consider. Sad but interesting historical support for this view comes from an increase in prostitution in the second half of the nineteenth century. Many women lost husbands and boyfriends in the war and were left penniless. Lacking formal education and living in a society that at the time offered few job opportunities to women, many of these bereaved women were forced to turn to prostitution to feed their families and themselves. As American cities grew rapidly during the last decades of the nineteenth century, thousands of immigrant women and other poor women also turned to prostitution as a needed source of income (Rosen, 1983). This late nineteenth-century increase in prostitution, then, occurred because of women’s poverty.

According to the feminist version of conflict theory, prostitution results not only from women’s poverty but also from society’s patriarchal culture that still views men as the dominant figure in heterosexual relationships and that still treats women as “sex objects” who exist for men’s pleasure (Barry, 1996). In such a culture, it is no surprise and even inevitable that men will want to pay for sex with a woman and that women will be willing to be paid for sex. In this feminist view, the oppression and exploitation that prostitution inherently involves reflects the more general oppression and exploitation of women in the larger society.

Symbolic interactionism moves away from these larger issues to examine the everyday understandings that prostitutes and their customers have about their behavior. These understandings help both prostitutes and customers justify their behavior. Many prostitutes, for example, believe they are performing an important service for the men who pay them. Indoor prostitutes are perhaps especially likely to feel they are helping their customers by providing them not only sex but also companionship (Weitzer, 2009). A woman who owned a massage parlor named “The Classic Touch” echoed this view. Her business employed fourteen women who masturbated their customers and offered a senior citizen discount. The owner reasoned that her employees were performing an important service: “We have many senior citizens and handicapped people. We have some men who are impotent and others who are divorced or in bad marriages. This is a safe, AIDS-free environment…that helps marriages. Husbands come in here and get a stress release and then they are able to go home and take on more. These are men who aren’t in bars picking up strange women” (Ordway, 1995, p. 1).

Dealing with Prostitution

With prostitution, past is once again prologue. It has existed since ancient times, and it has continued throughout the United States long since prostitution was banned by the United States in 1920. The legal brothels that now exist in rural counties in Nevada are the exception in this nation, not the rule. Yet prostitution is common outside of Nevada, and thousands of arrests occur nationwide for it.

As with illegal drugs (see Chapter 7 “Alcohol and Other Drugs” ), as we think about how to deal with prostitution, we should consider both a philosophical question and a social science question (Meier & Geis, 2007). The philosophical question is whether two people should be allowed to engage in a behavior, in this case prostitution, in which both want to participate. Many people may dislike this behavior for various reasons, but is that sufficient justification for the behavior to be banned if both people (let’s assume they are legal adults) want to engage in it? In this regard, and without at all meaning to equate prostitution with same-sex sexual behavior, an analogy with homosexuality is worth considering. Homosexual sex used to be illegal because many people thought it was immoral. When the US Supreme Court finally invalidated all laws against homosexual sex in its 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas , the majority opinion declared that “the fact that a State’s governing majority has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.” It further asserted, “The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government.” Although the majority opinion specifically said its decision did not apply to prostitution, a reasonable argument may be made that respect for privacy of consensual sexual conduct also means that prostitution, too, should be legal.

Here it may be argued that prostitution still victimizes and objectifies women even if they want to engage in it. This is a reasonable argument, but there are many occupations that victimize employees, either because the occupations are dangerous (such as coal mining and construction work) or because the job requirements objectify women as sex objects (such as fashion modeling and cheerleading). Because hardly anyone would say these occupations should be illegal, is it logical to say that prostitution should be illegal? Former US Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders thinks it makes no sense to ban prostitution simply because it objectifies women: “Why are we so upset about sex workers selling sexual acts to consenting adults?” she asks. “We say that they are selling their bodies, but how different is that from what athletes do? They’re selling their bodies. Models? They’re selling their bodies. Actors? They’re selling their bodies” (McCaslin, 1999, p. A8).

The social science question concerning laws against prostitution is whether these laws do more good than harm, or more harm than good. If they do more good than harm, they should be maintained and even strengthened; if they do more harm than good, they should be repealed. A growing number of scholars believe that the laws against prostitution do more harm than good, and they say that the best way to deal with prostitution might be to legalize and regulate it (Weitzer, 2011).

Proponents of legalization argue as follows. Although many people cite the horrible lives of many streetwalkers as a major reason for their support of laws against prostitution, these laws ironically cause the problems that streetwalkers experience (Weitzer, 2011). When US prostitution was legal a century ago in brothels across the nation, brothel prostitutes were safer than streetwalkers are now. Prostitutes working today in Nevada’s legal brothels are safer than streetwalkers. Whatever we might think of their behavior, legal brothel workers are relatively safe from being robbed, beaten, or raped, and their required regular medical exams leave them relatively free of sexually transmitted disease. The health problems and criminal victimization that many streetwalkers experience happen because their behavior is illegal, and legalizing and regulating prostitution would reduce these problems (Weitzer, 2011).

In this regard, legalization of prostitution is yet another harm reduction approach to a social problem. As Weitzer (2012, p. 227) observes, “Research suggests that, under the right conditions, legal prostitution can be organized in a way that increases workers’ health, safety, and job satisfaction. Mandatory condom use and other safe-sex practices are typical in legal brothels, and the workers face much lower risk of abuse from customers.”

Legalization of prostitution would also yield a considerable amount of tax revenue, as is now true in Nevada. Let’s assume that 50 million acts of prostitution occur annually in the United States, to cite our earlier estimate that is probably too low, and that each of these acts costs an average $30. Putting these numbers together, prostitutes receive $1.5 billion annually in income. If they paid about one-third of this amount (admittedly a rough estimate) in payroll taxes, the revenue of state and federal governments would increase by $500 million. Because the tens of thousands of arrests for prostitution and commercialized vice annually would reduce significantly if prostitution were legalized, the considerable financial savings from this reduction could be used for other pursuits.

Legalizing prostitution would add the United States to the lengthy list of other Western democracies that have already legalized it. Although their models of legalization vary, the available evidence indicates that legalizing prostitution does, in fact, reduce the many problems now associated with illegal prostitution (see Note 9.25 “Lessons from Other Societies” ).

Workers in legal brothels are relatively safe from victimization by customers and from the risk of incurring and transmitting sexual diseases.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Lessons from Other Societies

Legal Brothels in Other Western Democracies

In many other Western democracies, prostitution is legal to varying degrees that depend on the specific nation. In some nations, streetwalking is permitted, but in other nations, only brothels are permitted.

The legal brothel model is what the United States had a century ago and has today only in rural Nevada. As in Nevada, other nations that permit legal brothels usually require regular health exams and the use of condoms to prevent the transmission of sexual diseases. They also license the brothels so that the brothels must fulfill various standards, including the safe-sex practices just mentioned, to receive a license. In addition, brothels must pay taxes on their revenues, and brothel workers must pay taxes on their incomes.

As in rural Nevada, brothel workers in these other nations are unlikely to be abused by their customers. A major reason for their relative safety is that they work indoors and that any abuse by customers might be heard or witnessed by someone else inside the brothel. In addition, brothels in many nations have implemented certain measures to ensure workers’ safety, including the provision of panic buttons, the use of listening devices, and screening of customers when they enter the brothel.

A report by the Ministry of Justice in the Netherlands, where legal brothels operate, has concluded that most brothel workers say that they feel safe. A government report in New Zealand, which legalized prostitution in 2003, concluded that legalization made it more likely that prostitutes report any problems to the police and also increased their self-esteem because their behavior was now legal. A government commission in Australia that evaluated legal brothels in the northeastern state of Queensland concluded, “There is no doubt that licensed brothels provide the safest working environment for sex workers in Queensland…Legal brothels now powering in Queensland provide a sustainable model for a healthy, crime-free, and safe legal licensed brothel industry.”

Assessing all these nations’ experiences, sociologist Ronald Weitzer concluded that “legal prostitution, while no panacea, is not inherently dangerous and can be structured to minimize risks and empower workers.” The United States, then, has much to learn from the other Western democracies that have legalized prostitution.

Sources: Weitzer, 2009, 2012

Key Takeaways

Prostitution has existed since ancient times and continues to be common today around the world. The United States had legal brothels before 1920, and legal brothels are found today in rural counties in Nevada.
Many people oppose prostitution because they feel it is immoral or because they feel it degrades and victimizes women. Because prostitution usually involves consensual behavior, some scholars say it should not be illegal in a society that values a right to privacy.
Some scholars also say that laws against prostitution do more harm than good and in particular account for the various problems that streetwalkers experience.

For Your Review

Do you think prostitution should become legal and regulated? Why or why not?
The major difference between prostitution and sex resulting from a casual pickup involves whether money is exchanged. Write an essay in which you first take the “pro” side on the following debate question, and then take the “con” side: that prostitution is worse than sex from a casual pickup.

Barry, K. (1996). The prostitution of sexuality . New York, NY: New York University Press.

Brewer, D. D., Potterat, J. J., Garrett, S. B., Muth, S. Q., John M. Roberts, J., Kasprzyk, D., et al. (2000). Prostitution and the sex discrepancy in reported number of sexual partners. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97 , 12385–12388.

Bullough, V. L., & Bullough, B. (1977). Sin, sickness, and sanity: A history of sexual attitudes . New York, NY: New American Library.

Bullough, V. L., & Bullough, B. (1987). Women and prostitution: A social history . Buffalo, NY: Prometheus.

Clinard, M. B., & Meier, R. F. (2011). Sociology of deviant behavior (14th ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

Davis, K. (1937). The sociology of prostitution. American Sociological Review, 2 , 744–755. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2011). Crime in the United States, 2010 . Washington, DC: Author.

McCaslin, J. (1999, October 13). Vaginal politics. Washington Times , p. A8.

Meier, R. F., & Geis, G. (2007). Criminal justice and moral issues . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ordway, R. (1995, May 26). Relaxation spas perplex officials. The Bangor Daily News , p. 1.

Ringdal, N. J. (2004). Love for sale: A world history of prostitution (R. Daly, Trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press.

Rosen, R. (1983). The lost sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univesity Press.

Stanford, S. (1966). The lady of the house . New York, NY: G. P. Putnam.

Weitzer, R. (2009). Sociology of sex work. Annual Review of Sociology, 35 (0360-0572, 0360-0572), 213–234.

Weitzer, R. (2011). Legalizing prostitution: From illicit vice to lawful business . New York, NY: New York University Press.

Weitzer, R. (2012). Prostitution: Facts and fictions. In D. Hartmann & C. Uggen (Eds.), The Contexts reader (pp. 223–230). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

To Protect Women, Legalize Prostitution

by | Oct 1, 2019 | Amicus , Criminal Justice , Labor and Employment , Sex Equality |

Prostitution is a sensitive subject in the United States. Frequently, arguments against prostitution center around concern for the health and safety of women, and those concerns are not unfounded. Prostitution is an incredibly dangerous profession for the (mostly) women involved; sexual assault, forced drug addiction, physical abuse, and death are common in the industry. For the women who work in this field, it is often very difficult to get help or get out. Many sex workers were sold into sex trafficking at a very young age and have no resources with which to escape their forced prostitution, or started out as sex workers by choice only to fall victim to sex trafficking later on. Moreover, since prostitution is illegal in most places in the United States, there are few legal protections in place for prostitutes; many fear that seeking help will only lead to arrest, and many who do seek help are arrested and then have to battle the stigma of a criminal record while they try to reintegrate into society.

So why is the response to such a dangerous industry to drive it further underground, away from societal resources and legal protections?

When people argue prostitution should be illegal, in many cases their concern comes from a place of morality , presented as concern for the health and safety of women. People believe that legalizing prostitution will only lead to the abuse of more women, will make it harder for prostitutes to get out of the industry, or will teach young women that their bodies exist for the sole purpose of sexual exploitation by men.

However, legalizing prostitution has had positive benefits for sex workers across Europe . The most well-known country to have legalized prostitution is the Netherlands , where sex work has been legal for almost twenty years. Bringing the industry out of the black market and imposing strict regulations has improved the safety of sex workers. Brothels are required to obtain and renew safety and hygiene licenses in order to operate, and street prostitution is legal and heavily regulated in places like the Red Light District . Not only does sex work become safer when it is regulated, but legalization also works to weed out the black market that exists for prostitution, thereby making women safer overall. Also, sex workers are not branded as criminals, so they have better access to the legal system and are encouraged to report behaviors that are a danger to themselves and other women in the industry. Finally, legalizing sex work will provide many other positive externalities , including tax revenue, reduction in sexually transmitted diseases, and reallocation of law enforcement resources.

It’s true that current efforts by various European countries to legalize prostitution have been far from perfect. In the Netherlands, certain components of the legislation , such as requiring sex workers to register and setting the minimum age for prostitution at 21, could drive more sex workers to illegal markets. Not only that, but studies indicate that legalizing prostitution can increase human trafficking. However, even those who are critical about legalizing prostitution can recognize the benefits that legislation can have on working conditions for sex workers. If countries with legislation in place spend more time listening to current sex workers, the results of decriminalizing prostitution include bringing safety, security, and respect to a demographic that has traditionally been denied such things.

The underlying reason that people are uncomfortable listening to sex workers about legalizing prostitution has nothing to do with concern for the health and safety of women. If that were the genuine concern, prostitution would be legal in the United States by now. The underlying reason people disagree with legalizing prostitution is that prostitution is viewed as amoral because it involves (mostly) women selling their bodies for financial gain. However, telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies does not come from a place of morality: that comes from a place of control.

People, especially women, sell their bodies for financial gain in legalized fashions on a daily basis. Pornography is legal, and so is exotic dancing. It’s common for people to have sexual relationships with richer partners so as to benefit from their wealth, whether this is through seeking out wealthy life partners or through the less formal but increasingly prevalent phenomenon known as sugar-dating . It’s also common for people to remain in unhappy relationships because they do not want to lose financial stability or spend money on a divorce.

So, what’s the difference? Why are these examples socially acceptable, even encouraged, but prostitution is seen as so appalling?

The difference is that in all of these other situations, it is easy for people to pretend that the women involved are not actually selling their bodies directly. It’s easy to pretend that the pornography actors are just people having consensual sex that the viewing public just happens to be privy to observing . It’s easy to pretend that exotic dancers are not actually selling their bodies because they are not directly engaging in the act of sex. It’s easy to pretend that people who enter into or remain in sexual relationships with wealthy partners could be there for reasons other than financial gain or security.

Prostitution does not allow the general public to have the benefit of these pretenses. Rather, the industry is honest about how sex and money are directly related. And for many individuals, this is an uncomfortable notion. It is even more uncomfortable for some people to believe that women should be allowed to have the control over their bodies that would permit them to engage in prostitution voluntarily; they cannot allow themselves to believe that women would choose such a profession. Yet rather than recognize this reality, those who oppose the legalization of prostitution march forth with arguments about concern for the safety of women. They fail to realize that criminalizing prostitution does not help sex workers, and their arguments lead to legislation that harms women while operating under the morally-driven guise of wanting to protect them.

Instead of forcing sex workers to conduct their business in unregulated black markets where their lives are in danger, all for a mislabeled purpose of “saving” women, take actual action to save women. Legalize prostitution, impose strict regulations, and construct comprehensive support systems that allow sex workers to do their jobs safely.

The desire to protect women from sexual abuse will always be valid, and if anything is a desire that should be more widespread in the United States. What is disingenuous is opposing legalized sex work for reasons that purport to be women’s safety, but that are actually coming from a place of discomfort over women openly engaging in sexual interactions for financial gain. If you are uncomfortable with the idea of women having sex for money, then you should also have a problem with pornography, exotic dancing, and people dating for money. If you do not have a problem with all of these socially accepted practices but have a problem with prostitution because it is “morally questionable,” then you have lost your right to any forum where decisions about the safety and rights of women are being made.

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Should Sex Work Be Decriminalized? Some Activists Say It's Time

Jasmine Garsd

LGBTQ, immigrant rights and criminal justice reform groups, launched a coalition, Decrim NY, in February to decriminalize the sex trade in New York. Erik McGregor/Getty Images hide caption

LGBTQ, immigrant rights and criminal justice reform groups, launched a coalition, Decrim NY, in February to decriminalize the sex trade in New York.

Sex work is illegal in much of the United States, but the debate over whether it should be decriminalized is heating up.

Former California Attorney General and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently came out in favor of decriminalizing it , as long as it's between two consenting adults.

The debate is hardly new — and it's fraught with emotions. Opponents of decriminalization say it's an exploitative industry that preys on the weak. But many activists and academics say decriminalization would help protect sex workers, and would even be a public health benefit.

The Two-Way

Queen honors activist who fought to decriminalize prostitution.

RJ Thompson wants to push back against the idea that sex work is inherently victimizing. He says for him it was liberating: Thompson had recently graduated from law school and started working at a nonprofit when the recession hit. In 2008, he got laid off with no warning and no severance, and he had massive student loan debt.

Thompson became an escort. "I made exponentially more money than I ever could have in my legal profession," he says.

He says the possibility of arrest was often on his mind. And he says for many sex workers, it's a constant fear. "Many street-based workers are migrants or transgender people who have limited options in the formal economies," he says. "And so they do sex work for survival. And it puts them in a very vulnerable position — the fact that it's criminalized."

Thompson is now a human rights lawyer and the managing director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center. It's among several organizations that are advocating bills to decriminalize sex work in New York City and New York state. They already have the support of various state lawmakers .

TED Radio Hour

Juno mac: how does stigma compromise the safety of sex workers.

Due to its clandestine nature in America, it's extremely hard to find reliable numbers about the sex trade. But one thing is for sure: It's a multi-billion-dollar industry. In 2007, a government-sponsored report looked at several major U.S. cities and found that sex work brings in around $290 million a year in Atlanta alone.

Economist Allison Schrager says the Internet has increased demand and supply. "Women who pre-Internet (or men) who wouldn't walk the streets or sign with a madam or an agency now can sell sex work, sometimes even on the side to supplement other sources of income," she says.

So what happens when you take this massive underground economy and decriminalize it? Nevada might offer a clue. Brothels are legal there, in certain counties.

In Shrager's book, An Economist Walks Into A Brothel , she investigated the financial workings of the Nevada brothel industry. She found that on average it's 300 percent more expensive to hire a sex worker in a Nevada brothel than in an illegal setting. Shrager thinks it's because workers and customers prefer to pay for the safety and health checks of a brothel.

"Sex work is risky for everyone," she says. "You take on a lot of risk as a customer too. And when you're working in a brothel you are assured complete anonymity. They've been fully screened for diseases."

Goats and Soda

Legalizing prostitution would protect sex workers from hiv.

But many activists and academics say decriminalization would help protect sex workers and could also have public health benefits.

Take the case of Rhode Island . A loophole made sex work, practiced behind closed doors, legal there between 2003 and 2009.

Baylor University economist Scott Cunningham and his colleagues found that during those years the sex trade grew. But Cunningham points to some other important findings : During that time period the number of rapes reported to police in the state declined by over a third. And gonorrhea among all women declined by 39 percent. Of course, changes in prostitution laws might not be the only cause, but Cunningham says, "the trade-off is if you make it safer to some degree, you grow the industry."

Rhode Island made sex work illegal again in 2009, in part under pressure from some anti-trafficking advocates. That's the thing: The debate about sex work always gets linked to trafficking — people who get forced into it against their will.

Economist Axel Dreher from the University of Heidelberg in Germany teamed up with the London School of Economics to analyze the link between trafficking and prostitution laws in 150 countries. "If prostitution is legal, there is more human trafficking simply because the market is larger," he says.

It's a controversial study: Even Dreher admits that reliable data on sex trafficking is really hard to find.

Human rights organizations including Amnesty International support decriminalization. Victims of trafficking might be able to ask for help more easily if they aren't afraid of having committed a crime, the groups say.

Cecilia Gentili is the director of policy at GMHC, an HIV/AIDS prevention, care and advocacy nonprofit in New York. Erik McGregor/Getty Images hide caption

Cecilia Gentili is the director of policy at GMHC, an HIV/AIDS prevention, care and advocacy nonprofit in New York.

Former sex worker Cecilia Gentili says she might have been able to break free much sooner had it not been for fear of legal consequences. She left her native Argentina because she was being brutally harassed by police in her small town. She thought she'd be better off when she moved to New York, but as a transgender, undocumented immigrant, she says she had few options.

"Let's be realistic," Gentili says, "for people like me, sex work is not 'one' job option. It's the only option."

Gentili says that when police busted the drug house in Brooklyn where she was being held, she debated whether to ask for help. She figured she was in a very vulnerable position, as a trans, undocumented person. She stayed quiet.

These days Gentili is the director of policy at GMHC , an HIV/AIDS prevention, care and advocacy nonprofit in New York. She's advocating for New York City and state to decriminalize sex work.

Rachel Lloyd is the founder of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a nonprofit for sexually exploited women in New York. Jasmine Garsd/NPR hide caption

Rachel Lloyd is the founder of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a nonprofit for sexually exploited women in New York.

But many believe the sex industry is just fundamentally vicious and decriminalizing it will make it worse. Rachel Lloyd is the founder of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services , a nonprofit for sexually exploited women in New York. She says there's nothing that will equalize the power unbalances in the sex industry.

"The commercial sex industry is inherently [exploitative]," she says. "The folks who end up in the commercial sex industry are the folks who are the most vulnerable and the most desperate."

When she was a teenager, Lloyd sold sex in Germany, where it's legal. But she says that didn't make it any less brutal for her.

The Surprising Wishes Of India's Sex Workers

"Those power dynamics of exploitation were still there," she says. "When ... legal johns came in, they were the ones with the money."

Lloyd says she doesn't want sex workers to be persecuted or punished. But she doesn't think men should be allowed to buy sex legally. She says that would be condoning the same industry that brutalized her and the women she works with today.

But decriminalization activists say that sex work has and always will exist. And they say bringing it out of the shadows can only help.

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A common argument against prostitution states that selling sex is harmful because it involves selling something deeply personal and emotional. More and more of us, however, believe that sexual encounters need not be deeply personal and emotional in order to be acceptable—we believe in the acceptability of casual sex. In this paper I argue that if casual sex is acceptable, then we have few or no reasons to reject prostitution. I do so by first examining nine influential arguments to the contrary. These arguments purport to pin down the alleged additional harm brought about by prostitution (compared to just casual sex) by appealing to various aspects of its practice, such as its psychology, physiology, economics and social meaning. For each argument I explain why it is unconvincing. I then weight the costs against the benefits of prostitution, and argue that, in sum, prostitution is no more harmful than a long line of occupations that we commonly accept without hesitation.

Occupational Health
Public Policy
Social Aspects
Applied and Professional Ethics
Sexuality/Gender

https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2011-100367

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Introduction

Most of us believe that prostitution is harmful. We believe that we are harmed if we sell sex and, perhaps, harmed if we buy sex. This harm, moreover, we consider to be of serious proportions. Selling sex is not regarded as on par with eating too much chocolate or getting a bad grade. Rather, it is regarded as so harmful that if it is ever permissible and appropriate to engage in prostitution, it must be as the last option available in a situation where the alternative is to suffer a life-threatening harm (such as starvation). Opinion polls support this line of thought. 1

The belief that prostitution is harmful shapes how, privately and professionally, we approach the issue of prostitution. It also informs public policy debates. Even people with widely diverging views on prostitution legislation tend to share the underlying assumption that prostitution harms those who engage in it.

In this paper I challenge this underlying assumption, and I do so by arguing for the following conditional: if we accept the increasingly common view that casual sex is not harmful, we should accept that neither is prostitution. ‘Casual sex’, as I use the term, refers to sex engaged in for the sake of enjoyment or recreation without long-term commitments and emotional attachments. For all I argue here, casual sex might well be harmful, and if it is, so is prostitution. If casual sex is not harmful, however, I argue that prostitution—though, like most occupations, it has its downsides—is not harmful either. This conclusion, if correct, has far-reaching implications for how we should approach the issue of prostitution in the healthcare sector and in public policy. i

What is ‘prostitution’ and what is ‘harm’?

‘Prostitution’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , is ‘the practice or occupation of engaging in sexual activity for payment’. 2 For the purposes of this paper, this is an apt definition. ‘Harm’ is a more difficult concept, but I will here roughly speak of harm as that which is detrimental to well-being. Since I believe my argument is effective across a wide spectrum of theories of well-being, I shall not here commit to any specific theory. I exclude from the group of things and actions that are harmful, however, those things and actions that are detrimental to our well-being only because, and only to the extent that, we believe they are detrimental and thus act as if they were. The fact that a billion people might be disgusted and torn by guilt if they eat pork, for example, does not establish that eating pork is harmful. What is detrimental to people's well-being in this case, I maintain, is not the pork, but their religious convictions. I presuppose, in other words, a certain objectivism about harm.

In the following I shall first briefly discuss two views of sexual ethics: the view that casual sex is permissible and the view that it is not. Thereafter (in the section ‘Nine arguments that prostitution is harmful’) I examine arguments for the view that prostitution is harmful. These arguments incorporate diverse aspects of the practice of prostitution—its psychology, physiology, economics, social meaning and so on—and are meant to cover the ground of plausible arguments against prostitution. For each argument I explain why it is unconvincing. Thereafter I briefly weigh the costs against the benefits of prostitution, before I reply to two objections: first, that my argument runs contrary to basic, observable facts; second, that my argument rests on utopian presuppositions. ii

Two views of sexual ethics

In the paper ‘Two Views of Sexual Ethics’ David Benatar draws a distinction between two different views on the necessary conditions for permissible sex. In one view, which Benatar calls ‘the significance view’, sex is permissible only if it is ‘an expression of (romantic) love’ (author's parentheses). In the other view, which Benatar calls ‘the casual view’, sex need not have this significance in order to be permissible. 3

This is an important distinction. I believe, however, that the labels Benatar has chosen—‘the significance view’ and the ‘the casual view’—are misleading. They are misleading because they easily give the impression that while one view holds that sex can be romantically significant, the other view denies this. That, however, is not the case. ‘The casual view’ does not imply that sex is never romantically significant. It only implies that sex need not always be romantically significant in order to be permissible.

Clearly, proponents of what Benatar calls ‘the significance view’ might claim that ‘the casual view’ reduces sex to mere wriggling of meat, and thus makes all sex void of significance. That, however, is not a claim that proponents of ‘the casual view’ need to accept. They could explain why by drawing a parallel to eating. When a romantic couple dines at a lovely restaurant, their eating might well be romantically significant for both parties. What is, biologically, the mere satisfaction of a nutritional need is given deep personal meaning because of its social and psychological setting. It is not clear, however, the advocate of the ‘casual view’ might argue, that one degrades eating as such and destroys one's capacity for appreciating romantic meals if one has earlier engaged in ‘casual eating’ or has been ‘eating around’, occasionally catching a cheap hotdog on the run. If this is right, then engaging casually in an activity that has the potential for romantic significance needs not destroy that activity's romantic significance on other occasions. If we accept this, then we would need a separate argument to explain why casual sex destroys sex even though casual eating does not destroy eating.

Rather than speaking of ‘the significance view’ and ‘the casual view’, therefore, I shall speak of ‘the strong significance view’ and ‘the weak significance view’. While both views hold that sex can be romantically significant, only the strong significance view holds that all non-significance sex is impermissible. I will nowhere use the term ‘casual view’, though it could perhaps properly refer to the (implausible) view that sex is always merely casual and never romantically significant.

If the strong significance view is correct, it is very clear why prostitution is problematic. Though there might be cases where romantic love is present between a prostitute and a client (either one way or both ways), these are exceptions, and for the sake of the argument, I will take for granted that all sex between a prostitute and a client is sex without romantic significance. If casual sex is problematic, therefore, so is prostitution. If the strong significance view of sex is incorrect, however, it is no longer equally clear what the problem is with prostitution. At least, prostitution cannot be categorically ruled out for being sex without romantic significance, since sex without romantic significance is not per se a problem. As such, other features of prostitution would have to account for its alleged hazards. Let's examine nine influential arguments that purport to establish that such hazards exist.

Nine arguments that prostitution is harmful

The correlation with psychological problems argument.

P1: That which leads to psychological problems is harmful.

P2: Prostitution leads to psychological problems.

C: Prostitution is harmful.

This is a common argument with strong intuitive appeal. P1 seems undeniable. P2 is an empirical claim, and to assess it, it seems that we should consult psychological research on prostitution. When we do, we find that a significant number of prostitutes suffer from panic attacks, eating disorders, depression and insomnia, that many experience guilt, regret and remorse after having sold sex, and the suicide rate among prostitutes is six times that of the average population. iii Since it is very implausible that such correlations are accidental, P1 and P2 both seem to be true. Thus we seem to have good reason to believe that prostitution is harmful (C)—even if we accept the weak significance view of sex.

The problem with this argument is that accepting that prostitutes often experience psychological problems, and that this correlation is not accidental, does not imply accepting that prostitution leads to psychological problems.

To make this point clear, we may turn to the literature on, and the debate over, homosexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. What we find in this literature is that homosexuals in the early 20th century also experienced guilt, regret and remorse, were significantly more prone to depression, eating disorders and insomnia than non-homosexuals, and had a significantly higher suicide rate than the rest of the population. 7 , 8

These figures were used by opponents of homosexuality as allegedly scientific evidence that homosexuality is harmful. Today, however, most of us would claim that they misinterpreted the data. Though we would concede that many homosexuals did suffer from these problems, we would argue that the statistics themselves were insufficient to establish that there was anything inherently harmful in being a homosexual or in engaging in homosexual practice, and that the correlation was most likely due to the social treatment of homosexuals at the time. After all, homosexuals were subject to significant social stigma.

As long as we are merely spotting a correlation, therefore, we cannot exclude the possibility that to a larger or smaller extent, the same is true of prostitutes. Prostitutes, after all, are also subject to social stigma. ‘Whore’ and ‘hooker’ are highly derogatory terms, and Yolanda Estes, a former prostitute who is now a philosophy professor at Mississippi State University, claims in ‘Prostitution: a subjective position’ that if she had been open about her background all along, this would seriously have damaged her career. 9 Indeed, as notes prostitution researcher Teela Sanders, we have a strong historical tradition for portraying sex workers as ‘purveyors of disease, a social evil (and) a public nuisance …’. 10

I am not here making the strong claim that homosexuality in the early 20th century and prostitution today are perfect parallels. For all I argue (so far), it might well be that while there is nothing inherently harmful in homosexuality, there is something inherently harmful in prostitution. As such, there might be excellent reasons why prostitutes, even apart from the social stigma, naturally experience psychological problems. The stigma might even be proper. What I argue is merely that statistical correlation between prostitution and various psychological problems is not alone sufficient to conclude that prostitution leads to these problems. Since an argument from mere correlation with psychological problems alone fails to establish C, we will need additional arguments to show that prostitution is harmful.

The correlation with danger argument

P1: That which is dangerous is harmful.

P2: Prostitution is dangerous.

This is an argument formally similar to Argument 1, and it seems equally forceful. P1 seems obvious, at least if the danger in question is excessive. P2, here as above, is an empirical claim, and consulting sociological and criminological research, we find that prostitution intimately correlates with venereal disease, criminal underground networks, drug abuse and violence. 4 In a 1998 study, Melissa Farley and Howard Barkan found that 82% of the prostitutes whom they interviewed had been physically assaulted. 6 In 2008, Ulla Bjørndal and Bjørg Norli found that 72% had been victims of acts such as slapping, punching, kicking, robbing, burning, biting, raping and choking. 11 Being subject to violence of this kind clearly seems dangerous (P2), and as such, it seems that prostitution is harmful (C).

Here again, however, we can use the history of homosexuality to show that the argument, as it stands, need not tell us much about the nature of prostitution. The reason why is that homosexual practice, when forbidden and condemned, also correlated strongly with venereal disease, underground networks, drug abuse and various forms of violence, and just as in the case above, these figures were used by opponents of homosexuality as allegedly scientific arguments supporting the view that homosexuality is harmful. 12 Today, however, most of us would claim, again, that the data were misinterpreted. Though we would concede that many homosexuals did suffer from these problems, we would argue that the statistics were insufficient to establish that there was anything harmful inherent in being a homosexual or in engaging in homosexual practice. Rather, we would argue that the correlation most likely was due to the social and legal treatment of homosexuals at the time. After all, homosexuals were socially and legally oppressed.

Unless we wish to embrace a methodology that would have made us conclude, 70 years back in time, that homosexuality is harmful, we cannot conclude from these correlations alone that prostitution is harmful, for the social and legal treatment could be the source of these correlations as well. Indeed, it seems that this can be plausibly argued. In addition to the social stigma, the law (speaking here of current legislation in my own country, Norway) prevents prostitutes from joining labour unions, organising their work in brothels, renting a place where they can work, hiring security agencies, advertising and forming work contracts (regarding salary, working hours, working conditions, health insurance, retirement savings, and so on). It does not seem obviously wrong to hold that such legal restrictions contribute to pushing prostitutes away from civil society and make their lives rougher (this point is well argued by Almodovar 13 ).

Again, there might be excellent reasons why a correlation with harmful activities would be likely to occur across a wide spectrum of legal treatments, or indeed, why a strict legal treatment is proper. To make the case for this, however, no argument from mere correlation will suffice. In order to convincingly argue that engaging in prostitution is harmful, one will need to point to something either intrinsic to the activity of buying and selling sex, or to a natural consequence thereof, that is harmful. The rest of this paper is concerned with arguments that seek to establish this.

The objectification argument

P1: That which involves objectification is harmful.

P2: Prostitution involves objectification.

This argument purports to say something about the very nature of prostitution, and as with Arguments 1 and 2 above, it seems intuitively plausible. It seems harmful to use people as objects (P1) and this seems to be what goes on when a client uses a prostitute to satisfy his sexual desires (P2). Thus it seems that prostitution is harmful (C).

Before we can assess this argument we must—to avoid equivocation—get a clear understanding of what we mean by ‘objectification’. Let's examine two different senses of the term ‘objectification’ that are in use in the prostitution debate, one narrow and one wide.

In a narrow sense, such as Thomas Mappes’ in ‘Sexual morality and the concept of using another person’, objectification means dealing with other persons by means of force or fraud, that is, to the practice of using others as objects that one may manipulate and dispose of as one pleases. In a broader sense, such as Howard Klepper's in ‘Sexual exploitation and the value of persons’, objectification is not restricted to force and fraud, but includes any treatment of another person as a means to one's ends without regard for that person's own ends. iv

On Mappes’ narrow account of objectification, P1 seems true. On this account it is doubtful if P2 is true, that is, if prostitution involves objectification. However, though prostitution might in some or in many cases involve force or fraud, or both, it is not clear how this constitutes an argument against the very activity of buying and selling sex. It seems that using force or fraud is always (or nearly always) harmful, and the fact that it is harmful to force or defraud someone to φ is not a sufficient reason to conclude that it is harmful to φ. The fact that it is harmful to force someone to marry, for example, does not show that marrying is harmful. Indeed, one could argue that in cases where force or fraud is used, we should not even speak of prostitution, but of rape or sexual slavery. If prostitution means buying and selling sex—and ‘buying’ and ‘selling’, to be applicable concepts, presuppose at least a thin notion of voluntariness—it seems just as unreasonable to label sex slavery ‘prostitution’ as to label someone who is filmed while raped a ‘porn actress’. Thus Mappes’ narrow account of objectification, though we should concede that it identifies a harmful form of objectification, does not render P2 true and thus does not establish that prostitution is harmful.

On Klepper's broader account, we face not just one problem, but two. The first problem is that on this account, P1 is doubtful, since many actions that we perform on a daily basis also qualify as objectification. I, for one, use my newspaper delivery man as an object in Klepper's sense of the term. Though I hope my newspaper delivery man is doing well, I cannot say that I do much to help him reach his goals. I use him as an object—a newspaper delivery object—and as a consequence, he is fungible to me. Since I am still in bed when he delivers my newspaper, I would not notice it if he were replaced by another, equally punctual, newspaper delivery man (or, indeed, by a newspaper delivery machine). Thus it seems that I use him as an object on Klepper's account. Unless we should grant that we harm our newspaper delivery men, shoemakers, baristas and lawyers by doing ordinary business with them, it seems that we cannot rationally regard all sorts of Klepperian objectification as harmful—at least not in any significant way.

Even if we (generously) grant that P1 is true on Klepper's account objectification, it is not clear, however, how prostitution qualifies as such objectification—or, at least, how prostitution qualifies as objectification to a larger extent than activities that undeniably appear harmless. As Irving Singer has pointed out, ‘there is nothing in the nature of sexuality as such that necessarily … reduces persons to things’, and the reason for this, Singer explains, is that there is something fundamentally reciprocal to sex. 17 Bordering to this, Thomas Nagel points out in ‘Sexual perversion’ that a crucial aspect of sex is that we tend to derive pleasure from our sexual partner's pleasure. 18 If Singer and Nagel are right, it seems that since a prostitute sells sex, it is not unlikely that at least to some extent, it matters to the client how she feels. Prejudice aside, it could be argued that prostitution is one of few trades where it is natural that the buyer to some extent cares for the seller. Perhaps for this very reason, it seems that prostitutes are less fungible than sellers of most other services. It seems that a buyer of sex would care more about what prostitute he has sex with than I care who delivers my newspaper, and it also seems that a client would be more likely to build a personal relationship with his long-term prostitute than I would with my long-term newspaper delivery man. Of course, there could be (and sadly, are) extremely objectifying clients who do not care the least about those whom they pay for sex. Even if we grant that such carelessness is harmful, however, this is not an argument against prostitution as such, since it fails to show that there is something inherent in the activity of buying and selling sexual services that leads to objectification or makes objectification likely.

Thus P2 is doubtful on Mappes’ account, and P1 and P2 are doubtful on Klepper's account. Unless we can find an objectification argument that appeals to a harmful form of objectification and, at the same time, applies to prostitution, we need separate arguments to show that prostitution is harmful.

The exploitation argument

P1: That which involves exploitation is harmful.

P2: Prostitution involves exploitation.

While objectification is the practice of using other persons as objects, exploitation is the practice of profiting unduly from others’ work. If agent A works productively all day, yet earns almost nothing, while agent B earns what is rightfully A's, then B exploits A. This seems to harm A. If this is right, and prostitution involves such exploitation (P2), then prostitution is harmful (C).

For the sake of the argument, I will grant that P1 is true. It is unclear, however, if P2 is true—or, at least, if buying and selling sex involves or leads to more exploitation than buying and selling other goods and services. Even in today's context—a context with discriminating laws and social stigma—prostitutes do not seem to be significantly more exploited than others. For one, there are luxury prostitutes who earn significantly more than society's average income. Though these, of course, are exceptions, the income for ordinary prostitutes also appears to be fairly good, at least when compared to other kinds of low-skill, labour-intensive, and female-dominated work, which is the realistic alternative for most people engaged in prostitution. According to labour economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn, prostitutes have an average yearly income between two and six times that of other women in this group. 19 Similar findings have been replicated in other studies. Roger Matthews, in a survey conducted in London in 1996, found that prostitutes earned almost three times that of other manual workers. 20 In a more recent survey conducted in Chicago, Steven Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh found that street prostitutes on average make $25–$30 per hour. v That is perhaps not a huge salary, but it is four times the minimum wage. vi Neither is it clear that pimps exploit prostitutes to the extent that we often assume. According to Edlund and Korn, the spot-like nature of prostitution renders it hard for pimps to profit, and in a 1995 survey, Lee Lillard found that less than 6% of Los Angeles’ prostitutes share income with a pimp. Shyamala Nagaraj and Siti Rohani Yahaya, studying non-Western prostitution, found that in Malaysia, prostitutes on average share 2% of their income with pimps (see figures in Edlund and Korn 19 ).

Clearly, there is still profit involved in organising prostitution. That, however, fails to single out prostitution as a harmful profession, since profit is involved in organising virtually all professions. It seems, moreover, that a brothel—at least when run in a civilised manner—has the potential to contribute to the profit of a prostitute much the same way a hairdressing salon might contribute to the profit of a hairdresser, by providing facilities, steady income, safety, advertising, etc. This is supported by the findings of Levitt and Venkatesh, according to which prostitutes working under pimps on average earn more per week than prostitutes working alone—even though they work fewer hours and perform fewer tricks. 21 For these reasons, we cannot take for granted without further argument that all profiting from prostitution has an exploitive nature.

Neither can we take for granted that when extremely poor women (or men) sell sex, and are harmfully exploited when doing so, it is the selling of sex—and not the poverty—that is the genuine source of the harm. Within the context of extreme poverty, exploitation can take place in most professions. This does not establish that these professions are harmful. The fact that construction work performed 15 h a day without safety equipment is harmful, does not establish that construction work is harmful. Similarly, the fact that selling sex 15 h a day without safety equipment is harmful, does not establish that selling sex is harmful. It only establishes that selling sex can be practiced in a harmful manner, which is uncontroversial.

The male dominance argument

P1: That which involves male dominance is harmful.

P2: Prostitution involves male dominance.

This feminist critique of prostitution also seems forceful. Male dominance seems unjust and harmful (P1) and when women earn a living by satisfying men's sexual desires, what goes on looks like male dominance (P2). Thus it seems that prostitution is harmful (C).

Though I believe we should grant P1, it is not clear that P2 is true.

A first problem with P2 is the fact that prostitution is manifold, and that there are male and female prostitutes serving male and female clients. Even if we focus exclusively on stereotypical prostitution involving female prostitutes and male clients, however, it is not clear that male dominance is involved. Though there are many ways to account for the feminist charge of male dominance, I will here consider an influential argument put forth by Carole Pateman in ‘Defending prostitution: charges against Ericsson’. vii Pateman argues that ‘prostitution remains morally undesirable, no matter what reforms are made, because it is one of the most graphic examples of men's domination over women’. She supports this by arguing that a market demand for sexual services is the result of a ‘culturally distinctive form of masculinity (induced) into the unconscious development of little boys’, and that Hegel and ‘feminist interpretation of psychoanalytic theory’ can help us grasp why. According to Pateman, ‘(t)he masculine sense of self is grounded in separateness (from femininity)’, and ‘Hegel showed theoretically in his famous dialectic of mastery and servitude that a self so conceived always attempts to gain recognition and maintain its subjective isolation through domination’. Men thus experience a need to ‘affirm themselves as masters’ and ‘prostitution is the public recognition of men as sexual masters’. 26

This is not convincing. Even if we grant that the psychological mechanism which Pateman describes could perhaps lead to prostitution, her argument would only be effective against acts of prostitution motivated by a masculine desire to gain recognition and maintain identity by dominating the gender according to which men define themselves as the opposite. This appears to be a gross overtheorisation of men's willingness to pay for sex.

Even if we (generously) grant that this is in fact the mechanism behind all or most acts of prostitution, however, it is still not clear why it follows that prostitution is harmful. What Pateman has argued is that prostitution is ‘one of the most graphic examples of men's domination over women’, that is, that prostitution is a part of social life where it is clearly expressed that we live in a male dominated society. It is not clear, however, how this has any bearing on the harmfulness of prostitution, for even if B is a product of A, and A is harmful, it follows neither that B itself is harmful nor that B is indirectly harmful by reciprocally promoting A. For all Pateman has argued, prostitution could be a mere by product or a litmus test, which by itself is harmless. If Pateman seeks to argue not only that society at present harms women (which perhaps it does), but that prostitution is harmful, her argument fails. viii

A way to supplement Pateman's argument, suggested by Debra Satz, is that prostitution is harmful because it is degrading, and since most prostitutes are women, prostitution degrades women (this is a species of the argument that B is indirectly harmful by reciprocally promoting A). 29 There are, however, two serious problems with this further argument. First, it relies on a troubling form of collectivism in judging the prostitute as a representative of one of the groups to which she belongs. ix Second, if prostitution is degrading, it seems that it must be degrading in virtue of something. Thus calling prostitution ‘degrading’ takes for granted, rather than establishes, that there is something troubling about prostitution. As such, we are back in the search for substantial reasons to believe that prostitution is harmful. x

The economic dominance argument

P1: That which involves economic dominance is harmful.

P2: Prostitution involves economic dominance.

C: Prostitution is harmful

This is also an argument with strong intuitive appeal. Economic dominance, which we might define as the use of monetary power to subordinate a person to another person's will, seems harmful (P1). Since such subordination seems to be involved in prostitution (P2), it seems that prostitution is harmful (C).

I believe this argument can be put in at least three different ways, appealing to three different aspects of prostitution that supposedly give rise to economic dominance. Let's examine these separately.

First and most crudely it can be argued that there is something intrinsic to the roles of ‘buyer’ and ‘seller’ that tends to put the buyer, who has the money, in a dominant position over the seller, who must give up what she has in order to get the money she needs, and that this applies to prostitution. This is a weak argument, however, since it applies to a problematically large number of cases. Thus it is easy to come up with counterexamples. Consider, for example, a grocery store owner and a man buying bread or a drug dealer and a man buying drugs. In these cases, it is everything but clear that the buyer has the upper hand, even though the buyer supplies the money and the seller supplies the goods. As such, we cannot use the labels ‘dominator’ and ‘dominated’ categorically on either the buyer or the seller side, and as such, this cannot be used to establish that prostitution involves economic dominance.

An alternative reason why prostitution involves economic dominance could be that, at least in the majority of cases, there is a significant difference in economic power between the rich buyer and the poor seller, and it could be argued that this involves or makes likely that the rich party takes a dominant role in the transaction. This is also a weak argument, however, since we all take part in economically asymmetrical transactions on a daily basis, and we seem to do so without being harmed. Whenever I buy an airline ticket from KLM, an electronic device from Apple, or a hamburger from Burger King, I engage in a transaction where I have significantly less economic power than my trading partner. This does not harm me.

A third variant of the argument could appeal, not to the relative difference in economic power between the prostitute and the client, but to the absolute economic power of the prostitute, and to the fact that the prostitute might often be so desperately poor that in order to earn a living, she must satisfy all of her clients’ whims. Such cases are clearly tragic, but acknowledging this seems rather to be an argument that extreme poverty is harmful than an argument that prostitution is harmful, since—as in the exploitation argument—nothing in particular is said about the practice of buying and selling sex.

As such, it is unclear why it should follow from the nature of prostitution that the client holds a dominant position over the prostitute. Indeed, it seems that we might flip this common argument on its head and claim that the prostitute naturally holds a dominating position over the client. After all, what goes on in an act of prostitution is that two parties have sex, but one party, the client, is required to pay in order to be allowed to participate. If he will not pay, or he cannot pay, he is not allowed in. After the sex has come to an end, moreover, the client is left with nothing (but ebbing pleasure) while the prostitute is left with money.

Appeals to economic dominance, therefore, do not seem to establish that prostitution is harmful. To account for the alleged harm of prostitution, we need to say something more specific about the very actions involved in buying and selling sex specifically. I will now examine three arguments that do.

The selling one's body argument

P1: That which involves selling one's body is harmful.

P2: Prostitution involves selling one's body.

This argument says something substantial and seemingly forceful about prostitution. It seems harmful to sell one's body (P1) and it also seems that prostitution involves just this (P2). As such, it seems that prostitution is harmful (C).

Before we can assess this argument, we must—to avoid equivocation—get a clear understanding of what we mean by ‘selling one's body’.

It seems that the phrase ‘selling one's body’ can mean at least three different things. It can mean (1) selling one's body in the same way that one sells other commodities, such that after one has sold it, one no longer has any claim on it and the buyer may dispose of it as he pleases. Alternatively, ‘selling one's body’ can mean (2) renting out one's body for a certain period of time without restrictions on its use in the rental period, or it can mean (3) renting out one's body for a certain period with restrictions on its use in the rental period. xi

Selling one's body according to (1) is clearly harmful. It is very doubtful, however, if this is an apt description of what goes on in prostitution. Point (1) describes slavery, not buying and selling sex, and it is uncontroversial that slavery is harmful. The same goes for selling one's body according to (2), since there are clear restrictions on what a client can rightfully do to a prostitute. A client cannot rightfully beat up a prostitute any more than he can beat up a hairdresser or a plumber. (It is true that in many societies, violence against prostitutes is taken less seriously than violence against non-prostitutes. That, however, should speak against those societies, not against prostitution.) To the extent that prostitution involves selling one's body, it seems that it must be according to (3), which is a much weaker account of ‘selling one's body’ than the catchphrase hints to.

On this account, however, it is no longer clear that selling one's body is harmful, since prostitution is far from the only profession where bodies are sold in this sense. Pateman argues that prostitution is indeed singled out as the body selling profession, but in arguing for this, she compares the services offered by prostitutes solely with the services offered by counsellors. 26 That is not a very interesting comparison, however, since counsellors offer some of the least bodily services on the market. More interesting professionals to compare with are dancers, masseuses, sumo wrestlers and football players. Though few would argue that these professionals are significantly harmed, it seems undeniable that they sell their bodies according to (3). As such, it seems that making money from bodily work is at least not categorically harmful.

To single out prostitution, one might twist the argument by saying that in the same way selling does not really mean selling, body does not really mean body. One might argue that what matters is not that prostitutes rent out their bodies as such, but that they rent out a specific part of their bodies, namely their genitals. This can seemingly single out prostitutes, since dancers, masseuses, sumo wrestlers and professional football players do not earn money from renting out and doing jobs with their genitals.

In reply to such an argument, Martha Nussbaum has offered the example of a colonoscopy ‘artist’ who is paid and consents to having her colon used by medical researchers to develop efficient and comfortable colonoscopy equipment. This, Nussbaum admits, would be a strange occupation indeed, but it would not seem harmful in the sense and to the extent that most of us believe that prostitution is harmful (even though, as Nussbaum writes, the colonoscopy artist is ‘penetrated by another person's activity—and, we might add, far more deeply penetrated than is generally the case in sex’). 33 If Nussbaum is right, the fact that prostitution involves making money from using one's genitals is insufficient to establish that prostitution is harmful. xii

An alternative suggestion could be that the harm lies not in the seller having her genitals interfered with, but in the seller having to interfere with the buyer's genitals. This distinguishes the prostitute from the colonoscopy artist. The problem with this suggestion, however, is that although it would not imply that the colonoscopy artist is harmed by the colonoscopy, it would imply that the medical doctor performing the colonoscopy is harmed—at least if he is paid by the colonoscopy artist for doing his job. xiii This suggestion seems even less plausible than the suggestion that the colonoscopy artist is harmed.

A last suggestion falling under the ‘selling one's body’ category could be that the harm lies neither in the genitals of the prostitute nor in the genitals of the client, but in the interaction of their genitals. This would seemingly single out prostitution from all other body-selling professions, since prostitutes are presumably the only ones who make money from genital interaction. It is unclear, however, how it could be harmful that genitals A and genitals B touch and interact for payment if individually touching and interacting with genitals A and genitals B for payment is quite harmless. At least, it seems that if one wants to argue that such interaction is harmful, focusing solely on the bodily movements involved will not do the trick. To account for the alleged harm, then rather than looking merely to the body and the bodily movements, one should look to the movements’ sexual meaning and to the mental side of making money from providing sexual services, and seek to locate the harm here. This is the aim of the remaining two arguments.

The habitual faking argument

P1: That which involves habitual faking is harmful.

P2: Prostitution involves habitual faking.

One psychological hardship associated with selling sex is that it requires one to fake one's sexual responses. Perhaps Nagel's mutual enjoyment theory (see ‘The objectification argument’), assuming it is correct, leads not to the client caring for the prostitute's enjoyment, but to the prostitute being required to pretend that she enjoys having sex with her client. This seems quite plausible, and according to Estes, it is a brutal fact about prostitution that ‘every visible response (of the prostitute) must address the client's desires and wishes’. This, Estes claims, can make the prostitute ‘cognitively and emotionally confused’ if it is done consistently and over time. Indeed, Estes argues, this can destroy a prostitute's sex life, and she asks, seemingly rhetorically, whether someone who has worked as a prostitute will ever be able to ‘‘switch on’ her feelings when with her lover’. 9 To the extent that the prostitute will not, it seems that P1 and P2 are true, and thus that prostitution is harmful (C).

There are, however, problems with this argument as well. A first problem is that it is not always clear that ‘every visible response must address the client's desires and wishes’. Though some clients might demand this, others might not. As such, there seems to be limits to how much faking is required.

Regardless of the possibility of a lack of demand for excessive faking, however, we should concede that at least some faking is intrinsic to, or is made very likely by, prostitution. Thus it seems that a prostitute still could be led to making a habit out of faking, and thus that P2 remains.

Even if we grant that P2 is true, however, it is not clear that P1 is true. As in several of the above arguments, the allegedly harmful feature appealed to is also present in professions that we do not think of as harmful. A good example here is professional acting. An actress makes money from faking: from pretending that things are otherwise than they are. This can be rough: she can be required to play in a light-hearted comedy the day after a friend of hers has died or in a tragedy the day after she has gotten married. If she engages in this for decades, it seems that she could and would be making a habit out of faking. We do not, however, think of acting as harmful. On the contrary, we usually think of acting as enriching. A natural question to ask, then, is why the same cannot be true of prostitution. Prejudice aside, it does not seem impossible that a prostitute could handle her acting the same way actresses do and thus manage to keep her sex with a lover distinct from her sex with a client the same way an actress keeps the sorrow she expresses over Hamlet's death distinct from the sorrow she expresses at her friend's funeral. At least, an argument would have to be made as to why—granted the weak significance view of sex—a prostitute could not do this.

The habitual faking argument, therefore, seems not to be effective as long as it does not explain how faking while having sex is fundamentally different from faking in other areas of life. To make the case that it is, one must seemingly appeal to something in the very personal and emotional nature of sex.

The selling one's soul argument

P1: That which involves selling one's soul is harmful.

P2: Prostitution involves selling one's soul.

If we translate ‘soul’ into less mystical terms, and use it to refer to our deepest values, emotions and character traits, then this argument has a plausible P1. The arch example of selling one's soul is perhaps to sell the position as one's closest friend. Close friendships are thought to flow from our deepest values, emotions and character traits, and this seems to be the reason why close friendships should not (or perhaps could not) be sold. The intimacy of sexual relations might make them share this characteristic with friendships (P2), and this might in turn explain why prostitution is harmful (C).

The problem with this argument is that it is forceful only on the strong significance view of sex. If the strong significance view is false, it is not clear why selling a close friendship is a good parallel to selling sex. On the weak significance view, in which casual sex is permitted, it would be fine to engage in sexual actions without being emotionally involved.

A counterargument to this reply could be that even if the weak significance view is correct, complete emotional detachment is not possible, at least not as long as the person involved has a healthy, non-repressed emotional life. There might, accordingly, be some personal elements included in all sex, even though these might not be sufficiently strong to warrant the strong significance view of sex. I believe this is a sound counterargument. Even if we concede that there are certain personal elements involved in all sex, commercial sex included, however, this needs not imply that prostitution is harmful—or, at least, not harmful to a significant degree. After all, people sell personal elements in a long line of professions that we do not consider harmful. Nussbaum provides the example of a philosophy professor, like herself, who ‘takes money for thinking and writing about what she thinks—about morality, emotion, the nature of knowledge’ even though these are ‘all parts of a human being's search for understanding of the world and oneself’. 38 A philosophy professor, Nussbaum notes, sells her soul in this sense, and should expect, as part of her work, that strangers invade her private space: on the one hand, she could be facing students who are not worthy of her philosophical attention, yet still receive it for payment. On the other hand, she could experience unexpected arguments that shake her grounds in settings where she must remain calm and professional. A philosophy professor, therefore, seems to sell her soul, and the same might plausibly be said about professional musicians, authors, psychologists, priests, medical doctors, nurses, teachers and kindergarten workers. Granted the weak significance view of sex, it is not clear why a prostitute sells her soul to a larger extent than these professionals do. As such, we are still not given a convincing reason why prostitution is harmful.

Costs and benefits

Even though, for the reasons provided above, I do not believe that prostitution is harmful in the ways and to the extent that is traditionally assumed, neither do I believe it is harmless. Engaging in prostitution has its costs. Though prostitution is not necessarily a high-risk job, it is not a low-risk job either, most obviously because it carries with it a certain chance of catching sexually transmitted diseases. 34 Further, prostitution is incompatible with sexually monogamous relationships, and it might well be a considerable psychological burden to have sexual contact with someone towards whom one is neither physically nor mentally attracted (this point is forcefully put by Marneffe 32 ). These downsides, moreover, appear to be present regardless of our social or legal treatment of prostitution, and as such, they are genuine downsides to selling sex. xiv

Even on the weak significance view of sex, therefore, we need not agree with Lars O Ericsson, who claims that ‘If two adults voluntarily consent to an economic arrangement concerning sexual activity and this activity takes place in private, it seems plainly wrong to maintain that there is something intrinsically wrong with it’. 35 Though this might be a handy heuristic in a political context, and might serve as an argument against prohibition, consent is insufficient to ensure harmlessness. We can be harmed by things we consent to. That is why we are usually careful about giving our consent.

Even if we accept that there are genuine costs associated with prostitution, however, this does not give us sufficient reason to reject it. Before we reject it, we should also count its benefits. We should then compare the sum of total costs and benefits in prostitution with the sum of total costs and benefits in alternative occupations.

One benefit of prostitution is that it renders it possible for young people—who are the ones most likely to be poor—to earn a significant income without education and without investment costs, and to do so while keeping substantial parts of their spare time free to pursue other goals.

Another benefit is of a more general microeconomic nature: Imagine a woman, Caroline, who is very skilled at giving others sexual pleasure. Without prostitution, Caroline is free to give others sexual pleasure, but the only thing she herself can get out this is sexual pleasure in return. In economic terms, sexual pleasure is the only currency in which she can be paid. This currency restriction is suboptimal, for there might be many things Caroline needs more than she needs sexual pleasure. Perhaps she needs a new dishwasher or to pay for repairs to her car. If money is introduced as a medium of exchange, she can get this. If she can get money rather than sexual pleasure in return for sex, she can use the money she earns to buy herself a new dishwasher or repair the car. If these are more important to her than sexual pleasure is, then she has gained a higher value than she otherwise would.

A further advantage is that when money is introduced as a medium of exchange, Caroline can not only get more valuable things in return from sex: She can also get them from more people. Without prostitution, Caroline could only (as long as she wanted something in return) have sex with people who are fairly good at giving her sexual pleasure. With prostitution, she can enter profitable deals with a much larger pool of people. Now her sex partners need not be good at giving her sexual pleasure. They can be good at anything (teaching, writing, fixing computers, or selling newspapers), make money from doing what they are good at, and use the money to pay Caroline. Thus prostitution can give her something more valuable in return from a larger pool of people. This is a benefit that should be counted. xv

How does prostitution fare in comparison to other occupations? When we compare prostitution with other occupations, we see that in the same way that prostitution does not just have costs, other occupations do not just have benefits. This must be taken into account as long as the alternative to being a prostitute is not to get money for nothing, but to engage in other kinds of work.

When we compare the risks involved in prostitution with the risks involved in being a professional boxer, stunt artist, race car driver, deep sea diver, miner, policeman, or soldier—all of which are widely accepted occupations—it seems that prostitution is only moderately risky. The governmental New Zealand Accident Compensation Corporation interestingly categorises being a prostitute, which is legal in New Zealand, as safer than being an ambulance nurse. 36 When we further compare the level of felt disgust in prostitution with the level of felt disgust in being a toilet cleaner, a sewer maintainer, a garbage worker, a coroner, or an embalmer—all of which are also widely accepted occupations—being a prostitute does at least not appear to be exceptionally disgusting. Sex, after all, is by and large a positive activity.

Thus it seems that when the whole context is taken into account, the harmful aspects of engaging in prostitution, though they are real and should not be neglected, are not as significant as we tend to assume. Indeed, it appears that for some—say, those who accept casual sex, have a high sex drive, need money and are able to work in a safe environment—selling sex could be a prudent option.

If this is correct, we must concede that it might be rational to engage in prostitution, and for some, irrational to opt out of it. This, if true, has significant implications for how, privately and professionally, we should view prostitution and treat those who engage in it.

Replies to two objections

I have met two main objections to my argument. The first objection states that my argument runs contrary to basic, observable facts: prostitutes suffer tragic harms, such as depression, guilt, drug abuse and suicide attempts, and no amount of philosophical theorising can erase this.

This objection kicks in an open door, for I do not deny that prostitutes are harmed. Prostitutes are harmed. What I argue is that this harm has its main source, not in something intrinsic to prostitution, but in contingent external factors.

In ‘The correlation with psychological problems argument’ and ‘The correlation with danger argument’ I discussed the hypothesis that the extrinsic source of the harm suffered by prostitutes lies in how prostitutes are socially and legally treated. Proving this hypothesis would require sociological work beyond the scope of this paper. To try to isolate some of the harm brought about our treatment of prostitutes, however, consider the following thought experiment in which hairdressers are treated the same way prostitutes are treated: imagine that we were all brought up told that good girls are not hairdressers, that many of our common derogatory terms were synonyms for ‘hairdresser’, and that most people, upon seeing a hairdresser, would look away. Imagine that hairdressers had to live in fear of social exclusion if friends or family found out how they struggle to make ends meet, that no one would knowingly employ ex-hairdressers, and that landlords would terminate housing contracts if they discovered that their tenant is a hairdresser. Imagine that most hairdressers had to work on the street, in cars, or in the homes of strangers, and that if their work were organised, it were organised by criminals offering no work contracts, no sick leave and no insurance.

In such a society, hairdressers would very likely suffer significant harms. There would be two reasons for this. Most obviously, the social and legal maltreatment would be a heavy burden to bear for those already engaged in hairdressing. Less obviously, but statistically just as important, the maltreatment would skew the sample of who become hairdressers in the first place. If hairdressers were maltreated, then only (or almost only) people who were already in serious trouble would find it worthwhile to become hairdressers. As such, if hairdressers were treated the same way prostitutes are treated, we should not be surprised to learn that hairdressing correlated with depression, suicide attempts, drug abuse and so on—even if, as we all know, hairdressing is not a harmful occupation.

If the way we treat prostitutes is so grim that it could seriously harm a perfectly innocent social group, we have reason to suspect that this indeed is what harms prostitutes. This reason grows in strength if, as I argue above, we have trouble finding anything intrinsic to prostitution that accounts for the harm. If this reasoning is sound, my thesis in this paper is compatible with the fact that, sadly, many prostitutes suffer serious harms.

The second objection states that my argument is utopian: that prostitution is a complex practice deeply entrenched in a long line of other social and psychological issues, such as gender inequality, poverty, power hierarchies and exploitation, and that in abstracting away from these, my argument relies on presuppositions so far from the actual world that the conclusions I draw have few, if any, practical implications. I am hard pressed, however, to see that my argument is utopian, at least in any problematic sense. First, my argument does not rely on traditionally utopian characteristics, such as endless resources, perfect knowledge, or unbreached rationality. Neither does it assume a society radically different from our own. For prostitution to become a profession of only moderate risks, what we need is a shift in our social and legal treatment of prostitutes. History proves, moreover, that our social and legal treatment of various social groups lies within our power to change. In less than two centuries we have, in large parts of the world, ended slavery, given men and women equal rights, and accepted homosexuality. It is important to remember, moreover, that these changes were made possible because some people dared to be a little utopian and abstracted away from their present context. We can all too easily hear the voice of someone opposed to homosexuality half a century ago proclaiming that homosexuality is deeply interrelated with various complex social and psychological factors (such as depression, exploitation, rape, disease, drug abuse and unstable families), that these form part of what homosexuality is, and that trying to assess homosexuality apart from them is hopelessly utopian. Today, we are glad someone dared question their assumptions and look beyond their immediate social context in their assessment of homosexuality. If my arguments in this paper are sound, we should approach prostitution in a similar manner, and be open for the possibility that prostitutes are harmed, not because prostitution is harmful, but because society at present seriously wrongs prostitutes.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tommy Knutsen, Martin Larsson, Thomas M. Johanson, Panos Dimas, Morten Magelssen, Mathias Sagdahl and Andreas Brekke Carlsson for useful comments. I also owe sincere thanks to the staff and users at the Oslo Prostitution Centre (ProSentret), where I worked on an outreach project while writing this paper.

↵ Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, s.v. “prostitution.”. Oxford, UK.
Bullough VL ,
McAnulty RD
Sanders T ,
O'Neill M ,
Bjørndahl U ,
Almodovar NJ
Levitt SD ,
Venkatesh SA
↵ U.S. Department of Labor . Changes in Basic Minimum Wages in Non-Farm Employment under State Law: Selected Years 1968 to 2011 . http://www.dol.gov/whd/state/stateMinWageHis.htm (9 May 2011) .
Anderson SA
de Marneffe P
Ericsson LO
New Zealand Accident Compensation Corporation

↵ i Though I take for granted here that casual sex is not harmful, I believe this paper can also be of value for those who dispute this premise. For those who believe that casual sex is mildly harmful, but that prostitution is very harmful, I hope my argument can make their estimation of prostitution more on a level with their estimation of casual sex. For those who outright reject all casual sex, my argument might perhaps be seen as a reductio ad absurdum of the pro-casual sex view. In what follows I deal solely with issues concerning well-being and harm. Thus my argument is likely to do more work for consequentialists than for deontologists.

↵ ii I am here concerned solely with adult prostitution. Child prostitution, which involves both underage sex and child labour, requires a separate discussion.

↵ iii There is an extensive literature on psychological problems related to prostitution. For an overview see Bullough et al , Day, and Farley and Barkan. 4–6

↵ iv These two accounts are meant to be representative, not exhaustive. For a critical up-to-date overview of the debate over objectification in ethics and feminist theory, see the papers by Mappes, Klepper, and Papadaki. 14–16

↵ v The implications of these findings are discussed in Levitt and Venkatesh, and Levitt and Dubner. 21 , 22

↵ vi The Illinois minimum hourly wage in 2007 (the year Levitt and Venkatesh conducted their research) was $6.50. 23

↵ vii Feminist rationales along similar lines are found in Pateman, Barry and Farley. 24–26 For a methodological critique of these approaches to prostitution research, see Weizer. 27

↵ viii This objection has also been raised by Scott A Anderson: ‘… radical feminists have failed to explain clearly why selling sexual recreation might itself be particularly problematic—that is, why open commerce in sex would make things worse for women than they are anyway in a patriarchal, capitalist society’. 28

↵ ix Even if the assumed collectivism is legitimate, however, the claim is empirically questionable. Peter de Marneffe writes: ‘Here we must wonder, though, whether women as a group are more victimized by sex discrimination in nations where prostitution is tolerated, such as The Netherlands and Germany, than they are in the USA, where it is not’. 30 Another serious problem is that this objection does not fit well with male prostitution.

↵ x The rationales offered by Pateman and Satz clearly do not exhaust the range of arguments against prostitution put forth in the feminist literature. I hope and believe, however, that the strongest additional arguments are adequately dealt with in other sections of this paper (see especially ‘The objectification argument’, ‘The exploitation argument’, ‘The economic dominance argument’ and ‘The selling one's body argument’). For a philosophical overview of feminist views on prostitution (for and against) see Anderson. 28

↵ xi This taxonomy roughly coincides with Joel Feinberg's taxonomy of strong and weak waiving of rights, and relinquishing of rights. For an recent application of Feinberg's taxonomy to prostitution see Liberto. 31 For Feinberg's original discussion, see his 1978 paper. 32

↵ xii Strictly speaking, the colon is not part of the genitals. It is hard to see, however, how this could be argumentatively relevant, since we can presumably change the example to involve gynecology rather than colonoscopy without deriving at different results.

↵ xiii Perhaps the CEO of the medical company wants the equipment tested on her to ensure its quality.

↵ xiv It is also possible that the above considered sources of harm, though they might individually be small, aggregate to become significant, either because they sum up or because they interact in unfortunate ways. The former I accept, though I maintain that the sum would be reasonably low. The latter would have to be positively argued for.

↵ xv In counting the benefits of prostitution, we should perhaps include the benefits on the side of the client. If we grant that clients are not harmed by buying sex, that sex (or physical intimacy) is a basic human need, and that for various reasons, many people will not have access to sex (or physical intimacy) other than if they pay, it seems that prostitution can satisfy a legitimate need. Due to the curious nature of human sexuality, moreover, it seems possible that a slight favor on the side of the prostitute could give a big surplus on the side of the client. Take a fetish such as feet licking. If a client is turned on by licking a prostitute's feet, and she charges $50 for 20 min of licking, there could be a considerable surplus for both parties.

Correction notice This article has been corrected since it was published Online First. In the last paragraph of ‘The objectification argument’ section, the sentence ‘ Thus P1 is doubtful on Mappes’ account ...’ has been corrected. Also in the last paragraph of the paper, ‘youth uncertainly’ has been removed from the list of examples of ‘psychological factors’.

Competing interests None.

Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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“The Prostitution Problem”: Claims, Evidence, and Policy Outcomes

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Published: 29 November 2018
Volume 48 , pages 1905–1923, ( 2019 )

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Cecilia Benoit 1 ,
Michaela Smith 1 ,
Mikael Jansson 1 ,
Priscilla Healey 2 &
Doug Magnuson 2

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A Commentary to this article was published on 11 December 2018

Prostitution, payment for the exchange of sexual services, is deemed a major social problem in most countries around the world today, with little to no consensus on how to address it. In this Target Article, we unpack what we discern as the two primary positions that undergird academic thinking about the relationship between inequality and prostitution: (1) prostitution is principally an institution of hierarchal gender relations that legitimizes the sexual exploitation of women by men, and (2) prostitution is a form of exploited labor where multiple forms of social inequality (including class, gender, and race) intersect in neoliberal capitalist societies. Our main aims are to: (a) examine the key claims and empirical evidence available to support or refute each perspective; (b) outline the policy responses associated with each perspective; and (c) evaluate which responses have been the most effective in reducing social exclusion of sex workers in societal institutions and everyday practices. While the overall trend globally has been to accept the first perspective on the “prostitution problem” and enact repressive policies that aim to protect prostituted women, punish male buyers, and marginalize the sex sector, we argue that the strongest empirical evidence is for adoption of the second perspective that aims to develop integrative policies that reduce the intersecting social inequalities sex workers face in their struggle to make a living and be included as equals. We conclude with a call for more robust empirical studies that use strategic comparisons of the sex sector within and across regions and between sex work and other precarious occupations.

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The Gender Equality Potential of New Anti-prostitution Policy: A Critical Juncture for Concrete Reform

The gender equality potential of new anti-prostitution policy: a critical juncture for concrete reform

Emily St.Denny

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Benoit, C., Smith, M., Jansson, M. et al. “The Prostitution Problem”: Claims, Evidence, and Policy Outcomes. Arch Sex Behav 48 , 1905–1923 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1276-6

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Prostitution Pros and Cons

If con is the opposite of pro, what is the opposite of congress.

It is often said that politics is the oldest profession after prostitution. I simply put before you, dear reader, why the former prohibits the latter.

If a beautiful lady sells magazine subscriptions better than an ugly man, is she a prostitute? If a painter sells a painting of a naked woman, is he a pimp? Is a modeling agency guilty of sex trafficking? Should women who choose a date for materialistic reasons be put in jail? Surely, you’ll answer no. However, all these examples represent either the economic benefit of sexual advantage or the sexual benefit of economic advantage.

Of course, you’re not convinced. Sexual intercourse is different than mere sexual attraction. Yet consider this: an adult male approaches an adult female and offers to pay her for sex, she consents, and the transaction is completed. Is that prostitution? Most would readily say yes. But, wait, there’s more! Imagine if, in this hypothetical, a camera caught the whole exchange of fluids and finances on tape. Now it is simply pornography! Legal as a Puritan puppy on the Fourth of July!

In short, virtual voyeurism turns prostitution into pornography and punishment into profit. Most people do not favor prohibiting pornography but favor prohibiting prostitution. I find these two beliefs incompatible. The law essentially allows prostitution if the “John” is not paying the prostitute for his own sexual gratification but rather for economic profit in selling the sexual encounter to others. So how do you draw the line when sex is being sold to consumers on a daily basis and when paid sexual intercourse is legal so long as it is caught on tape?

Well, in short, you can’t draw that line. The best the law has come up with is essentially the discretion of the court. As former Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stewart, so adroitly put it when trying to define obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”

Some advocate decriminalizing prostitution on the grounds that it is a “victimless crime.” However, under most laws it is legally considered a “public order crime,” or a crime that disrupts the order of a community. In fact, it used to be considered a type of vagrancy. Street prostitution is illegal across the United States and only a couple counties in Nevada allow institutionalized or “brothel prostitution.” But prostitution, along with soliciting and facilitating prostitution, is illegal.

Oddly enough, laws prohibiting prostitution are fairly recent phenomena. Before the turn of the century, not only was prostitution legal, but there were also laws regulating it. Laws prohibiting prostitution are a product of the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prostitution laws largely came from a concern for the spread of venereal disease. There is, perhaps, no worse a way to stem the spread of venereal disease than by forcing those who have sexually transmitted diseases out of the public eye and encouraging its secrecy. Now, assured access to healthy prostitutes is nearly impossible, and prostitutes have less of an incentive to seek treatment (lest they be found out).

Some argue that prostitution isn’t a choice and that most women turn to prostitution out of desperation. I think this argument comes from the right place. It is important to note that the typical hooker is a far cry from the sympathetic Julia Roberts-type TV trope some may have in mind. For most gals, whoredom is probably not a first pick of profession. However, I do not think all prostitutes had no other option, and even if prostitution isn’t a choice, what good would outlawing it do? If they never had a choice to begin with, why would its legality matter?

I, like most people in this country, think sex for economic profit is immoral. But I, unlike many in this country , believe prostitution should be decriminalized. The law does not necessarily speak to morality. What is immoral is not always illegal, and what is illegal is not always immoral. For example, U.S. law does not prohibit cheating on your wife with her sister, giving an old lady the finger, denying the Holocaust, telling children in the street that Santa Claus isn’t real, or just generally being a jerk. If you need any proof, simply take a look at the moral caliber of the people in charge of passing laws.

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Should prostitution be decriminalized?

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It seems that almost everyone has an opinion about prostitution and sex work .

But with Amnesty International’s recent unflinching policy recommendation to decriminalize all adult consensual sex work – including their take-down of the Nordic model which claims to punish only clients – it is becoming increasingly difficult for naysayers to ignore the well-documented ways that sex workers are harmed by criminalization.

Amnesty’s position is based on many years of empirical research by leading health and human rights researchers , as well as calls by sex workers and advocates.

While much of the debate on sex work focuses on what is best for “women,” an enormous diversity of individuals trade sex at some point in their lives. This includes not just cisgender women from a range of age, racial, religious, dis/ability and sexual identities, but also transgender women, cisgender men and GLBTQ youth . Yet even when taking into account the diversity of individuals involved and the many settings in which sex is traded and policed, Amnesty studied the accumulating body of evidence and concluded :

to protect the rights of sex workers, it is necessary not only to repeal laws which criminalize the sale of sex, but also to repeal those which make the buying of sex from consenting adults or the organization of sex work (such as prohibitions on renting premises for sex work) a criminal offense.

As Amnesty explains:

Such laws force sex workers to operate covertly in ways that compromise their safety, prohibit actions that sex workers take to maximize their safety, and serve to deny sex workers support or protection from government officials. They therefore undermine a range of sex workers’ human rights, including their rights to security of person, housing and health.

Will Amnesty’s recommendation lead to a change in U.S. policies?

Beliefs versus empirical evidence

The answer to how U.S. lawmakers respond to Amnesty’s call will depend in part on their level of courage to fight other institutional and cultural pressures to maintain and even increase criminal penalties for clients and other individuals connected to the sex industry. But their reactions will also depend on their own personal beliefs.

As someone who has researched and taught about sex work and human trafficking for more than two decades, I know that for some individuals, no amount of evidence or logic will change their opinion that sex work is intrinsically wrong. For them, decriminalizing any form of sex work – including adult consensual encounters – would send the unacceptable message that sex work is a legitimate form of income generation. And it is in this emotional territory where the decision to decriminalize or not rests.

Because of the difficulty in evaluating evidence on emotional topics, my first assignment for students in my Sex Work, Human Trafficking, and Social Justice class is to document their current reactions to the issue of sex work.

I ask students to honestly reflect on how their life experiences might shape the way they approach the issue of exchanging sexual services for pay. At the end of the course I ask students to revisit their feelings. I have found that when given the opportunity to make space for their feelings and to evaluate the best empirical evidence (such as Alexandra Lutnick’s “Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: Beyond Victims and Villains” ), most students conclude that adult consensual sex work should be decriminalized. They come to this conclusion even if they still personally do not “believe” in it.

Furthermore, students report that they understand how decriminalization can be one arm of a larger set of strategies to assist victims of structural and individual harms. These harms may include poverty, neglect, police violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

I wish that I could also give this assignment to all policymakers and anti-sex trade activists.

This includes organizations such as the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), which described Amnesty’s move toward decriminalization a “willful and callous rejection of women’s rights and equality,” and Hollywood celebrities such as Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet who have joined CATW in their opposition to decriminalization. While I have previously written that “it is no longer acceptable to prioritize the opinions of celebrities over those of sex workers and the scientists who advocate for them” – the belief systems underlying these opinions are still important to address.

Prostitution as a trope

As Barb Brents and I point out in our introduction to a special section of Sociological Perspectives on sex work and human trafficking, there has long been a serious decoupling between reliable empirical evidence and sex work policies in the U.S. While there are complex historical and institutional reasons for this disconnect, the answer in part is because sex workers have long served as a trope – a symbol for other people’s agendas.

Of course, sex workers have long been used as punchlines for misogynist jokes . But the symbol of the sex worker is also used by anti-prostitution activists who purportedly want to “help” them. For example, in a recent article discussing sex workers rights in The New York Times Magazine, Yasmeen Hassan, global executive director for Equality Now, expresses the following opinion about sex workers:

They’re sexual objects. What does that mean for how professional women are seen? And if women are sex toys you can buy, think about the relationships between men and women, in marriage or otherwise.

In Hassan’s statement and others like it coming from prohibitionists, a central “problem” of sex work is not what the best empirical evidence says, but what they believe sex workers symbolize. And when one is focused on one’s own symbolic interpretation, it is difficult to listen to conflicting evidence.

Listen to sex workers

Sex workers have long argued that criminalization and policing practices cause and/or exacerbate the worst harms to their well-being. Scientific evidence, as found in Amnesty’s reports, confirms this.

But changing the laws requires policymakers (and to some extent, the larger public) to respect and humanize people who are currently both stigmatized and criminalized.

Sex workers have made some progress in bringing attention to the harms of criminalizing sex work policies. One example is the practice of police using the carrying of condoms as evidence of prostitution. With growing global momentum behind the sex workers’ rights movement, I expect many more successes to come. Yet now is also a critical time for everyday citizens both to check in with their own feelings about the issue and to read and evaluate for themselves the best available empirical evidence.

U.S. history is full of examples of public beliefs and norms lagging behind progressive institutional change. Examples include civil rights for African-Americans, voting rights for women and marriage rights for same-sex couples. Most individuals in the U.S. now believe that upholding the civil rights for those groups was the right thing to do.

Decriminalizing sex work will not on its own fix misogyny, racism and other forms of systemic oppression. But decriminalization of consensual sex work is one key step toward social and sexual justice.

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28 Prostitution and sex work

Teela Sanders is a Professor of Criminology at the University of Leicester.

Barbara G. Brents is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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This essay discusses the debates about prostitution and sex work in relation to the ‘sex wars’ paradigm, posing questions about its theoretical usefulness in addressing the regulation of commercial sexual activity between adults. The authors map the global trend in accepting the ‘Swedish model’ for managing the sex industry, noting the problems that have resulted with the turn to criminalization that many Western countries have taken in recent years. This ‘turn’ has been influenced significantly by myths about sex trafficking and the belief that all commercial sex is in some ways forced, coerced, or exploitative. The authors discuss the discourses that frame the male client as the ‘offender’ and the female as the ‘victim and offender’. The consequences are reviewed both for individuals engaging in sexual services and for contemporary feminist debates. The human rights perspective can offer useful insights for understanding and regulating sexual behaviour.

Among the more widespread and persistent of sexual ‘offences’ is prostitution. Often seen as a vice rather than a crime, the political and social discourses surrounding prostitution have often been contradictory, reflecting politicized debates about women’s sexuality and women’s sexual agency: Is the prostitute an offender or a victim? Women who break sexual norms can be either knowing offenders, variously publicly flaunting their sexuality and luring men into succumbing to irrational desires, or they are innocent victims of manipulative male desire. Imbued in these are questions of power and control, the meanings of agency, and the controllability of desire. Implicated are questions of just what is the social norm that prostitution violates: Is it an affront to the heterosexual family, women’s sexual asceticism and purity, or visible disorder and irrationality? More importantly, just what are the sexual norms of our late capitalist economy and postmodern culture? Underlying all these questions is the basic observation that to label victims and offenders is to ultimately individualize behaviour. Missing in victim/offender discourse is poverty, inequality, opportunity for resources, and the often quite rational decision to either earn money by selling sex or to break the law and purchase sexual release.

In this essay, we will discuss the development of this discourse and the social policy responses that spring from it—victim, offender, and rehabilitation. We will discuss the debates today and the implications of these models for the construction of appropriate femininity, masculinity, and sexuality.

To summarize the key points of this essay:

During the period of industrialization and the move to modernity, prostitution became the focus of religious and state intervention that focused on controlling wayward female sexuality.

The individualization and feminization of prostitution led to a contradictory discourse of women as both victim and offender.

Moral reformers mobilized rhetoric around white female slavery in the 19th century, locating the origins of the modern-day panics about trafficking and immigrants in relation to the sex industry.

Feminist theoretical debates known as the ‘sex wars’ have informed understanding about the place of prostitution in a patriarchal society, leading to more nuanced post-feminist discourses on gender politics and the rights of the individual.

During the time of neo-liberal politics and values there has been a global trend to use criminalization to regulate prostitution, firmly entrenching the victim/offender contradiction within welfare, criminal, and social policies.

Despite this trend, several effective alternative systems are operating across the world, demonstrating how sex workers’ rights (particularly in relation to safety, health, and right to freedom) can be at the forefront of policy.

Section I of this essay provides a history of state control of prostitution. Here we look at ‘the birth of the prostitute’ alongside industrialization and the changing position of women in society. We flag how the concerns around ‘white slavery’ formed the bedrock of the first laws against prostitution. In section II we outline the theoretical debates since second-wave feminism in the 1970s informing how prostitution and sex work have been conceptualized. Looking more closely at recent reflections in post-feminist thought about the complexities of commercial sex and sexual labour in a time of mass consumption, we chart how the discourses around the ‘victim and offender’ have developed alongside neo-liberal social and criminal justice policy. In section III we look at the trend toward criminalization during the late 20th century, further examining the ways in which the victim/offender discourse has been peddled in politics. In this section we also examine several alternative models beyond criminalization to regulate and manage the sex industry. In section IV we bring together some brief conclusions and discuss contemporary controversies in this area.

I. Historical and Cultural Context

A. modernity and the birth of laws against prostitution.

While prostitution is often labelled the ‘oldest profession’, it was not until the Industrial Revolution that laws specifically targeted prostitution. Whilst either religious institutions or local village norms regulated all sorts of individual sexual behaviour in the cause of enforcing moral codes, being a prostitute was singled out neither as an offender nor a victim in developing English or American common law ( Luker 1998 ; Laite 2012 ).

During the 19th century, however, industrializing cities in Europe, the United Kingdom, and America attracted men and women freed from the village patriarchal familial norms and with the means for economic survival. A class of low-wage-earning, independent women took advantage of the market provided by men delaying marriage, and selling sex became a visible alternative to poverty ( Gilfoyle 1994 ).

The earliest regulations affecting prostitution were directed at regulating a variety of offences to visible social disorder and propriety. ‘Disorderly’ behaviour tended to be the same that violated earlier patriarchal and religious proscriptions, and police enforced rules against the increasing number of poor and immigrants. The 1824 Vagrancy Act in Britain sought explicitly to remove the idle, poor, and other offenders to middle-class values from public view, and allowed women selling sex discovered in public to be fined or imprisoned.

However, as the 19th century progressed, prostitution became a lightning rod for a wide range of social anxieties and conflicts. In 1836 Paris passed laws testing prostitutes for disease. Under the Contagious Disease Acts in England in the 1860s police detained prostitutes (and suspected prostitutes), gave them medical examinations, and kept them in hospitals for up to three months if found to have a disease ( Self 2003 ). Zoning regulations grouped brothels, as well as dance halls, saloons, and other bastions of irrational and disorderly behaviour, into red-light districts. In the United States, between the 1870s and the turn of the century, a few cities followed some European examples, experimenting with regulated prostitution through a formal system of red-light districts, licensed brothels, mandatory medical examinations, and restrictions on mobility, whilst other regions practiced these policies informally (Walkowitz 1980 , 1992 ; Gilfoyle 1994 ; Best 1998 ; Laite 2012 ).

Increasingly powerful feminist organizations, echoing prevailing Victorian views of female asexual virtue and purity, campaigned against these disease-testing policies for perpetuating a sexual double standard, encouraging offensive sexual behaviour in men while punishing women. ‘Social purity’ campaigns, using a medical rhetoric to police moral behaviour, picked up steam throughout the United States and Europe. Middle-class feminists helped repeal the British Contagious Disease Acts in 1886 and campaigned throughout Europe to repeal policies regulating prostitution. In the United States, feminist organizations saw prostitution and drunkenness as contributing to women’s dependence and lobbied for red-light abatement laws fining building owners who rented to prostitutes ( Walkowitz 1980 ; Luker 1998 ).

Feminist organizations and urban missionary societies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe also launched campaigns to ‘rescue’ fallen working-class women from lives of ruin and instruct them in middle-class rules of piety and respectability. By the turn of the century, these social purity campaigns targeted a wide range of behaviours of young working-class girls, including public recreation in saloons and dance halls.

Not all feminists opposed prostitution. ‘Free love’ feminists in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and Russia, many of whom were also associated with the socialist and anarchist movements of the time, rejected institutions of marriage and sexual repression that limited sexual expression to reproductive sex. They linked prostitution to poverty and the evils of capitalism.

B. Prostitute—Victim or Offender?

These various movements expressed an array of cultural anxieties related to industrialization—anxieties over morality, race, social class, and women’s rights and sexual freedom. Social purity campaigns often blurred the lines between campaigns against violations of women’s rights and campaigns against prostitution itself. There was as much resistance as support for tightened legal control on ‘loose’ women.

As the 19th century progressed, the discourse on prostitution changed. First, these debates and policy shifts individualized prostitution and labelled the participant as a ‘kind of person’, although the prevailing ideology shifted from a sinful to a sick person. Second, debates gendered and feminized prostitution. Prostitution became less a problem of social order and more a problem of appropriate women’s sexuality, a problem of gender relations, regardless of whether the approach was to defend or oppose this. Male prostitutes, while few in number, disappeared completely from the characterization of the ‘problem’ of prostitution ( Luker 1998 ; Laite 2012 ).

Third, this individualization and feminization of prostitution raised an important dilemma: Were female prostitutes victims or offenders? The victim/offender contradictions and complications haunt prostitution policy to this day. On the one hand, the prostitute was an offender. Legal interventions focused on publicly visible prostitutes who flagrantly violated feminine norms. The surrounding markets were social evils, havens of indecent, disorderly behaviours. Propriety dictated that these private behaviours, however immoral, were best contained away from public view. Policing was directed against offenders violating rules of public order. And of course, a sexually active woman was immoral, immodest, flaunting social rules, and in need of punishment. She was an offender, a quintessential ‘bad girl’ and subject to an emerging penal ideology that irregular behaviour must be isolated and controlled. In Europe the embryonic development of the discipline of criminology compounded the turn against women involved in selling sex as ‘deviants’, marking them out as distinctly different from ‘normal’ women. What is now an infamous publication from the Italians Lombroso and Ferrero in 1893, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman , set out a pathological approach to understanding why some women sell sex ( Rafter 2004 ). Referring to degenerative physiology and a propensity for evil, the hallmarks of pathologizing women involved in sex work were firmly set out in European criminological thought. During World War II U.S. public health campaigns against venereal disease used posters of swarthy women seducing soldiers to a life of disease.

On the other hand, many defenders of women’s rights cast prostitutes as unwitting victims of male sexual desire. Victorian sexual scripts essentialized the active male/passive female. Womanhood was naturally oriented more to family than sexual pleasure. Men, as the active party to all things sexual, had a sexual nature in need of control. Bad sexual behaviour came not so much from bad women as from sad or confused women, victimized by men exploiting innocent females. If women were virtuously asexual, women who sold sex must be victims of forces beyond their control. As pointed out, these gender ideologies invoked racial ideologies. If white, Anglo men were potential tempters, certainly immigrant and working-class men had fewer mechanisms of self-control.

C. White Slave Trafficking and the Criminalization of Prostitution

In the late 1800s, this additional portrait of women as victims seemed to throw needed public support to campaigns against prostitution. In the United Kingdom, when legislation against prostitution was floundering, a moral reformer/news reporter William Stead wrote an exposé on white slave trade based on a loose reading of fact. Nearly 30 years later, in 1909, U.S. newspapers discovered the profitability in sensationalizing the same panic, only these stories sensationalized unscrupulous immigrant men who took advantage of poor innocent white women and sold them into sexual servitude. In both these cases, the stories were wildly exaggerated, often set up by the newspapermen themselves. But they did draw on enough cultural anxieties to fuel a spate of laws against third-party ‘tricksters’, designed to protect vulnerable women. In England, the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, passed as the Contagious Diseases acts were repealed, made keeping a brothel, third-party involvement, and procuring for the purpose of prostitution illegal and raised the age of consent—all intended to ‘protect’ women from sexual exploitation. The result was an increased policing of women. Across Europe, Australia, and the United States many municipalities passed laws criminalizing offenders seen as victimizing women and instituted laws against third parties, pandering, pimping, and brothel keeping. In 1910 the United States hastily passed the national law known as the Mann Act, criminalizing the transportation of individuals from one state to another for the purpose of prostitution ( Donovan 2006 ).

These laws against third parties criminalized much of the prostitution exchange. Most nations stopped short of criminalizing female victims. In the United Kingdom and most of Europe, prostitution remained a private affair whilst the public aspects of the trade and third-party involvement were criminalized. The control of public prostitution was intensified in the 1950s as the United Kingdom and Europe tightened laws against prostitution. The Street Offences Act in 1959 prohibited loitering or soliciting in a public place, driving most prostitution indoors but not making the act of selling illegal. Russia in 1917, Argentina in 1936 and 1955, and China after 1949 either ended regulation or outlawed prostitution altogether ( Walkowitz 1992 ; Gilfoyle 1994 ; Luker 1998 ).

The United States, however, criminalized the sale of sex in most regions between the world wars, largely in reaction to the flood of immigrants and a religious tradition oriented more to prohibition, rescue, and reform than protecting civil rights. In the United States Progressive Era municipal reformers felt that prostitution fed corrupt politicians and ward bosses who profited from vice in urban areas. Not surprisingly, investigations found immigrants in charge of most vice operations. Vice commissions in various cities recommended prosecuting keepers, inmates, and patrons of bawdy houses; replacing prostitution fines with imprisonment or probation; and banning women without male escorts from saloons. The late campaign against white slavery combined with the public health campaigns against disease-spreading prostitutes to convince policymakers that criminalizing prostitutes was itself in the public interest. The prostitute as victim was overshadowed by prostitution as a physical and moral threat to the nation’s young fighting men, now entering World War I. A now-powerful public health community joined with the military to launch social hygiene campaigns against venereal disease, and the target of these campaigns was prostitutes. Federal authorities closed most red-light districts near military bases between the world wars ( Luker 1998 ; Brents et al. 2010 ).

However, in Europe and the United States, many of these offences were non-indictable, meaning that arrests were up to the police and punishments were up to judges. In other words, enforcement was haphazard and often arbitrary, reflecting the political and moral agendas of the day. Prostitution became a reflection of images of proper gender, class, and raced sexualities. Missing was any realistic understanding of the diversity of prostitution and the agency of the working-class men and women who participated in it. Historian Julia Laite (2012 , p. 16) characterizes the consequences of this haphazard policy approach: ‘the control of prostitution relied entirely on the woman’s identity, and though the term “common prostitute” was not defined in any statute, it was, and remains, absolutely central to the control of prostitution in Britain’. Historian Judith Walkowitz found that most women probably engaged in sex work on a part-time basis, the average age being 20 to 23. But once they were registered, labelled, or incarcerated, it fixed an identity as prostitute and made it more difficult to reintegrate with the urban poor, dissolving solidarity among working-class women, taking away their agency, and reinforcing women’s silencing. In other words, the contradictory approach to prostitution created the identity of prostitute.

II. Feminism and the Sex Wars

Feminism has been among the most important social movements influencing policies toward women, helping to gender prostitution, focus on individual rights, and solidify the victim/offender contradiction in prostitution policy. Feminist debates in the 1970s and 1980s have had a profound impact on the direction of prostitution policies today.

During the 1970s, a growing consumer economy, a baby boom, and an explosion of social movements focusing on civil liberties and individual rights all stimulated more acceptance of premarital sex, sexual experimentation, and women’s sexual agency. In the context of a growing feminist consciousness, organizations of women in prostitution emerged globally and began to call for rights and the decriminalization of prostitution ( Delacoste and Alexander 1988 ; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998 ). Prostitutes’ rights organizations such as COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) in the United States mobilized prostitutes as sex workers, arguing that laws against prostitution exploit women by punishing their right to work and their rights to control their bodies however they choose ( Jenness 1990 ). Building off an increasing appetite for positive approaches to sexuality and support for individual rights, sex workers’ movements began to argue that prostitution could actually be empowering for women.

In many countries, laws toward prostitution in the 1970s began to relax. Australia, Canada, Sweden, and Finland repealed their vagrancy laws, which had been used against street prostitutes. Spain redefined only forced prostitution as a crime. France redefined laws in ways favourable to prostitutes. The Netherlands and the states of Victoria, New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory repealed bans on prostitution and regulated prostitution into the 1990s ( Outshoorn 2005 ).

As some feminists sought to fight patriarchy by celebrating women’s sexual pleasure, freedom, and rights, other feminists saw liberalized sexual values themselves as a potential arena of danger for women. Feminist writers such as Andrea Dworkin, Catherine Mackinnon, and Kathleen Barry attacked prostitution and pornography for representing male domination over female sexuality writ large. These anti-prostitution and pro-prostitution feminists battled quite intensely during the 1980s and 1990s.

Women’s sexuality again became a battleground on a number of fronts as reproductive rights, birth control, abortion, childbirth options, sexual violence (including rape and incest), women’s sexual choices, lesbian rights, and sexual freedom became the subject of public debate. Once again, anti-prostitution activists within the feminist movement found common cause with the ‘religious right’ reacting against the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. However, while anti-prostitution rhetoric resonated with conservative moral ideologies that equated sex with danger, conservative groups remained unlikely to support broader goals of women’s empowerment and feminists remained unwilling to support the institutions of patriarchal heterosexual marriage. For the most part, there was little change in prostitution policy during these years, but the feminist movement was successful in pushing dramatic changes in attitudes toward women’s social roles.

Underlying these activist battles were two different theoretical approaches to understanding the institution of prostitution and women’s place in it. Second-wave anti-prostitution feminists saw patriarchy as an overarching theory of power. Loosely modelled on the Marxist theories then popular in academia, conflicts between males and females were seen as similar to the class conflicts between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Indeed, patriarchy as a system was more pervasive and deeper and had a longer history than capitalism. Prostitution was a key institution that perpetuated women’s oppression. Because patriarchy was so deeply engrained in hearts and minds, like the proletariat, many women, especially groups like prostitutes, might not immediately see their oppression and might be complicit in their own oppression ( MacKinnon 1989 ). As such, prostitutes either are innocent victims, so suffering from false consciousness that they must be saved against their immediate will from the oppressive system that chains them, or are knowingly complicit and part of the oppression of all women. Even today, radical anti-prostitution feminists see sex workers as either ‘prostituted’ women, victims, or, for a few, offenders themselves, either pimps or profiting off other women’s oppression.

This view of patriarchy as the overarching system explaining social relations in prostitution was fairly quickly critiqued from within feminism. Feminist scholars worried that ideologies of fear and danger surrounding sex were often used against women and other sexual minorities, and they called for more attention to how these sexual ideologies were themselves socially constructed and used to reinforce powerful groups ( Rubin 1984 ). In focusing on gender as the sole basis for oppression, feminism seemed to overlook differences among women. Foucault (1978) and other writers called attention to more multidimensional views of power. A number of writers began calling attention to class and race as important dynamics that differently affect women’s experiences ( Collins 1990 ; Crenshaw 1991 ). Whereas early empirical studies of prostitution focused on causes of prostitution such as child sexual abuse, trauma, and drug use, by the turn of the 20th century they examined prostitution as women’s labor and sought to understand raced, classed, and gendered construction of women’s and men’s commercial sex and particularly to move beyond the view of women as passive victims ( Chapkis 1997 ).

A. Neo-liberalism and Sexual Values

Today’s cultural climate has heightened contradictory policies toward the prostitute. On the one hand, studies show a dramatic liberalization in attitudes toward sexual behaviour and women’s sexuality, including prostitution, as part of a growing climate of tolerance in cosmopolitan and democratic cultures in Western Europe, America, and Australia ( Stack, Adamczyk, and Cao 2010 ). This is at the same time as international travel and mobility, a consumer economy, more leisure time, and a rollback of regulations against obscenity have made the global sex industry more visible. There has been a mainstreaming of the sex industry and, particularly in more privileged sectors, more public acceptance of women’s right to sell consensual sex ( Brents and Sanders 2010 ).

On the other hand, while societal attitudes are changing, prostitution remains a kind of ‘last bastion’ of ambiguities toward sexual commodification and women’s and men’s irrational sexual behaviour. Prostitution has become a lightning rod for new sets of concerns in the global economy, particularly immigration and border control.

As a result, in a context of a neo-liberal political climate, despite increasing support for individual rights, and especially the rights of consenting adults to engage in sexual commerce, the trend has been toward the criminalization of prostitution and an intensification in labelling prostitutes both victims and offenders ( Sanders and Campbell 2014 ). At the same time, there has been concern about the human rights of sex workers and in some areas decriminalization of sex work.

B. Gender Politics and New Feminisms

Neo-liberal policy toward prostitution reflects both a climate of increasing attention to individual rights and responsibility and a rollback of government regulations and social welfare supports. A neo-liberal culture of control has replaced governments’ function as a provider of social support, with government as punisher for those not fully taking appropriate advantage of neo-liberal freedoms ( Kempadoo 2005 ). There has been a huge growth in prisons and criminal justice institutions, fuelled by an increasing desire to punish those ‘not like us’, including immigrants and marginalized social classes and racial and ethnic groups.

Whilst in the 1970s radical feminist critics of prostitution were ignored at a policy level, in the 21st century anti-prostitution feminism has gained new ground. Feminist ideals of equality and women’s individual rights are more integrated among left-wing and even some conservative politicians. However, coalitions with conservatives tend to promote ideologies of protectionism rather than women’s agency. These groups are also more likely to empower criminal justice institutions to protect those rights rather than social services. As anti-prostitution feminists have become more entrenched in the halls of government and public policy institutions, they have been most successful in leveraging the repressive arm of the state to eliminate behaviour that harms women. A ‘carceral feminism’ ( Bernstein 2010 ) has resurrected modernist notions of power and essentialist notions of gender to mobilize support for policies of punishment and an individualist ethics of justice seeking. These policies ‘advocate for the beneficence of the privileged rather than the empowerment of the oppressed’ ( Bernstein 2007 , p. 127). Their views of gender are similar to the essentialism of the Victorian era positing the ideal woman as white, heterosexual, middle-class, and monogamous, against which all other female bodies are criminally aberrant. But in this era, the ideal woman is also one who ‘appropriately’ takes advantage of opportunities for professional employment and middle-class consumption as individual freedoms.

Most significantly, these carceral feminist approaches have found common ground with traditional religious organizations. Conservative Christians are much more likely to embrace middle-class women’s rights and anti-prostitution feminists are more likely to accept egalitarian heterosexual family values.

In this context, the contradictions of victim/offender have intensified. The moral panic against trafficking has become a public issue once again, as we will discuss below, and in this context the female prostitute as victim, particularly the young innocent female child, has become emblematic of the struggle for women’s freedom. The offender, as before, is male sexual predation in the form of third parties, pimps, and panderers, most likely male and people of colour, but also adult female prostitutes who refuse to turn in a trafficker. But this time, male sexual predation also now takes the form of the male client.

III. Contemporary Approaches

The historical legacies of modernist and more recent postmodern neo-liberal efforts to control women’s sexuality and the use of their bodies is key to understanding contemporary approaches to managing (or attempting to eradicate) prostitution and sex work. In this section we unpack how the criminalization of the sex industry has become a strong global trend, yet at the same time we see in other countries alternative models of regulation.

A. The Trend Toward Criminalization

1. neo-liberal policy and individual responsibility.

As noted above, a key piece of the ‘victim/offender’ discourse has been the growth in criminal justice and welfare-based criminal justice approaches to prostitution. This form of neo-liberal governance displaces responsibility from the state to the individual, at the same time introducing welfare conditionality and moral authoritarianism. U.K. community protests against ‘anti-social’ and prostitution activity in their neighbourhoods helped justify criminal justice involvement and constructed sex workers through the victim/offender paradigm ( Scoular et al. 2007 ). Research has found that community reactions to sex work are often more complex than the policy response ( Pitcher et al. 2006 ). Governments respond to community safety, ignoring complaints about violence and crime against sex workers.

British New Labour governments from 1998 onward have instituted changes designed to ‘eradicate’ prostitution and introduce what has come to be known as the ‘Swedish model’, discussed below (see Phoenix 2009 ). Including sex work in this New Labour ‘anti-social behaviour’ and individual responsibility agenda ignores deep-rooted and widespread structural issues (e.g., poverty and drug addiction) that often explain sex industry involvement ( Scoular and O’Neill 2007 ). The rhetoric of social inclusion fostered a focus on exiting prostitution as the main strategy. Programs tried to ‘reach out’ to women who had lost their way, providing various carrots to leave the life of prostitution. If they would accept rehabilitation, renounce their ‘bad ways’, and conform to the script of the active and appropriate citizen, women could receive drug treatment, housing, and welfare assistance outside the criminal justice system ( Sanders 2009 a ). A new rehabilitation mechanism (called an Engagement and Support Order) was introduced in the Policing and Crime Act of 2010, demonstrating yet again the use of the criminal justice system to control the sexual behaviour of individual women ( Scoular and Carline 2014 ).

2. The Swedish Model

Sweden in the late 1990s turned the focus onto male clients, and in 1999 buying sex was criminalized while selling sex was decriminalized. ‘Tackling demand’ was as much a symbol of the Swedish state’s goal of gender equality as it was about controlling prostitution. This radical feminist construction of prostitution as violence against all women was intended to abolish prostitution and initiated a strong discourse against the purchase of sexual services. Recent research finds the law has increased dangers for sex workers, removed vital harm-reduction services, and infiltrated the attitudes of service providers, resulting in a hostile and dangerous environment for sex workers ( Levy and Jakobbsen 2014 ).

Other jurisdictions began to ‘tackle demand’, importing the Sexkopslagen law and depicting buyers as dangerous, exploitative, ‘bad’ citizens ( Sanders 2009 b ). The United Kingdom has been steadily increasing sanctions against the ‘kerb-crawler’ since 1985, but in the mid-2000s policy shifted to further sanctioning the purchaser ( Scoular et al. 2007 ). Local councils created ‘Johns’ Schools’, court diversion schemes imported from Canada and the United States that attempted to rehabilitate the male offender through moral education and scare tactics. Such programmes have been criticized for flawed low re-offending success rates, promoting ideological and inaccurate understandings of prostitution, only focusing on street sex buyers, and using ‘shaming’ as punishment ( Sanders 2009 b ). An attempt to introduce the Swedish model entirely was defeated in Parliament in 2009. Instead, a law passed criminalizing the purchase of sex from anyone who is forced, coerced, or deceived. An All-Party Parliamentary Group of Prostitution (2014) continued to recommend that the way to tackle the ‘global sex trade’ in the United Kingdom was by adopting the criminalization-of-demand perspective.

Whilst the U.K. prostitution policy presents a criminalization model at the central government level, with more nuanced and creative ways of managing the sex industry taking place at a local level, there is still a strong appetite for the Swedish model across Europe. The Nordic countries of Norway and Iceland (the latter banning strip clubs from 2010) soon followed this model, with variations of the model occurring in France, Finland, Israel, South Korea, Northern Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Whilst there is of course resistance to such sweeping, uninformed political manoeuvring from the sex workers’ rights lobby and academics committed to evidence-based policy, the Swedish model continues to convince some politicians that this is a workable option for managing the sex industry.

B. Alternative Models to Criminalization

Despite a trend toward increased criminalization and discourses of women as victims, globalization and neo-liberalism spurred alternative models that emphasize individual freedom and promote a human rights–based approach that considers sex work as work and prostitutes as legitimate labourers.

The most successful of these reflect a unified goal of worker protection. Often, even these alternative approaches reflect political compromises that combine goals of reducing the industry’s size and visibility and enhancing safety and improving working conditions. The less unified the goal, the less successful the policy.

Most nations’ laws do not criminalize the act of selling sex but do criminalize third parties, soliciting, and other public-order offences. As noted above, beginning in the 1970s, a few nations began relaxing laws or enforcement against prostitution, and by the turn of the 21st century a broad array of nations and locales began to experiment with licensing brothels, regulating red-light districts, instituting alternative policing, eliminating laws against third parties, and putting into place other registration and public health policies. These include the Netherlands, various states in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Denmark, Austria, and Switzerland. Prostitution is legal in 13 of Mexico’s 31 states. Major cities with red-light districts include Amsterdam, Bangkok, Frankfurt, The Hague, Hamburg, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, and several municipalities in Belgium have de facto legal red-light districts. Many Spanish-speaking Latin American countries have red-light districts (see Weitzer 2012 for a good overview).

Most recently, even the United States has begun to recognize a human rights discourse in some areas of government. The United States made it official policy in March 2011 to accept Recommendation 86 of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s UPR that ‘No one should face violence or discrimination in access to public services based on sexual orientation or their status as a person in prostitution’. However, while the U.S. Department of State (2011) has this policy, it has not translated into legal changes for state and local governments in the United States.

1. New Zealand

New Zealand has among the most liberal of prostitution laws. Reform began in 1978, mandating indoor parlour workers to register with authorities and allowing police to monitor parlours for drugs and organized crime. However, the laws were restrictive enough that many chose to work unregistered in the streets or as escorts. New Zealand’s sweeping prostitution reform in 2003 was based on the argument that existing laws against third-party involvement and public prostitution (which were similar to those in the United Kingdom) did not protect victims but rather exposed workers to a range of harms, including preventing access to public health and the ability to protect themselves against violence (see Abel et al. 2010 ). The New Zealand Prostitutes Collective played a key role in writing the law and was consulted before and during debates surrounding the law’s passage and consistently during implementation. The law was designed to reduce exploitation and to give workers labor rights, eliminate work by minors, reduce related crimes, and decrease illegal immigrants. The law removes restrictions against third parties and decriminalizes all adult prostitution, soliciting, brothels, and escort agencies. It also imposes laws against exploitative management practices. It allows police as well as health and social services to inspect prostitution premises.

Public and legislative support for the law has increased since its passage, and attempts to recriminalize sex work have failed in Parliament by increasingly larger majorities. Scholarly research has shown the law to be successful in reaching its goals of protecting the health and safety of workers. Easier access to the criminal justice system has helped in prosecuting crimes against sex workers. Sex workers can take work-related issues to the disputes tribunal, even as independent contractors. Surveys show that 90 per cent of sex workers are aware of their legal and employment rights ( Abel 2014 ).

Opposition to the law in New Zealand, as in most places in the world, has largely been about the most visible aspects of the industry, particularly street prostitution. Most of the opposition to the law has revolved around public nuisance and visibility, with relatively little concern about indoor prostitution. While local authorities were purposely limited in powers, some have attempted to limit the size and visibility of the industry through zoning and brothel restrictions. Despite concern about increasing visibility, studies find that decriminalization has not increased the number of sex workers or street workers.

2. Netherlands

The Netherlands, like many European nations, had criminalized third-party involvement but never prostitution itself. However, prostitutes retained an array of rights, including rights to vote, old-age pensions, and basic state benefits. These liberal approaches allowed the development of ‘window prostitution’ in a central red-light zone.

Beginning in the 1980s it was Dutch feminists who criticized prostitution policies and sought to treat sex work as work. They were also vocal about the need to distinguish forced from voluntary prostitution. Along with the prostitutes’ rights organization Red Thread, these groups helped lift a ban on brothels as part of a reform strategy to recognize prostitution as work and to grant prostitute rights. According to Outshoorn (2012) , the perspective drew on discourses of tolerance and individual rights as well as sexual liberalism from the 1960s.

The 1999 law allowed prostitution in brothels, designated prostitution as labor and subject to labor law, created protections against forced prostitution, and gave local authorities much leeway to impose regulations and licensing. While the reform was motivated by a human rights agenda, these local regulations were often motivated to control the size and visibility of the industry and largely prohibited street work. Recent legal changes have made it more difficult to engage in home-based work.

Most recently, concerns about immigration have complicated the distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution. Instituting protections for forced workers has resulted in categorizing sex workers, with Dutch and EU sex workers receiving the most rights, while workers from new EU states, including those from countries in Eastern Europe, are only permitted to work as independent workers, not as employees. Non-EU sex workers are not granted work permits, and this has driven these workers underground.

Subsequent research by the Red Thread has found that conditions in brothels are not good and current regulations have not enforced basic labor rights. Debates on brothel regulation revolve around labor rights for independent contractors versus employees. There is also concern about a growing illegal sector working outside restrictive regulations. In current debates, sex workers’ rights discourses face challenges from law-and-order discourses.

3. Australia

While the laws in Australia’s five states and three territories were fairly uniform and similar to those in most of Europe, during the 1970s a number of states began to liberalize their policies. These policies were motivated by a wide range of factors, including individual rights to buy and sell sexual services, but also out of a concern with the corruption and criminality increasingly visible in the prostitution trade. These policies allowed more spaces for legal prostitution but used a wide range of different approaches.

New South Wales was the earliest state to change its prostitution laws. In 1979 the state decriminalized soliciting and most prostitution-related offences. Police continued to prosecute brothels, and in 1995 brothels were taken out of criminal justice codes and placed under the jurisdiction of local planning councils. These local planning districts regulate brothels like any other businesses. New South Wales remains the only state allowing street prostitution, although there are few places where street soliciting is allowed.

Over the next several years, several states, including Victoria, Queensland, the Northern Territory, the Australian Capital Territory, and Western Australia, began allowing brothels and various levels of indoor prostitution in a wide variety of approaches. Sullivan (2010) argues that whilst concern for individual rights has motivated much of the change in these policies, the desire to contain the ‘undesirables’ and other marginalized social groups remains. Sex workers and increasingly men who pay for sex remain marginalized in moral codes of appropriate behaviour and are subject to policing. The various laws all have some level of protections for workers, but the cost and severity of their licensing varies, depending on local desires to contain the industry. In cases where there is strict licensing, there is also a larger underground industry consisting of those without the resources to become legal.

The Bedford v. Canada case, which struck down some of the anti-prostitution laws in December 2013, was fought mainly on a rights-based approach. While Canada did not expressly prohibit prostitution, several key provisions of the criminal code essentially prohibited the practice. The legal challenge was brought amid concerns about high levels of violence against sex workers. The courts ruled that laws force sex workers to work secretly, thereby preventing them from the right to security. The court found that laws against living off the earnings of a prostitute, while intended to prevent pimping and exploitation, prevent a prostitute from hiring an assistant or bodyguard, which can help make the work less dangerous. Laws against communicating in public about an exchange prevent street prostitutes from screening clients early in the transaction, putting them at an increased risk of violence. How these changes will be implemented remains to be seen.

IV. Conclusions

A final key controversy in understanding prostitution and sex workers as ‘sex offences and sex offenders’ is sex trafficking (debated in Chapter 30 of this volume by Lee). Even though the majority of human trafficking activity has been in non-sex sectors, sex trafficking has become a rallying point for faith-based and secular activists, human rights advocates, and a wide range of feminist, evangelical, and religious institutions, plus conservative and semi-conservative politicians ( Musto 2010 ). As noted above, previously opposed movements have rallied to incarceration as a common ground in a fight for gender justice. Trafficking efforts globally have fuelled a human trafficking rescue industry that focuses mostly on sex trafficking ( Doezema 2000 ; Agustín 2007 ; Bernstein 2010 ; Cheng 2011 ). Concern with trafficking has inflamed debates about the prostitute, threatening to override other crucial issues such as access to health, safety, and security for all sex workers. Globally, anti-trafficking initiatives are firmly grounded in neo-liberal governance and are inflamed by populist campaigns, racial and nationalist fears, culture wars, and sex panics that justify the repression of those who are outside the norm. Moral authoritarianism, individual responsibility, and justice seeking have defined the parameters around victims and offenders as well as efforts at rehabilitation.

Whilst many groups take care to distinguish trafficking from consensual prostitution, the consequence of the global anti-trafficking crusade has been to equate trafficking with prostitution itself ( Lerum et al. 2012 ). Much research has found that the execution of anti-trafficking policing and social services, just as in the first wave of the trafficking panic, polices and punishes sex workers and migrant workers in the name of ‘protection’ rather than providing social services ( Cheng 2011 ). Police raids, arrests, detainments, prosecutions and deportation, and social service rehabilitation efforts are often couched as ‘for their own good’. A study of Canadian media stories from 1980 to 2004 found that the media predominantly portray sex work through risk, enslavement, and entrapment prisms ( Hallgrímsdóttir et al. 2008 , p. 130).

While sex workers’ rights politics is occupied with disentangling trafficking rhetoric from prostitution/sex work, there has been progress in advancing sex workers’ rights as human rights. U.K. activists seek use Article 8, the right to a private life in the Human Rights Act of 1998, to challenge some of the prostitution laws ( Graham 2015 ). Thinking ahead, litigation based on a human rights approach poses promise in furthering workers’ rights, particularly in the face of the continual violence and harassment faced by sex workers who are forced to work in dangerous conditions because of the current criminalization laws.

Scoular and others note that even with a wide range of policies variously criminalizing or regulating prostitution, it is street prostitution that attracts the most attention, and where sanctions, stigma, marginalization, and exclusion are most likely to occur. The visibility of street work remains an arena where society can project social class, racial, and ethnic biases as well as moral concerns about sexuality and about women’s proper place.

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Graham, Laura . 2015. “A Critical Exploration of the Role of the Human Rights Act in the Reform of the Law Relating to Sex Work in England and Wales.” PhD dissertation, University of Nottingham.

Hallgrimsdottir, Helga K. , Rachel Phillips , Cecilia Benoit , and Kevin Walby . 2008 . “ Sporting Girls, Streetwalkers, and Inmates of Houses of Ill Repute: Media Narratives and the Historical Mutability of Prostitution Stigmas. ” Sociological Perspectives 5(1): 119–38.

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v.171(2); 2004 Jul 20

Prostitution laws: health risks and hypocrisy

Canadian law on prostitution has changed little since our first Criminal Code outlawed “bawdy houses,” procuring and living on the avails of prostitution; then as now, the Criminal Code did not prohibit the buying and selling of sexual services. But these longstanding laws against prostitution are largely unenforced, as anyone consulting the yellow pages under “escort services” will realize. In fact, most municipalities gave up on enforcement long ago, turning instead to regulation, licensing and, as for all commercial establishments, taxation. As citizens we all live off the avails.

A more recent law, however, is enforced. In 1985 the federal government passed a new prostitution control measure that prohibits communicating in a public place for the purpose of buying and selling sexual services. This “communication provision” (which serves to underscore the hypocrisy of our prostitution laws) was designed to deal with the visible nuisance of street prostitution — and, undoubtedly, to protect property values.

Apart from the legal paradox — it is legal to buy and sell sexual services, but not to communicate about the transaction — the law in its application favours the client and puts young girls working on the street at risk. When prospective clients are convicted of the criminal offence of “communicating” they are, unlike the prostitutes themselves, rarely jailed. They are required to go to “john school,” not to address the question of a public nuisance violation, but to attend a one-day “morality play on prostitution.” 1

Foremost among the health risks of prostitution is premature death. In a recent US study of almost 2000 prostitutes followed over a 30-year period, by far the most common causes of death were homicide, suicide, drug- and alcohol-related problems, HIV infection and accidents — in that order. The homicide rate among active female prostitutes was 17 times higher than that of the age-matched general female population. 2

In his thoughtful and comprehensive review of Canadian prostitution law, 1 John Lowman of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University identifies a “two-tier” sex trade in Canada: “a licensed off-street trade, and a black-market [on-street] trade.” Women (mostly of legal age, over 18) in relatively stable living situations work in the licensed and regulated off-street sex-trade in relative safety from abusive clients and free of police prosecution, while young girls, frequently homeless, must fight it out on the streets with both clients and police.

They live precarious lives. Often less than 18 years of age, most have few qualifications for other work. Many, for various reasons — poverty, mental illness, homelessness, a history of childhood abuse — turn to prostitution as the only way to survive and pay for their basic needs. Drug addiction, when it has not been the cause of their dropping out from school and home, frequently develops, making it even more difficult to find safer employment.

Targetted by police who enforce the communication laws, street prostitutes must conclude too-hasty negotiations with their customers (often climbing into the client's car); if violence or robbery ensues, they rarely report the incident to the police for fear of being prosecuted and jailed. As well, street prostitutes are more likely to encounter men whose intention is violence or a combination of sex and violence. These men avoid regulated off-street prostitutes because of the ease with which they can usually be identified during the negotiations and payment for sexual services. Most (80%) of the prostitutes murdered in British Columbia between 1975 and 1994 worked on the streets. 3

In its recently released comprehensive report and broad set of recommendations, Prostitution de rue , 4 Quebec's Conseil permanent de la jeunesse urges that society exchange its moral hypocrisy for a harm-reduction approach. In addition to a broad range of recommendations that tackle the important issues surrounding street prostitution — poverty, schooling, health care, drug treatment, community policing, etc. — the report recommends a repeal of the communication laws against both prostitutes and their clients. Physicians should urge federal politicians to repeal all prostitution laws, as Lowman recommends, and start over again. Municipalities and public health and community physicians must work harder to protect this vulnerable population. — CMAJ

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Largest Compilation of Structured Essays and Exams

Essay on Prostitution

January 15, 2018 by Study Mentor Leave a Comment

The act of prostitution basically means to offer sexual services provided in order to gain monetary or other benefits in kind, in exchange of the same.

The word is generally used with a negative connotation presently, but this certainly has not always been the case. If we are to analyse etymologically, then the origin of the word ‘prostitution’ can be traced way back to the Latin word ‘prostituta’.

The actual meaning of this word has been debated upon, but the usual consensus points at the combination of ‘pro’ and ‘stature’- which can be translated as ‘to place forward’, or ‘to cause to stand’.

Image Credit: Source (prostitute seeking customer)

But in the modern scenario, prostitution is often considered to be violence against women, and can take many different forms- physical, digital, etc.

Examples of the same will include pornographic acts, pole dancing, and other such instances. Whether prostitution should be legalised or not is an important and controversial question in many of the developing nations today.

Prostitution can inevitably be the cause and the effect of human trafficking and sex slavery, and therefore it is also a really grave issue which we shall necessarily look into.

Table of Contents

Historical development

Prostitution is present in almost all the historical accounts of different civilizations, all across the world. For instance, prostitution is evidently a part of the civilizations which had thrived in the ancient east, ancient Greece, Rome, and in Asian and Hebrew culture.

This can be proven through the presence of various shrines or temples dedicated to certain deities, which had evidences of some sort of sacred prostitution. This is an example of how prostitution was viewed differently in the past than it is now, commonly.

In the code of the famous Babylonian emperor Hammurabi, there existed certain provisions which upheld the rights and liberties of sex workers, who can be seen as prostitutes.

There are also instances of keeping records of and registrations for prostitutes in ancient Roman culture, as has been displayed by certain remaining found in Pompeii. Other marked instances were found in the countries like Greece, Japan, and India (the Mughal tradition of having tawaifs).

It is well inscribed in the Urdu literature as well as in the well-known Geisha tradition of Japan and its surrounding nations.

Over the middle ages, this tradition saw some changes, as the terms used to define a prostitute started to become more and more ambiguous and abstract; although, in spite of the same, certain legislative provisions are found scattered over the historical remnants of this period.

However, by the time of the advent of the sixteenth century, prostitution was being treated with a stiffer attitude and certain restrictions were started to be imposed accordingly.

Various types of prostitution

The following can be said to be the main categories of prostitution as it is being practiced in the present world- brothels, escort services (male and female), street prostitution, sex tourism, and virtual prostitution (mostly in digitalised forms of sex).

Brothels: these are specific establishments or settlements dedicated to mass scale prostitution, and are frequently referred to as the infamous ‘red light areas’.

Escort services: these are services where sexual partners can be escorted at one’s will in exchange of payments and the sexual acts often take place at rented hotel rooms or other such settlements. Prostituted who function through escort services are often referred to as call girls and gigolos.

Street prostitution: this is a form of prostitution where prostitutes wait for customers whom they approach at certain street corners.

Sex tourism: these occur through organised trips solely for the purpose of one’s indulgence in various sexual activities.

Virtual prostitution: the main form of virtual prostitution is forced pornography, but also includes phone sex and sex through online chat rooms or websites.

Legal perspectives

In all of its essence, legal perspectives regarding prostitution include the following areas of concern- victim hood, ethics, freedom of choice, and whether it causes any benefit or harm to the society.

Otherwise, legal perspectives on this topic also revolve around feminist theories of how prostitution should be looked at and dealt with. Mostly, the question which arises most often is whether prostitution should be legalised or not.

This has both advantages and disadvantages- for example, some experts on this matter say that because women (or men) choose sex work freely and on their own, there is no harm in giving their professional an official recognition.

On the other hand, it is also arguing upon that since prostitution inevitably brings upon whoever engages in it some sort of sexual violence, it cannot be necessarily legalised.

Also, one cannot possibly overlook the probable health hazards which prostitution can cause, especially several sexually transmissible diseases (for example, HIV and AIDS).

This adds on to the argument of prostitution not being legalised. The question of morality is also important in this context and should also be examined if we are to make sense of the matter completely.

Socio-economic concerns

The main concern which arises out of the socio-economic perspectives regarding prostitution is child prostitution. According to a recent survey conducted, it has been discovered that over 45 percent of all prostitutes in our country are underage and this poses a grave threat to the sustainable development of an entire generation.

The fact that survival has become so important among the underprivileged and they need to resort to prostitution for the sake of the same is an important consequence of one of the most pressing questions- population explosion.

Since we do not have enough jobs or opportunities to feed all the people in our country, they have to resort to such an extent that they have to engage in prostitution to feed themselves.

This is indeed a significant and sad socio-economic problem of India. On the other end of the spectrum, prostitution among the elderly is also a serious concern, health-wise as well.

Violence against women is also rising in prostitution, and the homicide rates have been ever increasing among the same practitioners, especially in the United States.

Another important concern is human trafficking, which refers to selling off people forcefully against their will to engage them in prostitution in a way that the seller makes some profit out of the victim’s sexual acts.

Prostitution is a very commonplace act and I personally believe that a lot of problems relating to it can be solved if a proper recognition can be given to both the act and the people who engage in it.

Therefore, a proper sensitization programme is required in order to stabilise the situation regarding prostitution, especially in India. The rate of violence is also a serious issue and can be probably curbed perhaps only through appropriate legislation and police actions, as sexual violence is an alarming criminal act.

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The Benefits of Legalizing Prostitution Opinion Essay

Prostitution has been illegal in many countries in the world. Despite this fact, prostitution has continued to be practiced in every capital, and other cities in every country. This being the fact the governments need to see that they are fighting a losing battle and continuous prohibition of prostitution is like chasing wind. There are many reasons that do call for the government to change its strategy and legalize prostitution. There are numerous reasons as to why the government should legalize prostitution. Some of those reasons are as follows.

When prostitution is illegal, many of those who practice it do it secretively. This makes them be exploited by their clients. They are put in every kind of abuse, yet they are afraid to report the exploiters to the authority, as they fear they may be arrested. This makes the exploiters to evade justice.

This encourages them to continue with their vice thus humiliating many innocent prostitutes. If prostitution will be legalized, prostitutes will not fear to report the clients who rape them and the exploiters will stop this menace, as they will be afraid of consequences of their actions.

Legalizing prostitution will curb the spread of HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. This is because when prostitution will be legalized prostitutes can be required to be tested for those diseases. Those found with diseases can be treated or barred from trading. The government can offer treatment to them easily as prostitutes will not be afraid to seek medication. This will be extremely beneficial as it can protect the prostitutes and their clients.

Legalization of prostitution will make the government put its resources in other beneficial activities. Governments do use a lot of money in campaigns to condemn prostitution. These resources can be put into other uses such as education or health provision in the country. Police spend a lot of time chasing and arresting prostitutes, whereas many criminals are harassing the public. With the legalization of prostitution, police will be chasing real criminals instead of harassing harmless prostitutes.

Prostitution is a source of income to those who practice it. With the current rise of unemployment in the country, it is paramount for the government to legalize prostitution. Bearing in mind that many of prostitutes have low education profile and for them to secure decent jobs is hard, prostitution need to be legalized. This would make prostitutes be respected by members of the public. This will minimize stress faced by prostitutes, which leads to other stress related crimes.

Legalization of prostitution makes the government control prostitution. The government will ensure those who practice this profession are not underage. This will assist in eliminating child prostitution. Human trafficking will decrease as many of victims trafficked are meant to participate in prostitution. With this in mind, it is crucial that those who care for children should let prostitution be legalized.

Ones body is a God’s gift, which one should not be controlled on how to use it as long as one is not infringing rights of others. Therefore, prostitutes has right to use their bodies as they see it fit without being stigmatized by law. Legalization of prostitution will make prostitution be carried out in conducive environments, which pose no danger to the prostitute and their clients.

Since today prostitution is illegal, prostitutes are not taxed, yet they earn a lot of money from the trade. Bearing in mind that taxes are the ones used to develop every country economy it is not agreeable to ignore the contribution the taxes from prostitutes can make. The government can encourage the establishment of brothels, which would make government access the taxes from prostitutes easily.

Prostitutes would be required to acquire licenses in order to commence their business. The licenses would be provided with a fee as a source of income to the government. Countries, which have legalized prostitution, are getting a lot of revenue from the sex industry. Dutch sex industry gives more than 500 million dollars annually. Countries with high population can make a lot of money from prostitution and put this revenue in their economy development.

Legalization of prostitution will help to curb incest and rape crimes. This is because the perpetrators of these crimes will not fear to seek prostitute services. Many relatives are exploiting young ones, and if prostitution is legalized the relatives are provided with an alternative to seek prostitutes’ services without being intimidated or judged. Bestiality and other harmful sexual practices will come down with legalization of prostitution.

Prostitution is a trade where buyers and sellers do it willingly. No one is forced to be the party in prostitution. This being the fact there is a need to legalize this practice because adult individuals who are responsible for their actions carry it out. Prostitution therefore, needs to be considered as any other profession carried out in the country.

The government has no choice but to legalize prostitution. Legal prostitution is the only remedy to end menace associated with prostitution. Prostitution is a practice, which is here to stay, and illegalizing makes, it is a black market trade exposing both the prostitutes and their clients to many risks. Legal trades are easy to control and manage, and if the government want to control this trade it need to legalize it.

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IvyPanda. (2022, April 28). The Benefits of Legalizing Prostitution. https://ivypanda.com/essays/prostitution-legalization/

"The Benefits of Legalizing Prostitution." IvyPanda , 28 Apr. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/prostitution-legalization/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Benefits of Legalizing Prostitution'. 28 April.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Benefits of Legalizing Prostitution." April 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/prostitution-legalization/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Benefits of Legalizing Prostitution." April 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/prostitution-legalization/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Benefits of Legalizing Prostitution." April 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/prostitution-legalization/.

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April 2, 2024

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

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Hundreds of Philippine schools suspend classes over heat danger

by Cecil MORELLA

Hundreds of schools in the Philippines suspended in-person classes on Tuesday due to dangerous levels of heat

Hundreds of schools in the Philippines, including dozens in the capital Manila, suspended in-person classes on Tuesday due to dangerous levels of heat, education officials said.

The country's heat index measures what a temperature feels like, taking into account humidity.

The index was expected to reach the "danger" level of 42 degrees Celsius in Manila on Tuesday and 43C on Wednesday, with similar levels in a dozen other areas of the country, the state weather forecaster said.

The actual highest recorded temperature for the metropolis on Tuesday was 35.7C, below the record of 38.6C reached on May 17, 1915.

Local officials across the main island of Luzon, the central islands, and the southern island of Mindanao suspended in-person classes or shortened school hours to avoid the hottest part of the day, education ministry officials said.

The Department of Education was unable to provide an exact number of schools affected.

March, April and May are typically the driest months of the year for swathes of the tropical country. This year conditions have been exacerbated by the El Niño weather phenomenon.

Primary and secondary schools in Quezon, the most populous part of the capital, were ordered to shut while schools in other areas were given the option by local officials to shift to remote learning.

Some schools in Manila also reduced class hours.

A heat index of 42-51C can cause heat cramps and exhaustion, with heat stroke "probable with continued exposure", the weather forecaster said in an advisory.

Heat cramps and heat exhaustion are also possible at 33-41C, according to the forecaster.

The orders affected hundreds of schools in the Mindanao provinces of Cotabato, South Cotabato and Sultan Kudarat, as well as the cities of Cotabato, General Santos and Koronadal, Zamboanga regional education ministry spokeswoman Rea Halique told AFP.

Five schools in Mindanao's Zamboanga region also shut schools for the day, though local officials in the area did not recommend the suspension of in-person classes in other schools, the ministry said.

"At the Pagadian City Pilot School one (kindergarten) student and two in the elementary school suffered nosebleeds," Zamboanga regional education ministry official Dahlia Paragas told AFP.

"All of them are back at home in stable condition and were advised to avoid exposure to the sunlight."

Cotabato city experienced the highest heat index in Mindanao, reaching 42C on Monday and Tuesday, the state forecaster reported.

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Guest Essay

There’s No Such Thing as an American Bible

A photo of an LED sign against a vivid sunset, displaying the word “GOD” atop an American flag background.

By Esau McCaulley

Contributing Opinion Writer

The presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States, who weeks ago started selling shoes , is now peddling Bibles. During Holy Week.

What’s special about this Bible? So many things. For example, according to a promotional website, it’s the only Bible endorsed by Donald Trump. It’s also the only one endorsed by the country singer Lee Greenwood. Admittedly, the translation isn’t distinctive — it’s your standard King James Version — but the features are unique. This Bible includes the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance and part of the lyrics of Mr. Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA.” Perhaps most striking, the cover of the Bible does not include a cross or any symbol of the Christian tradition; instead, it is emblazoned with the American flag.

While part of me wants to laugh at the absurdity of it — and marvel at the sheer audacity — I find the messaging unsettling and deeply wrong. This God Bless the USA Bible, as it’s officially named, focuses on God’s blessing of one particular people. That is both its danger and, no doubt for some, its appeal.

Whether this Bible is an example of Christian nationalism I will leave to others. It is at least an example of Christian syncretism, a linking of certain myths about American exceptionalism and the Christian faith. This is the American church’s consistent folly: thinking that we are the protagonists in a story that began long before us and whose main character is in fact the Almighty.

Holy Week is the most sacred portion of the Christian calendar, a time when the church recounts the central events of our faith’s narrative, climaxing in the death and resurrection of Jesus. That story, unlike the parochial God Bless the USA Bible, does not belong to any culture.

Holy Week is celebrated on every continent and in too many languages to number. Some of the immigrants Mr. Trump declared were “ poisoning the blood” of America will probably shout “Christ is risen!” this Easter. Many of them come from the largely Christian regions of Latin America and the Caribbean. They may have entered the country with Bibles in their native tongues nestled securely among their other belongings.

One of the beauties of the Christian faith is that it leaps over the lines dividing countries, leading the faithful to call fellow believers from very different cultures brothers and sisters. Most of the members of this international community consist of the poor living in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are more Spanish-speaking Christians than English- speaking ones .

If there are central messages that emerge from the variety of services that take place during Holy Week, for many Christians they are the setting aside of power to serve, the supremacy of love, the offer of divine forgiveness and the vulnerability of a crucified God.

This is not the stuff of moneymaking schemes or American presidential campaigns.

It was Pontius Pilate , standing in as the representative of the Roman Empire, who sentenced Jesus to death. The Easter story reminds believers that empires are more than willing to sacrifice the innocent if it allows rulers to stay in power. The church sees Christ’s resurrection as liberating the believer from the power of sin. The story challenges imperial modes of thinking, supplanting the endless pursuit of power with the primacy of love and service.

Easter, using the language of St. Augustine, represents the victory of the City of God over the City of Man. It declares the limits of the moral reasoning of nation-states and has fortified Christians who’ve resisted evil regimes such as fascists in South America, Nazis in Germany, apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States.

For any politician to suppose that a nation’s founding documents and a country music song can stand side by side with biblical texts fails at a theological and a moral level. I can’t imagine people in other countries going for anything like it. It is hard to picture a modern “God Bless England” Bible with elements of British common law appended to Christianity’s most sacred texts.

I am glad for the freedoms that we share as Americans. But the idea of a Bible explicitly made for one nation displays a misunderstanding of the story the Bible attempts to tell. The Christian narrative culminates in the creation of the Kingdom (and family) of God, a transnational community united by faith and mutual love.

Roman Catholics , Anglicans and Orthodox Christians, who together claim around 1.5 billion members, describe the Bible as a final authority in matters of faith. Evangelicals, who have overwhelmingly supported Mr. Trump over the course of three election cycles, are known for their focus on Scripture, too. None of these traditions cite or refer to any American political documents in their doctrinal statements — and for good reason.

This Bible may be unique in its form, but the agenda it pursues has recurred throughout history. Christianity is often either co-opted or suppressed; it is rarely given the space to be itself. African American Christians have long struggled to disentangle biblical texts from their misuse in the United States. There is a reason that the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that between the Christianity of this land (America) and the Christianity of Christ, he recognized the “widest possible difference.”

And while Christianity was used to give theological cover to North American race-based chattel slavery, it was violently attacked in places like El Salvador and Uganda, when leaders including the archbishops Oscar Romero and Janani Luwum spoke out against political corruption.

The work of the church is to remain constantly vigilant to maintain its independence and the credibility of its witness. In the case of this particular Bible, discerning what is happening is not difficult. Christians are being played. Rather than being an appropriate time to debut a patriotic Bible, Easter season is an opportune moment for the church to recover the testimony of the supremacy of the cross over any flag, especially one on the cover of a Bible.

Esau McCaulley ( @esaumccaulley ) is a contributing Opinion writer, the author of “ How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South ” and an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College.

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