ALJAZEERA Column: On Dec. 20, Canada’s highest court struck down the country’s laws regulating prostitution, saying the laws infringed on sex workers’ right to personal safety. The Canadian legislature has a year to rewrite the laws. The case opened up vigorous debate in Canada and around the world, about much more than just the laws governing sex work. The case, and the debate around it, brings to the forefront a whole tank of our most fraught modern tribulations — gender equality, globalization, pleasure, bodily autonomy and sex itself.
Former sex workers inhabit all sides of the sex-work debate. Those who are abolitionists point convincingly to their own abuse and exploitation as evidence of prostitution’s ills and the need for it to be eradicated. And there is little argument that many women who are coerced into sex work are extremely vulnerable — abuse victims, drug addicts, abandoned young women, low-income girls trying to survive.
Current sex workers — at least those who are active on the Internet, arguably an English-speaking, financially stable and educated sliver representing sex workers who are significantly more privileged than the average global sex worker — seem to populate the pro-decriminalization group more heavily. This is not surprising, considering the perils sex workers face when their trade is outlawed, with rapes and assaults that cannot be reported to police, abuse at the hands of police, control by pimps or organized criminal cartels, arrests and criminal records that make other work impossible, murders no one cares about. (Street sex workers, for instance, are underrepresented in mainstream media stories but account for about 20 percent of sex workers in the U.S. and face much higher levels (PDF) of extreme poverty, homelessness, desperation and substance abuse than the general population — and even the overall sex-work population — does.)… (more)
EDITOR: If sex work was taxed, regulated and controlled, there would be no market for street walkers. Moreover, those unfortunate women and men would have an opportunity to work out of a licensed, inspected and far safer facility.
