Introduction
All over the world, prostitution exists and the practice seems to be gaining roots in almost every part of the world. Although the practice was very popular in western countries initially, it is today rampant in every continent. This paper looks at the act of prostitution in the United States and whether it should be kept illegal.
The Existing System in the United States
The United States is one of the few developed Western countries which criminalize prostitution. Denmark, the Netherlands, West Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria all have legalized prostitution, although in some of the countries it is restricted by local ordinances. Therefore, where prostitution is permitted, it is closely regulated (Spector 415). Suppose that we accept that gender equality is a legitimate goal of social policy. The question is whether the current legal prohibition on prostitution in the United States promotes gender equality. Most probably, it does not. The current legal policies in the United States arguably exacerbate the factors in virtue of which prostitution is wrong.
The current prohibition on prostitution renders the women who engage in the practice vulnerable. First, the participants in the practice seek assistance from pimps in lieu of the contractual and legal remedies which are denied them. Male pimps may protect women prostitutes from their customers and from the police, but the system of pimp-run prostitution has enormous negative effects on the women at the lowest rungs of prostitution. Second, the prohibition of prostitution raises the dilemma of the double bind. If we prevent prostitution without greater redistribution of income, wealth, and opportunities, we deprive poor women of one way of improving their condition. Analogously, we do not solve the problem of homelessness by criminalizing it (Spector 416).
Furthermore, women are disproportionately punished for engaging in commercial sex acts. Many state laws make it worse a crime to sell sex than to buy it. Consequently, pimps and clients are rarely prosecuted. In some jurisdictions, patronizing a prostitute is not illegal. The record of arrests and convictions is also highly asymmetric. This is can be deduced easily when one considers that ninety percent of all convicted prostitutes are women. Studies have shown that male prostitutes are arrested with less frequency than female prostitutes and receive shorter sentences. One study of the judicial processing of 2,859 male and female prostitutes found that judges were more likely to find defendants guilty if they were female (Spector 416).
Should Prostitution Be Legalized?
According to Spector (414), it is important to distinguish between prostitution’s wrongness and the legal response that we are entitled to make to that wrongness. Even if prostitution is wrong, we may not be justified in prohibiting it if that prohibition makes the facts in virtue of which it is wrong worse, or if its costs are too great for other important values.
As explained in the preceding section, the current legal prohibition on prostitution unambiguously benefits women as a class because the cultural meaning of the current governmental prohibition of prostitution in the United States is not clear. While an unrestricted regime of prostitution could have negative external consequences on women’s self-perceptions and perceptions by men, state prohibition can also reflect a view of women which contributes to their inequality. For example, some people tend to support state regulation because they believe that women’s sexuality is for purposes of reproduction, a claim tied to traditional ideas about women’s proper role (Farley 22).
There is an additional reason why banning prostitution seems an inadequate response to the problem of gender inequality and which suggests a lack of parallel with the case of commercial surrogacy. Banning prostitution would not by itself eliminate it. While there is reason to think that making commercial surrogacy arrangements illegal or unenforceable would diminish their occurrence, no such evidence exists about prostitution. There is no single city that has eliminated prostitution merely through criminalization. Instead, criminalized prostitution thrives as a black market activity in which pimps substitute for law as the mechanism for enforcing contracts. It, therefore, makes the lives of prostitutes worse than they might otherwise be and without clearly counteracting prostitution’s largely negative image of women.
Clearly, if a decision is made to ban prostitution, these problems must be addressed. On the other hand, if a decision is made not to ban prostitution, then the government must be careful to regulate the practice in order to address its negative effects (Farley 24). Certain restrictions on advertising and recruitment will be necessary so as to address the negative image effects that an unrestricted regime of prostitution would perpetuate. Beyond any doubt, the current regime of prostitution has negative effects on prostitutes themselves. It places their sexual capacities largely under the control of men. To promote women’s autonomy, the law needs to ensure that certain restrictions are in place.
Over the years, women’s movements have been at the forefront to fight prostitution with claims that the practice represents male dominance, and that women, especially prostitutes, are victims (Balk 82). The prostitutes’ interest groups, however, emphasize that society should treat their occupation as any other source of livelihood. According to advocates of prostitution, sex workers should not be branded as victims as this undermines their self-determination. Where prostitution is legal, there is no need for protective services for the prostitutes. Where there is a need to oversee their working conditions, all laws and practices that make sex workers unable to go out in search of health care and social services need to be overturned.
Balk (84) claims that state systems of control and prohibition of brothels can lead to illegal employment relationships and, at worst, to slave-like working conditions. Based on history, criminalization only increases crime by driving the illegal acts underground. People who wish to keep prostitution illegal usually use as their rationale, a laundry list of problems created by the black market nature of the sex trade.
Decriminalization, on the other hand, gives authorities greater control over activities that take place regardless. After the Netherlands overturned its widely ignored 1912 ban on brothels in the year 2000, these businesses became tax-paying establishments with the standard employee benefit requirements. The idea behind overturning the ban was to weed out illegal immigrants, forced prostitution, and underage girls (Balk 90).
Studies have shown, again and again, that sex workers are less likely to spread sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or get unwanted pregnancies than other sexually promiscuous people. However, laws legalizing prostitution do not remove the social stigma that still surrounds their job.
Conclusion
Many advocates of decriminalization or legalization of prostitution believe that it would significantly lower the enormous costs associated with enforcing prostitution laws (Flowers 156).
Due to the fact that prostitution is already illegal but usually consensual, few prostitutes ever report the illegality of their sex acts to the police. As a result, law enforcement must often go to the consensual offenders through various means of deceit and trickery to enforce prostitution statutes and create opportunities to spend more crime allocated funds.
References
Balk, Antti. Balderdash: A Treatise on Ethics, Washington, DC: Thelema Publications, 2012. Print.
Farley, Melissa. Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress, New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Flowers, Ronald. The Prostitution of Women and Girls, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1998. Print.
Spector, Jessica. Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate About the Sex Industry, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2006. Print.