A checked a few of your articles about prostitution, and you repeatedly refer to prostitution as a victimless crime. I would strongly disaqree. Some useful resources supporting my view can be found at

• www.prostitutionresearch.com
• www.catwinternational.org 
• Stark, Christine and Rebecca Whisnant. Not For Sale. 
• Dworkin, Andrea. Scapegoat, the chapter called "Palestinians/Prostituted Women," especially. 
• Farley, Melissa. Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress.

some statistics from the info found above

• about 75% of prostituted people were sexually abused as children before entering prostitution. 
• the average age of entry into prostitution (for both kids and adults) is 14 
• about 75% of prostitution is pimp controlled 
• between 62 and 85% of women have been raped while in prostitution -in one study, 72%, and in another, 86%, are currently or formerly homeless 
• 75% of women in escort prostitution have attempted suicide, and comprise 15% of all suicides reported to hospitals 
• in another, 68% were raped, 68% were beaten, 72% were kidnapped or confined, and 60% were victims of attempted murder just in the previous 6 months. 
• one study found that 67% had post-traumatic stress disorder 
• over 90% of those in prostitution want to get out of it.

I am not familiar with the 3 referenced books, but I took a look at the 2 websites mentioned.

Immediately, the problems became clear. The materials there all assume that prostitution only involved males buying sexual services from females. For example, one quote I found was this

The practice of prostitution is a practice of sexual objectification of women. "... every act of sexual objectifying occurs on a continuum of dehumanization that promises male sexual violence at its far end." John Stoltenberg (1990) Refusing to be a Man, Fontana, London.

The point made is not wrong, but I would contend it is too narrow. The danger is that in generalising prostitution as dehumanising, ultimately violent, with women as victims, we see start to think that by definition, all prostitution must be like that: trade in sexual favours must necessarily have victims and be devoid of any modicum of human decency. Our responses are then shaped by this very strident reading of the situation.

At the same time, the websites treat the problem too broadly. It also says we should see "stripping, exotic dancing, nude dancing, table dancing, phone sex, trafficking, child and adult pornography, lap dancing, massage brothels, and peep shows as prostitution."

Well, yes and no. They're all industries that suffer from sex-phobic moral condemnation, and as a result, people who participate in them face all the disadvantages of the closet, but adopting such a sweeping approach detracts from the focussed, non-judgmental help which, as I will argue below, are the things that can do real good.

Pole dancer in a Thai bar

But what about all those percentages above -- of rape, kidnap and homelessness, etc? I'm in no position to dispute them since it's not an area where I have collected any data. We can take it that they are probably true for female prostitution. To some degree, though probably less, they apply too with male prostitution, which those websites, from the look of them, haven't yet imagined to exist, or if they have, might prefer to avoid mentioning, seeing as it does how it undermines male domination as an explanation for all the horrors of the trade. As for child prostitution, for sure, things must be much worse.

However, I think it is important to keep a clear mind and remember that these are associated phenomena. Prostitution per se does not have to create such outcomes, nor is prostitution required for such outcomes.

In years past, and no doubt still in many countries of the world, the same horrors happen in marital and concubinal situations: sexual abuse, beatings, marital rape and confinement leading to despair and attempts at suicide. I wouldn't be surprised if a huge majority of such wives or mistresses wished they could get out of their roles.

This is not to make light of anyone in such predicaments; it is only to point out that misdiagnosis means misdirecting our energies. Sure, by all means do something about poverty, the lack of education and jobs; do something about pimps who confine, kidnap or physically hurt their charges (just as we would any factory manager who locks his employees up in dormitories at night, for example). But to go all shrill about prostitution as the fundamental evil, and then narrowly too, focussing only on gender inequalities, gets us nowhere.

 
Respecting individual autonomy while combatting abuses

As always, my starting point is the need to respect individual autonomy even as we go about combatting abuses. Even if one individual out of 1,000 willingly, for the heck of it if nothing else, wants to be a prostitute, we should respect that choice and not insist on a blanket ban.

And let's face it: a blanket ban is as achievable as total prohibition of alcohol.

The websites hailed the Swedish law as a kind of model. It makes anyone who obtains sexual services with payment a criminal. It is said to be good because it legitimises the woman, while delegitimising the man (the buyer).

Frankly, it takes considerable imagination to think that any woman (or man for that matter) selling sex would feel legitimised because of such a law. She'll still feel the way she feels because of economic desperation and society's smug morality.

There is no magic solution that comes from aiming at prostitution generally, even less if the concept is narrowly construed and misdefined as one of gender abuse, and then broadly cast to include any and every form of sex industry. We improve people's lives only if we act on the specifics. Are they in the country legally? Do our government agencies and justice systems help them get fair wages from their customers and pimps? Do we do anything at all about involuntary confinement? Do we empower them to insist on safe sex? Do we offer any alternatives to such work?

As an analogy, let's think for a moment about migration. This too is bedevilled with all sorts of horrors. Economically desperate people seek out snakeheads to smuggle them across borders or oceans. The migrants get into serious debts and work like slaves to pay off those debts. They do the most dangerous jobs, and their employers exploit their illicit status to skimp on safety measures. They live in fear of arrest any day; they feel totally disempowered in negotiating with those who ought to be paying them for work done, and no doubt, many are confined, beaten and raped.

Does this mean we should condemn all migration and slap a blanket ban on it? Does this mean migration agents should be wiped off the face of the earth as some might wish of pimps? Does this mean we can expect demand for cheap labour, like demand for paid sex, to just disappear if we tried hard enough?

No, it does not. Reason tells us, we need to find a way to bring the business of migration above board, perhaps with short-term work permits and more liberal quotas. We need to promulgate and enforce fair labour laws and we need to inform everyone, including the illiterate labourers, of their rights and avenues of recourse. Not least, we need to destigmatise racial and cultural differences, to make life in the host country more livable.

Similarly, the abuses that often come with prostitution should be managed in the same dispassionate way. Not least, again, we need to destigmatise sex.

 
The Turkish example

Just recently, there was a news report from Turkey about one such well-focussed, non-judgmental effort. There, an organisation (I can't recall if it was an NGO or government-related) set up and advertised a telephone hotline for prostitutes to call if they felt confined against their will. On receiving a tip-off, provided there were some specifics about the person's location, a police squad would be sent to free them and trace the people in charge.

The surprise was that 75% of the calls came from the male clients. The women had either told them of their predicament while they were briefly together, or the men themselves noticed that the women were under restraint. The promise of confidentiality or anonymity allowed the johns to call the hotline, and the program turned out quite successful because of this.

What this shows is that instead of demonising the buyer, a lot of good can be achieved by avoiding judgment and doing something practical.

It also shows that many can distinguish between the trade of sexual favours for money, which needless to say, they see nothing wrong with, and the associated ills, e.g. confinement and beatings, which even the johns think are beyond the pale. Conflating the two, as the anti-prostitution campaigners do, makes things harder, not easier.

* * * * *

The TV documentary must have had to hold back its instincts to go down the same route of condemning all prostitution. But, on the whole, it succeeded in restraining itself, though a slip here and a slip there showed the dangers of confusion in the producers' minds between on the one hand, its title and subject matter, Child Sex Tourism, and on the other, dealing with prostitution as a whole.

The documentary focussed on Batam, an Indonesian island that is a half-hour hydrofoil ride away from Singapore. With a population of about half a million, it is said to have over 80 "entertainment outlets... each with 60 – 100 girls".

Batam, it was said, has over 7,000 "registered prostitutes", but a survey by John Hopkins University in 2005 estimated there were around 20,000. This was according to the voice-over in the TV documentary; I couldn't find any information about this study in a web search.

Indeed too much of the business in Batam involves underaged girls. ChannelNewsAsia (CNA) reported that some 40% of the prostitutes there were under the age of 18. A 2003 article in the Australian newspaper The Age gave a good inside look at how unacceptable it is. See Rough trade.

Some 80% of the clients were Singapore men, the majority 40 – 60 years old. Interestingly, the head of Unifem Singapore, Fazlin Abdullah, told CNA the Chinese and Indian men tended to be older than the Malay johns. No clue was given as to why.

The first of 2 slips – interviewing the men about prostitution generally, hardly anything questions about child sex

CNA managed to interview 2 men, with faces obscured. One was a Chinese guy who was probably in his late twenties or thirties, with shoulder-length blond hair, speaking in Mandarin and Cantonese. The other was a Malay gardener, probably aged 60. What I recall however, was how except for one question posed to the Chinese guy [2] none of the other questions posed to the men were specific to having sex with the underaged. They were all about why they went to Batam, and why they preferred "younger girls".

Inside a Batam bar

The latter is a no-brainer of a question, actually. It is a fact of biology that youthfulness is a major part of sexual attractiveness, but "younger girls" can mean anyone up to, say, 23 or 24.

The result is that the interviews dealt with desiring sexual services in general, not about child sex. Thus, instead of dealing specifically with the subject matter, the program slipped away somewhat to a general indictment about paid sex.

The Chinese guy was the more articulate of the two. He was married and his wife sometimes accompanied him to Batam. The wife helped him choose the girls, he said. He offered the usual defences for prostitution: the girls needed the money, if they didn't have sex with him, they'd have sex with someone else anyway, and so on. He was also unequivocal about always playing safe, saying he went to Batam for a good time, not to get sick.

The older, Malay guy looked to be a bigger problem. His awareness of safe sex practices appeared to be nil, saying the way to protect himself was to eat the head of a pineapple and to stay away from the wife for two weeks after his return from Batam! That way, the itch will subside, he said, not explaining what he meant by "itch".

 
The second slip – at 16, the girls were past the age of consent

The other slip was in the choice of the 3 prostitutes the program managed to find. Nurul, Liana and Arti were all 16 years old. One of the opening lines of the documentary was that internationally, girls under 18 were considered children, and so these three were presented as child victims.

This slip was quite stark since the documentary itself mentioned this provision in our law, though the script didn't discuss the logical gap. So, for all the subtle disapproval expressed through the interviewer's questions and the camera angles, it was misleading to suggest that anyone having sex with them was guilty of child sex as defined by our own laws.

Perhaps CNA couldn't find anyone under 16 to interview. Perhaps no Singaporean guy would agree to any question that was specifically about having sex with girls aged 15 or younger, therefore making it hard to keep the interviews on topic. I can understand the difficulties.

But I think it is still important for me to point out that the documentary could be accused of being misleading, though personally, I think they did the best they could.

 
Humanising the subjects

Nonetheless, what it did well was to humanise the subjects, and this is very important. I have faith that the average human person is a decent person, and if we open his eyes to something, he will act appropriately. "Appropriately" doesn't mean he won't pay for sex -- many people think it is dishonest not to pay for services rendered -- but it may mean that he treats the other person with a bit more understanding, consideration and kindness, just like how the Turkish johns reported cases of confinement.

If that means that people can be educated to avoid having sex with underaged prostitutes, that would be nice, though I doubt if any TV program can do much in that regard. The problem is much more complex than that, and yes, it should require legal penalties.

But humanising the subjects also cuts the other way. One of the girls, Arti, was shown living with a family and having a boyfriend, who was jobless and looking for work. In the meantime, Arti was supporting him. He said as soon as he found a job, he'd want Arti to stop her line of work; he should be the one supporting her, not the other way around.

Arti appeared to be quite a vivacious girl, and the camera showed her dressing up and going off to the discotheque where she would work the crowd from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. in the morning, getting as many as 3 or 4 tricks in a night.

There didn't seem to be a pimp involved.

It's difficult to reconcile this person and her situation -- her choices, if you'd accept the use of the word -- with the unbearable hell painted by the statistics given in the 2 websites above. This is not to say that it's a desirable job -- it may even be less desirable than being a municipal cleaner or restaurant dishwasher -- but surely the issue is a lot more grey than black and white.

For that reason, it calls for more critical ways of thinking and more subtle attempts at intervention than merely passing laws and raving about morals and gender abuse.

© Yawning Bread