Sex Work

by Frédérique Delacoste

, and they also have a web page. The NSWP organized a series of events at the 1998 International Conference on AIDS in Geneva, as they have done at major AIDS conferences since the network was formed in 1992, always in coalition with the local sex workers’ rights organization, in this case ASPASIE. They also published a guide to organizing HIV/AIDS prevention for sex workers (Overs, 1997), and have played an important role in bringing representatives of far-flung projects together.

  Who Benefits from the System

  It is difficult to see how anyone benefits from the present system. At the time the United States’ prohibition was enacted in one state after another, it was at least partly in response to feminist concerns about the abuse of women and children involved in prostitution, after a muckraking media campaign exposing the “horrors” of brothel prostitution. (Longstreet, 1970; Madeleine, 1919/1986; Walkowitz, 1992). The alarmists contended that white women were being kidnapped and sold into slavery in foreign lands (not Europe, of course), so it was necessary to do something to stop “traffic” across national borders. In fact, Chinese and Japanese women had been imported into this country wholesale, and sold into brothels on the West Coast, while there was little or no traffic in the other direction. Prostitution was also an occupation selected by immigrant women from many countries because it required little command of English, although at least one study of the time found that children of immigrants were more likely to be sex workers than the immigrants themselves (Rosen, 1982). Nonetheless, a significant number of the prostitutes who worked in Virginia City during the days of the Comstock Lode were immigrants, as were many prostitutes in San Francisco during the gold rush (Goldman, 1981; Barnhardt, 1986).

  While the enactment of laws before World War I prohibiting prostitution, pimping, running brothels, transporting women across state lines for “immoral” purposes, etc., did nothing to reduce prostitution, it did have other effects. Before prohibition, most brothels were owned and managed by women, most of whom had been prostitutes themselves. After the tolerated brothels were closed, the sex work businesses went underground and were increasingly headed, or at least owned by a male, a criminal hierarchy that continues. The closing of brothels also forced many women to work on the streets, subjecting them to greater risks of violence. The basic conditions of women’s lives, which caused some of them to decide to work as prostitutes, did not change, and the number of prostitution arrests in the United States increased every year from the time the prohibition was enacted until 1983.

  For most of recorded history, prostitution has been organized for the benefit of the customers, managers, and tax collectors, not the workers, no matter what system was in place. The stigma enforced by the prohibition in this country is also enforced by systems of regulation that require prostitutes to dress differently or to live and work in special districts, or that deny them the right to relationships. The health schemes that require prostitutes to have regular checks for STDs are similarly designed to benefit the customer, since there is no equivalent requirement that customers be checked or use condoms to protect the prostitute, and there are rarely any regulations requiring brothels to provide condoms, disability insurance, workers’ compensation, and/or health insurance. Similarly, systems of de facto legalization, in which the workers in massage parlors and other prostitution businesses are licensed by the police, do not reduce the number of women working as prostitutes, they merely force them to register with the police as prostitutes, giving them an official record that can follow them the rest of their lives, and which can be a bar to other kinds of employment. What constantly amazes me is that there is so little variation in how nations deal with prostitution under the law, even where there is enormous variation in just about every other aspect of society.

  Alternatives to Sex Work?

  This country spends an inordinate amount of money to arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate women and men involved in prostitution. In 1977, the cost of arresting one prostitute in New York and keeping her in jail for two weeks was three thousand dollars, while at the same time San Francisco spent an average of two thousand dollars to arrest and prosecute one prostitute. The average cost per arrest was similar in sixteen cities evaluated by one observer in 1987 (Pearl, 1987), and it is unlikely the cost has dropped since then. At the same time, virtually no money is allocated by government or foundations for programs that would help prostitutes who want to improve their working conditions or to change their occupations or their lives. Within the criminal justice system, little is spent on vocational programs in women’s jails, even relative to the small amount spent for men. There are a few transitional programs for adult prostitutes outside of the criminal justice system (e.g., Mary Magdalene Project in Southern California and Genesis House in Chicago), but not nearly enough. There are also a growing number of programs for younger prostitutes (e.g., Children of the Night, in Los Angeles, TRY in Buffalo, and Hospitality House, in San Francisco), but again, not nearly enough.

  Programs to help people involved in prostitution make a transition to the square world often fail to acknowledge and deal with the positive attractions of prostitution. First and foremost is the economic incentive: a full-time prostitute in this country can gross from about one hundred to five hundred dollars a day, or more, with a great deal of flexibility about hours and days of work. They must also recognize the excitement or edge associated with risk taking, particularly when helping sex workers evaluate their own skills to identify other jobs they might enjoy doing. Programs that try to help prostitutes make a transition into low-paid, boring jobs tend to fail. Occupational programs should be run by former sex workers, who have a complex understanding of the positive aspects of sex work, as well as a familiarity with the stigmatization, isolation, sexual and physical abuse, and the experience of arrest and incarceration, and have made the transition themselves. However, programs that only deal with the abusive aspects of prostitution also tend to fail, because they deny the women they seek to help any agency or pride in who they have been.

  Shelters for battered women have not always responded well to sex workers who sought haven from domestic violence. Some have taken them in without question, but many have not. One shelter worker explained, at a feminist conference, that they don’t have enough well-trained staff to deal effectively with pimps finding the shelter and demanding “their” women back, although at that same conference a worker from a shelter that did serve prostitutes said pimps were no more tenacious than the husbands or boyfriends of other women. One shelter worker actually told me that they would be glad to accept prostitutes as long as they didn’t “work out of the house,” although other women were expected to work and contribute to the cost of running the shelter, and it was clear that her primary concern was the stigma, not the illegality of the work. The situation in 1998 is better than it was in 1987, but other programs, such as those for drug treatment, often continue to treat them as pariahs.

  Alternatives to Prohibition

  There are two main alternatives to prohibition, generally termed decriminalization and legalization. In Europe, decriminalization is sometimes referred to as abolition, and refers to the abolition or repeal of the criminal laws regarding prostitution. However, the term abolition is also used by some activists, including Kathleen Barry in the United States and the International Abolitionist Federation in Europe, to refer to the long-term goal of eliminating all prostitution.

  From a sex workers’ rights point of view, decriminalization means the repeal of all existing criminal codes regarding prostitution between consenting adults, including mutually voluntary, contractual relationships between prostitutes and agents or managers (pimp/prostitute relationships), and noncoercive pandering (serving as a go-between). It would involve no new criminal codes to deal specifically with prostitution, but could include the use of labor and occupational safety and health codes to regulate prostitutes’ working conditions, including the issue of hours of work, paid vacation and sick leave, and coverage by health and disability insuran
ce and workers’ compensation. Some states in Australia, and the Netherlands, which have decriminalized at least some sex work businesses, have already begun to develop OSHA regulations. In addition, prostitutes in the Australian state of Victoria have formed a local in the Australian Liquor, Hospitality, and Miscellaneous Workers Union (Overs, 1997). Serious problems such as fraud, theft, negligence, deception, extortion, and physical force should be prosecuted using existing penal code provisions against those crimes.

  Legalization, on the other hand, has traditionally meant a system of control of the prostitute, with the state regulating, taxing, and/or licensing whatever form of prostitution is legalized, leaving all other forms illegal, without any concern for the prostitute herself. Traditional regulation has often involved the establishment of special government agencies to deal with prostitution. The brothels in Nevada, for example, are licensed and regulated by the government, and the women who work in them are registered as prostitutes with the sheriff or other local authorities. As discussed earlier, they are severely restricted in their movements outside of the brothel. Independent prostitution is illegal, as is prostitution in massage parlors, for escort services, and of course, street prostitution. The women generally work fourteen-hour shifts on a three seven-day week tour of duty, during which they may see ten or fifteen customers a day, or more. They have little or no right to refuse a customer (although the management tries to keep out potentially dangerous customers), and until a law was enacted requiring condom use in the brothels in the late 1980s, they were not allowed to protect themselves from STDs by using condoms. Because of the long work shifts, some of the women use drugs to help them stay awake and alert, or to help them sleep, supplied by the same doctor who performs regular health checks. Nonetheless, approximately 300 women at any given time opt to work under these conditions, which do, after all, protect them from arrest.

  Some abolitionists, such as Kathleen Barry, Janice Raymond, and Dorchen Leidholdt, contend that legalizing prostitution increases the prevalence of forced prostitution and coerced international migration for the purposes of prostitution, which they call “trafficking.” However, they fail to distinguish between traditional legislative approaches and the approach proposed by the international sex workers’ rights movement. Although unregulated workplaces do exist in legal employment sectors, for example sweatshop garment factories or restaurants that exploit the labor of undocumented immigrants, such exploitation is not increased by regulating an industry, it is decreased. That is, before the regulations were adopted, sweatshops were the rule rather than the exception.

  Simply removing the criminal law is not enough. That is essentially the current status of pornography—decriminalized but with unregulated working conditions, leaving it up to the goodness of the video producer to insist on safer sex practices, for example, or to make sure that the actors are willing to perform the activities involved. Even with workplace regulation, things will not be perfect, of course, because there is no way to effectively regulate management attitudes towards employees, or even to consistently prevent such abuses as sexual harassment. The status quo, however, denies prostitutes who work for third parties any control over their working conditions, and some control would obviously be an improvement, even if it was not perfect. A shift in the allocation of monies now used to arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate sex workers could permit the active and consistent enforcement of labor, building, and OSHA regulations. If the managers of sex work businesses were required to adhere to such regulations, instead of the existing outright prohibition, working conditions would change. Regulating the businesses, rather than the prostitutes/workers, would also make it easier to prosecute those who abuse prostitutes, either physically or economically, while the voluntary, non-abusive situations would be left alone.

  Repealing the criminal laws against both prostitution, per se, and the organization of prostitution, and developing workplace regulations, would also enable prostitutes to join unions and engage in collective bargaining in order to improve their working conditions, as some prostitutes have done in Australia and strippers have done in San Francisco. Prostitutes would also be able to form professional associations, and develop codes of ethics and behavior designed to reduce any problems associated with prostitution, without fear of being charged with promoting prostitution, a felony. Finally, it would be possible for experienced prostitutes to train new workers, so that their first solo experiences would be safe.

  In order for new approaches to work, it will also be important for residents, business people, and prostitutes to get together to iron out compromises that take into consideration the right of prostitutes to work without harassment, and the right of the other residents and businesses to go about their lives and work without harassment. Steps in that direction were taken in San Francisco, where the Board of Supervisors formed a Task Force on Prostitution, with representatives of many population sectors, to propose alternatives to the existing situation. Although the Task Force’s proposals have not yet been implemented, the report offers a model for other cities to follow in addressing these issues. At the time of this writing, a summary of the report is available on the internet, at www.penet@bayswan.org, which also provides hyperlinks to the web pages of a number of sex workers’ rights organizations around the world.

  In the meantime, until prostitution has been decriminalized, the noncoercive managers regulated, and those who use fraud and force prosecuted, pressure must be put on police and sheriff’s departments, district attorneys, public defenders, bail bondspeople, judges, and pretrial diversion and probation programs to improve the treatment of persons arrested under these archaic laws.

  Unless there is a strong voice of sex workers pointing out the oppressiveness of brothel systems, both to the women working in such a system and to the workers outside of the system, most people in this country will assume that such a system works to the benefit of all concerned. That is, they will assume that in a well-regulated brothel system, STDs would be controlled, prostitution would be kept off the street and out of the sight of children, and that all in all, it would just be better, safer, and cleaner. The problem is that none of those assumptions are correct, and in exchange for a false sense of security, we would get another oppressive system.

  The onus for the abuses that coexist with illegal prostitution must be put on the system that perpetuates those abuses, and no longer on the prostitutes who are abused. After all, women have the right and the capacity to make up their own minds about whether or not to do this work, and under what terms. They have the right to work as freelance or self-employed workers, as do nurses, typists, doctors, writers, and so on. They also have the right to work for an employer, a third party who can take care of administration and management details. They have the right to relationships outside of work, including relationships in which they are the sole support of the other person, so long as the arrangement is acceptable to both parties. They have the right to raise children. They have the right to a full, human existence. As feminists, we have to end the separation of women into whores and madonnas. If we ensure that prostitution remains under the control of the sex workers—and not in the hands of pimps, customers, and police—then we will have given the prostitutes the power, and the support, to change that institution. We will all benefit.

  References

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