In the wake of a benign but humbling online quiz attempting to ascertain if stereotypical behaviors could pinpoint your political allegiances, in which I scored 76 percent conservative, I’ve been taking some time to reevaluate my belief system. I jest, but in all seriousness, living abroad this year while studying at Oxford and traveling around central and Eastern Europe during my holiday has given me time to test run ideologies. Each new place I awoke to resembled a parodied version of Odysseus’ arrival in a sequence of strange lands. “Odysseus woke, sat up, and thought: ‘Oh what mortal place have I reached this time? Are they cruel and merciless savages, or god-fearing people, generous to strangers? Am I near creatures with human speech? Let me look, and see.’” Again, I jest. Odysseus was nothing if not a walking hyperbole of man, but his trepidation at setting out without Google maps or his Zagat’s Guide rings true in the mind of every traveler: star struck with the locale but a bit shaky on the gory logistics. But novelty in the course of one’s travels does lie on a spectrum, and for the purposes of this article I speak primarily of the normalcy of legalized prostitution in many European countries.
The topic of decriminalization, both of prostitution as well as a number of illegal substances, is often met with illogical reasoning in the United States. Puritanical warnings are resurrected from their bygone New England graves, making the 1950s seem a fairly liberal era. However, neither side emerges as the victor, with each one clinging to stereotypes once the gamut of syllogisms runs out. Supporters of decriminalization often invoke the notion that America has far too many laws regulating morality, especially when it comes to ‘victimless’ crimes. It is true that the American penal code could be interpreted as regulating the intentions of its citizens by curbing the use of drugs such as marijuana. Cigarettes, by contrast, which are more detrimental to one’s health, are legal for everyone over 21 in New York City (provided you don’t light up in a restaurant). Alcohol, again arguably more harmful to long-term health than chronic marijuana use, is not markedly restricted. The argument continues that if these incontestably more harmful substances are allowed the freedom they currently boast, why should marijuana be illegal?
This argument suffers from what’s sometimes called the fallacy of relative privation: A is worse than B and A is legal, therefore B should be legal as well. The same fallacy is often invoked in the argument for the decriminalization of prostitution. In rough terms, it takes the following form: the alternative for prostitutes could be working at (insert name of marginalized fast food establishment), where they would make less money and have less protection. Therefore, legalizing prostitution is said to be wise. Whether fast food workers really do have it worse than prostitutes is obviously up for debate, but it shouldn’t matter: just because the conditions involved in working for minimum wage in the food industry are also abhorrent does not render the circumstances offered in a life of legalized prostitution acceptable, even if they are slightly better.
All of this is not to say that comparisons for the sake of argument are not useful or even accurate in many instances. Our view of the world is exceedingly relativistic, however frightening that concept is to the absolutists that walk among us (and vice-versa). So for the remainder of my article I shall strive to move away from the semantics of logic and push toward logistical and ethical considerations.
When the topic is brought up in conversation in Europe, people tend to rattle off arguments about the practicality of legalization. Prostitutes in Germany, for example, pay taxes, have the right to health care and the ability to go to the police if a client mistreats them. They are, on paper, contributing members of society with a union that represents them in the government and the freedom to dictate their own terms. They can even refuse clients they find unsatisfactory.
This all sounds well and good, but the fact remains that out of the 400,000 female and male prostitutes in Germany, only 44 are signed up to receive the health and welfare benefits provided. An article published in Spiegel comments, “In Hamburg, with its famous Reeperbahn red-light district, only 153 women are in compliance with regulations and have registered with the city’s tax office.” A report done by the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth in 2007, reflecting on the social benefits provided to prostitutes in a 2002 piece of legislation, found that most women were not signed up to receive their social security benefits and employment contracts were used only by 1 percent of the women, because “the prostitutes did not consider it a financially attractive option.”
Additionally, there were few cases where a prostitute brought a client to German court to sue for fair pay. The same report also found that brothels were kept at substandard conditions and repeatedly stated that there had not been enough effort to reach the government’s goal of providing an exit strategy from prostitution. Perhaps the worst unintended consequence of legalization has been the significant increase in sex trafficking in these areas. While police presence would seem like a positive regulatory mechanism, instead it has frightened the women, mostly brought in illegally and underground from Eastern Europe, and made it difficult to expose trafficking rings, including those exploiting children. A study done by Axel Dreher of the University of Heidelberg et al., published a year ago, concluded after analyzing statistics from 150 countries, “On average, countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows.” The overall aim of legalization of prostitution was to protect the women, but this observation shows how pimps and traffickers instead exploited the attitude of lenience. The same study concluded that based on the two established and competing economic models in this field, the scale effect prevailed: The legalization of prostitution resulted in an overall increase in trafficking as the supply in the industry rose to balance with demand. The authors did note that there is an opposing force called the substitution effect, which relies on the fear of prosecution if trafficked women are used in legal brothels, but their data show this effect is generally dominated by the scale effect.
Finally, even if legalized prostitution had no drawbacks and significantly improved the overall working conditions of prostitutes, there would still be one final reason not to legalize the buying of sex. To clarify, I am not arguing that prostitution laws as they exist in the United States are anywhere near acceptable. Charging prostitutes with misdemeanors is both counterproductive and cruel. Instead, Sweden’s approach offers a legitimate and constructive middle ground. Max Waltman of Stockholm University wrote in a New York Times article recently, “Not to be bought and sold for sex should be a human right. Sweden effectively recognized this in 1999, criminalizing buying sex and decriminalizing being in prostitution. This law has been adopted in full by Norway and Iceland, partly in Korea, Finland, Israel and the United Kingdom.” In fact, Sweden has seen a promising decline in the number of prostitutes and a correlated decrease in the amount of sex trafficking.
Far from logistical, this final argument hinges on the ethical aspect of the sex trade. While many women and men have argued that the legalization of prostitution confers autonomy to the woman (or man as the case may be), essentially providing her with the ultimate control over her own body, there is a great degree of naiveté in the belief that the majority of prostitutes enter the field in an attempt to reclaim their independence and sexuality. Prostitution remains a last resort.
Ultimately, prostitution must be evaluated on its own, even if it seems more dignified in some places than a minimum wage job. Sex is one of the most intimate forms of interaction that exists for the human race. Commodification does not empower the donor, for lack of a better word, but rather removes the humanity from the act itself. One cannot simply sell her body by night and resume a healthy relationship during the day without residual effects. A prominent feminist in Germany named Alice Schwarzer argues that prostitution relies on a power imbalance, as do all economic transactions: The customer providing the money has the upper hand, while the provider of the service must perform accordingly. The idea that there is any equality in legalized prostitution is deceptive, she argues. Schwarzer goes on to say that what people forget when they argue that women have the right to sell their bodies, is that men have the legal right to buy them. Pierrette Pape, the spokeswoman for the European Women’s lobby in Brussels agrees, adding “Nowadays, a little boy in Sweden grows up with the fact that buying sex is a crime. A little boy in the Netherlands grows up with the knowledge that women sit in display windows and can be ordered like mass-produced goods.” Obviously there is no cure-all for the situation, and curbing free will is a tricky business. But it is not altogether Draconian, especially when that will may only be free for argument’s sake.
Nika Sabasteanski is a sophomore neuroscience major from New York City. She is a staff writer for The News-Letter. Her column, Crooked Wood, discusses international affairs and philosophy.
