Downplaying Evil: Is Prostitution ‘Empowering’?

Breakpoint with Charles Colson ^ | August 23, 2005 | Charles Colson

[Mr. Silverback]

“Can you set your own work hours? Pick your clients? Keep all the profits?” That job description sounds great, doesn’t it? Except the line of work referred to is prostitution.

In an article titled “Prostitution Gives Me Power,” the fashion magazine Marie Claire praised the lives of three “sex workers” in Holland for “using their bodies to foster trust, compassion, and happiness in the world.” One woman said that working for a brothel or escort business allowed for a connection because “you’re there for a couple of hours” and “talk much more.” Of course, any sort of “connection” she may think she’s making is a false one. The transaction is commercial; she is a commodity to be purchased. And no matter how she packages that, it’s dehumanizing.

Attempting to legitimize prostitution as “sexual freedom,” Marie Claire downplays an overriding evil: sex trafficking.

As Ambassador John Miller, head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the State Department, wrote in a letter to Marie Claire, “[W]here prostitution is legal or illegal but tolerated, there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims,” because local women don’t view prostitution as “legitimate or desirable,” and so “crime networks fill the void.”

Moreover, says Miller, recent academic research in nine countries “found that 57 percent of women in prostitution were raped, 73 percent were physically assaulted, and 68 percent [qualified] for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” Eighty-nine percent of those women said they wanted to “escape” their situation.

“The U.S. Government has come to oppose legalized prostitution,” Miller wrote, “not only because it is inherently harmful and dehumanizing, but also because it creates a thriving marketplace for victims of human trafficking. This connection cannot be disregarded if we are to be serious about ending modern-day slavery.” And that’s why it’s so important that you and I continue to urge implementation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. It is up for reauthorization this year. There are still problems we need to address more strongly.

The number of persons trafficked across borders is between 600,000 and 900,000. And estimates of the number trafficked into the United Stated ranges from about 15,000 by government records up to 50,000 according to anti-slavery activists.

Thanks to China’s one-child policy, women are so scarce that North Korean women who escape into China are quickly abducted and forced to become wives or prostitutes.

Now, don’t think that legitimizing prostitution as a “good” to be sold is simply the argument of magazines like Marie Claire. When Bill Bennett and I first approached the Clinton administration in the mid-nineties to get them to stop sex trafficking, we ran into a stone wall. The feminist position was, believe it or not, being accepted, that this was empowering women. Slavery—empowerment? That’s a dangerous newspeak, but it’s exactly what we’re up against in this culture. And it’s the reason that Christians today have to fight against modern-day slavery. This is a human-rights abuse that must be ended.

[GSlob]

People seem not to get the difference between a profession and a calling - prostitution and whoredom in this case. Hence the confusion.

[thoughtomator]

It's dehumanizing in its own way, but so is much of modern industrial life. You pick your poison. While I would never patronize, I would also not condemn them. I can see how some may believe it is the lesser of evils and respect their choice of how to live their lives. It would be nice to live in a world where such a thing did not exist, but we do not live in that world.

[Dumb_Ox]

Something has always confused me: why aren't porn stars treated like streetwalkers? If they have some First Amendment exemption from prosecution, why haven't regular prostitutes simply started "be a porn star" movie businesses, filming themselves and their johns "at play" and selling not the sex, but the film?