Quote from: lisagurl on January 08, 2009, 01:09:34 PMhowever then still have more of the other sicknesses. Which your info avoids.
I'm sorry Lisa, but you'd have to provide evidence of this before I could take it at face value.
QuoteThen again only where legal prostitutes get regular health inspections Neither of the killed black prostitutes did.
Which is kind-of the point. Legalising and (importantly) regulating prostitution improves the overall situation.
QuoteMoral and Nuisance Concerns. Prostitution offends some citizens' moral standards.
Moral standards are not universal and cannot be universally applied.
QuoteProstitution is a nuisance to passersby and to nearby residents and businesses.
Prostitutes and clients offend uninvolved people in the area when they solicit them.
A valid concern. However, as with any other business, certain areas should be zoned for sex work. Obviously one would not have such areas near residential areas, in the same way that you would not have industrial estates near residential areas.
QuoteJuveniles, less capable of making informed choices, may become prostitutes.
Yes. Providing them with clear, unbiassed information upon which to make those choices improves matters.
QuoteProstitutes and clients may spread sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis, herpes, and AIDS.†
As we've established, the opposite is actually true where prostitutes are protected and informed. This material confirms that:
Contrary to popular belief, prostitution has not been demonstrated to be a primary means of HIV transmission, at least not in the United States, largely because most street prostitution sex acts are oral rather than vaginal (oral transmission is less likely), most prostitutes insist that clients use condoms (less true of drug-dependent prostitutes), and transmission is more difficult from female to male. Of course, fear of contracting HIV has likely changed the sex practices of some prostitutes and clients.[Quote
Used condoms, syringes, and other paraphernalia left on the ground are unsightly and potentially hazardous.
Street prostitution and street drug markets are often linked.
HIV transmission among prostitutes is more likely to occur from sharing needles for drug injections.
Agreed. Drug use amongst street prostitutes is a huge problem, one exacerbated by their generally horrid situation, exploitation by pimps etc. Improving the environment within which these people find themselves and providing them with the means they need to kick the habit will improve the problem.
QuoteProstitutes who do not have access to proper facilities may urinate, defecate, or bathe in public.
Again agreed. However, the same is true of anybody on the margins of society with nowhere else to go. Homeless people, for example, which prostitutes quite often are. Have you been on those margins yet Lisa? Not a good place to be.
QuoteClients may harm prostitutes. Clients or prostitutes may be defrauded, robbed, or assaulted. Pimps may financially and physically exploit prostitutes.
These abuses are much less likely where prostitutes and clients have legal avenues by which to protect themselves.
QuoteProstitution may provide the seedbed for organized crime. Prostitutes create parking and traffic problems where they congregate.
Again, this does not necessarily follow. All the examples I've provided have lead to the opposite situation.
QuoteProstitution attracts strangers and criminals to a neighborhood.
Strangers yes, criminals, not necessarily. Besides, strangers are equally attracted to malls, commercial areas, industrial areas ... in fact, everywhere commerce or business occurs.
QuoteLegitimate businesses may lose customers who avoid the area because of prostitution. Prostitutes' presence may negatively affect the area economy, reducing property values and limiting property use.
The same may be said of industrification of an area. The reality is that city areas tend to become specialised.
QuoteProstitutes, as citizens, have rights that need to be protected.
Agreed. Rights those citizens rarely take recourse to because they are afraid of the very people meant to protect them.
QuotePolicing prostitution creates special opportunities for police officers to engage in unethical conduct, such as taking payments in exchange for nonenforcement, because prostitutes, pimps, and clients are in weak positions to complain about police misconduct.
The highlighted text addresses the very problem stated.
QuoteStreet prostitutes have lower status than indoor prostitutes. They are often in some state of personal decline (e.g., running away from abusive situations, becoming drug-dependent, deteriorating psychologically, and/or getting less physically attractive). [3] Most have social, economic, and health problems. Most first turn to prostitution at a young age, often before they are 18.
Exactly. These people are victims, not criminals, yet almost 90% of all arrests for prostitution are of prostitutes rather than their clients, pimps or others that benefit from the trade. Provide these people with the means to improve their situation.
QuoteTheir inability to find adequately paying work elsewhere is the most common reason prostitutes give to explain their choice to work on the street. [5] Many prostitutes try to leave the streets, although they often return and then leave again. Most return to prostitution because their limited education and lack of skills make finding employment very difficult. Without a means to support themselves and their children, they may think staying on the streets is less risky than leaving prostitution.
and
Street prostitutes' lives are organized principally around prostitution itself, and around maneuvering through the legal system. It is a cycle of engaging in prostitution, getting arrested, going to jail, paying fines, and returning to the street.
This addresses your original position that prostitutes become such because they are lazy. The majority do so out of need. The point made about inability to find work is an important one, because it highlights that it's not necessarily a case of there not being work, but that these individuals are unable to find it. The majority of prostitutes are ill-educated and ill-informed. They fear using official avenues of procuring work or information or protection because they are afraid of the wrong questions leading to the wrong kind of attention. The only way to get prostitutes off the streets is to provide them with valid, achievable alternatives, not hounding them from one area to the next.
QuoteThe pattern of violence in pimp-prostitute relationships is similar to that of domestic violence. Prostitutes do not report most assaults to the police because they either fear retaliation by pimps or believe the police will not take the matter seriously, or will charge them for soliciting.
The quoted passage speaks for itself. Prostitutes deserve the same protections from violence that other people have.
QuoteBoth prostitutes and those who assault them may believe prostitutes are not entitled to the criminal justice systems' normal protections.
Another good argument for legalisation, or at the very least, decriminalisation of being a prostitute.
QuoteOne study found, however, that women with pimps experienced higher levels of client violence than those without pimps. Women with pimps tended to work in more dangerous areas and take more risks because of pressure to earn a certain amount of money (Norton-Hawk 2004).
Pimps use violence and drug dependency as means to control prostitutes. Many pimps resemble the batterers in domestic violence situations, and women under their control often react similarly to domestic violence victims. [19] They may express love and admiration for their pimps and may feel they deserve the violence. Pimps control both their freedom and their finances. By some estimates, pimps take 60 to 70 percent of prostitutes' earnings.
Prostitutes are dependant on pimps mainly for protection and for drugs. Decriminalising the prostitutes and providing them alternative avenues of protection, such as the police, removes one hold pimps have, and providing good health services removes the other. (I'm also in favour, incidentally, of legalising and regulating the drug industry, again to provide addicts with better information, health services and ultimately better choices) I am in agreement that pimping should remain illegal and be vigourously prosecuted.
QuoteNow, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country's former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops.
I have read similar accounts from Vietnam and a number of other Southeast Asian countries. Again, my opinion is that strict regulation of the sex trade and clear, unambiguous protections for prostitutes would combat these abuses. People who have no personal power are easily taken advantage of. If a prostitute knows he or she is protected from abuse or exploitation by the law, rather than it being yet another danger to them, they are much more likely to blow the whistle on pimps, traffickers and abuse by officials.
Look, Lisa, we can chuck statistics and citations at one another till the cows come home and we won't convince one another, so I'll bow out now with this thought:
QuoteSomewhere around 10 to 20 percent of men admit they have paid for sex
Think about that number. We're talking about a tenth of the world population in that statistic: 700 MILLION men. Just the ones admitting to it.
Do you propose to jail them all?
The justice system realises that's impossible, so it goes after the easy targets instead: the prostitutes themselves. Yet all they do is make those people even more likely to return to prostitution - generally poorly educated to begin with, usually in a precarious financial situation, now you go and addfinancial losses and fines, a criminal record, fear of retribution for perceived snitching, isolation from social services ... not exactly the basis from which to build a better life, is it?
The answer is to target the prostitutes, yes, but to target them with education, with health services, with legal protections. The only way those people will ever leave the street permanently is if they are shown a better way to survive. Shown, because they are usually in too weak a position to find it themselves.
Mina.
