The real victimization of sex-trade workers (LTTE Winnipeg Free Press)

[Prometheus Bound]

The real victimization of sex-trade workers
By: Have Your Say
15/06/2010 1:00 AM

Around 100 years ago, John McRae, Winnipeg's chief of police, met with Minnie Woods, a well-known brothel keeper, to discuss the possible segregation of houses of prostitution. Woods selected Point Douglas, and within a few weeks, many of the city's brothel-keepers had purchased properties on Rachel Street. By 1910, there were 58 houses of prostitution on Rachel and McFarlane, all of which were owned and operated by women.

The Board of Police Commissioners' unofficial policy of segregation reflected a rational approach to prostitution that was too soon replaced in 1912. Conditions in Point Douglas allowed women to sell their social and sexual services in the relative safety of brothels. Some brothel-keepers chose to hire private security guards to remove violent or disorderly clientele, but there is no evidence to suggest that pimping took place. Other brothel-keepers encouraged their employees to undergo routine medical inspections. While violence and venereal diseases were never completely eliminated, women were able to effectively control both.

It was only after local authorities began to enforce sexist vagrancy and occupancy laws that sex workers' health and safety was undermined.

Claims of human trafficking, which Kowalchuk incorrectly conflates with prostitution, were never proven in Winnipeg. Many women chose to move to Winnipeg from other parts of Canada and the United States to work in or operate brothels because of the potential profits to be made here. Women working in brothels made approximately four times as much as domestics, cooks, laundresses and factory workers. They were not impoverished or stigmatized, as Kowalchuk claims. Indeed, the "white slave" scare was largely the product of the Moral and Social Reform Council's purity campaigns, which effectively victimized women working in the sex trade and criminalized racialized and immigrant men in hopes of establishing greater control over both groups.

Such archaic attitudes towards prostitution persist. In a gendered and racialized labour market, prostitution continues to represent a viable alternative. While drug and alcohol addictions, child prostitution, pimping and police brutality are serious problems plaguing our city's streets, they cannot be dealt with effectively through laws that simply criminalize sex work. Policy makers must adopt a more nuanced approach to prostitution. Looking to our past is a fine place to start.

AMY WILKINSON

Winnipeg

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 15, 2010 A11
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/the-real-victimization-of-sex-trade-workers-96359514.html

[Prometheus Bound]

1. Opposing view: What's Wrong with Legalizing Prostitution?

March 03, 2010
What's Wrong with Legalizing Prostitution?
By Janice Shaw Crouse

snip

In Amsterdam, 80% of prostituted women reported that they were there by force. In Germany, over 60% of the prostitutes are foreigners; in Spain, it's 80%, many coerced by gangs. In Germany, legalizing prostitution hasn't improved conditions for prostitutes. The women do not want (or are not allowed by their pimps) to register, get health checks, pay taxes, or adhere to rules that might affect business. For example, johns are willing to pay extra for sex without a condom. Further, Germany found that legalization did not increase tax revenues like expected -- mafias don't pay taxes.

One study found that 80% of prostitutes were assaulted by their pimps, and over one-third receive death threats for themselves or their families. Nor does legalization end corruption -- laissez-faire Amsterdam closed one-third of their legal brothels because of ties to organized crime while acknowledging that the illegal brothels are thriving outside the official zone. Neighboring countries call the Netherlands a "failed experiment."

Legalizing prostitution increases sex-trafficking because demand exceeds supply. So traffickers fill the demand with girls and women from other countries -- lured, tricked, or sold, they end up without their passports, assaulted and forced into sex slavery. After legalization in Australia, illegal brothels increased 300%, pulling thousands more vulnerable women into prostitution.

Yet there are those who want to make prostitution legal. What other job requires working naked, subject to the whims another person, with no protection against abuse? Pimps, traffickers, and madams are dictators, usually brutal ones. Even in the legal brothels in Nevada, some prostituted women are there because pimps dumped them for the referral fee, working with no right to refuse any customer. And though some rooms have panic buttons for situations that get out of control, one john explained, "Look, men pay to get what they want. Lots of men go to prostitutes to do things to them that 'real women' would not put up with."

Legalization doesn't mean freedom and dignity; it doesn't eliminate injuries or diseases. In fact, violence is an integral part of the job -- broken bones, burns, vaginal and anal tearing, stabbings, rapes, STDs, HIV/AIDS, sterility, miscarriages, and drug and alcohol addictions. Two years after legalization in Australia, the number of women with HIV infections increased 91%; johns don't undergo medical exams. Prostitutes in regulated brothels may be marginally safer, but the illegal brothels they spawn offer little to no protection.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/whats_wrong_with_legalizing_pr.html