Prostitution and trafficking of women

I haven’t been post­ing my tutorial topics in the last few weeks because much of my pre-tute time was taken up with mark­ing and then (shock, horror) actu­ally seeing stu­dents who wanted to talk about their grades and how they could improve what they’re doing.

Besides, last week was on fun­da­ment­al­isms and I knew exactly the sorts of dis­cus­sion I wanted to have on that, and the week­end before was the polit­ics of repro­duc­tion, which, you know, I’m kind of an expert on right now.

How­ever this week is traf­fick­ing and prosi­ti­tu­tion. I’ve had ex-girl­friends and cur­rent friends who have been sex work­ers. Part of the dis­cus­ison for this week revolves around the issue of the ter­min­o­logy “sex work” and the attempt to legit­im­ise the rape, sexual abuse and viol­ence that goes along with much “sex work” as “just another dif­fi­cult job”. It attempts to equate the ali­en­a­tion of sex work with the ali­en­a­tion of all work. How­ever, as the paper by the Coali­tion Against Traf­fick­ing in Women that I just read sug­gests, there’s a dif­fer­ence between the exploit­a­tion of labour and the exploit­a­tion of intimacy.

I’ve been dis­cuss­ing this with Doug in the last few days as I’ve been build­ing up to these tutes. We both agree that the cur­rent system is enorm­ously prob­lem­atic. The gov­ern­ment bene­fit­ing from the exploit­a­tion of women in brothels as they cur­rently exist is com­plic­ated. I agree with CATW that without leg­al­ised pros­ti­tu­tion, traf­fick­ing would­n’t have the wide market it cur­rently has. Doug and I talked about the notions of ‘essen­tial ser­vices’ for lonely people… and let’s face it, I’ve used Life­line in that way as a depressed teen­ager. I didn’t *pay* for it, but the person I was speak­ing to was being paid to speak with me. That’s *very* dif­fer­ent from being paid to have me viol­ate their body, but I can see a con­nec­tion in the roles. I think there may be a place for escort ser­vices that are com­pan­ion­ship but NOT intimate.

I think where I’m at right now is: decrim­in­al­ise women’s par­ti­cip­a­tion, crim­in­al­ise pimp­ing, traf­fick­ing and brothel-owning. I’m really, really unsure of what to do with the ‘cus­tom­ers’. Doug is adam­ant that soli­cit­a­tion should­n’t be a crime.

I *think* what I’m going to do is have the stu­dents have a debate – it’s the last week, after all, and I think this one ought to be con­tro­ver­sial. Of course, I could be wrong: the like­li­hood that any of them have ex-girl­friends who have been sex work­ers is slim. The like­li­hood that one of their old friends is involved with SWOP is slim. They may all have very com­mon­place moral out­rage pos­i­tions that pros­ti­tu­tion is legal in this state. And the sorts of stats in the read­ings this week are hor­rendous. The incid­ence of rape, beat­ings etc, etc in reg­u­lar sex work is an indic­a­tion to me about the way that com­modi­fic­a­tion of women’s bodies leads to a dehu­man­ising of the person that per­mits this kind of beha­viour. I’m lean­ing strongly towards a pos­i­tion of “pros­ti­tu­tion is an affront to women’s dig­nity and a viol­a­tion of their human rights”.

The com­pletely dif­fer­ent image that both Doug and I have of the “temple whore” where respect for the divine fem­in­ine is the start­ing point of the inter­ac­tion is so far from what we have now that I have no idea how to get there from here.