Under legalization, the illegal sector has grown alongside legal brothels and street toleration zones, and pimps imported their human merchandise from other countries to meet the growing demand.
Nazarul Islam
Many of us who boast of being well informed, like to assume that the practice of sex trade needs to be decriminalized, at least in the West. The logic is—that it would make lives better for women who are engaged in livelihood of prostitution. My take is that, it won’t. Along with its close relative “legalization” it has made them worse. Which is why I am astonished that public money in Europe and the USA is going towards Decriminalized Futures, a highly politicized exhibition opening later this month at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA).
“Full decriminalization of sex work is the rallying cry that unites the sex worker rights movement across the world,” reads the blurb on the ICA website. “Under this banner, sex workers and their allies have fought tirelessly for strong workers’ rights, an end to exploitation, an end to criminalization, and real measures to address poverty.”
This “celebration of the ‘sex workers’ rights’ movement” will feature 13 artists from countries including the UK, France, Germany and the US, and highlight the history of the campaign to decriminalize the sex trade.
Obviously It is not surprising to discover that one of the major supporters of the show is the Open Society Foundation (OSF) — the world’s biggest financial backer of the pro-legalization lobby. Also involved is SWARM (Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement) which “aims to highlight the ways in which sex workers’ rights are inextricably linked to struggles for racial justice, migrant rights, anti-austerity work, labor rights, trans-rights, and many other movements and campaigns”.
The debate is weighted heavily on the ‘“sex work is work/legalize it” debate, as this is the commonplace liberal position, but it is based on fantasy rather than fact. We need to understand that Prostitution is not work, and every attempt to legitimize the inside of a woman’s body as a workplace has failed.
I have relevant data about the global sex trade. I have met with social workers and worked with people who claimed to have visited legal brothels and street toleration zones in the US, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. I have spent time interviewing some of the workers in the sex industry, the punters, the pimps and brothel owners, and I know that the only benefit of decriminalization for the women means that they are not arrested.
And that pales somewhat when you realize the devastating effect of assuming that prostitution can ever be work, and that the punters are merely paying for a service.
The Netherlands, which legalized its sex trade in 2000, came to realize in short order— what an unmitigated disaster the move had been. Dutch politicians began to publicly admit that none of the promised benefits had been realized: rather than tackling the illegal side of the market, such as trafficking of women across borders, underage girls, and associated criminality such as drug dealing, violence and murder of the women by pimps and punters, the opposite happened.
Soon after legalization, the US Department of State ranked the Netherlands as one of the top five countries of origin for trafficking victims worldwide.
Under legalization, the illegal sector has grown alongside legal brothels and street toleration zones, and pimps imported their human merchandise from other countries to meet the growing demand. Something similar happened in Queensland, Australia, where it has been reported that up to four times the number of trafficked women have been discovered in legal brothels than in illegal ones.
Neither decriminalization nor legalization will likely, ever result in a reduction of or an end to prostitution. Instead, both approaches set in stone the idea that prostitution is inevitability. And the gold standard today, according to pro-prostitution activists, including SWARM, is the New Zealand model that Lindsey and Carly are toiling within.
In 2003, New Zealand became the first country to decriminalize its sex trade, passed by only a majority of one vote in parliament. The application form to open a brothel in New Zealand is just two pages long: three pages shorter than the form to apply to adopt a pet from the Dogs and Cats Home in the United States.
Freedom of information requests by anti-sex trade campaigners in New Zealand found that, despite the promises from local governments that legal brothels would be regularly inspected; there had been only 11 inspections between 2003 and 2015 across the whole of New Zealand, all of which originated from complaints from the public. Meanwhile, the women are getting younger and the men are demanding sex without condoms.
Rachel Moran, author of the best-selling memoir, ‘Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution’ and now actively campaigning to dispel myths about the sex trade is vehemently opposed to the ICA’s exhibition.
“Art is its own thing, but there is a strong argument for it to be true to life when it’s presented in the service of a political objective and with public funding,” says Moran about Decriminalized Futures. “This exhibition warns that it contains ‘depictions of violence’ but there are no warnings about the exhibition’s political objective — to campaign for the full decriminalization of brothel keepers and pimps. This unacknowledged agenda constitutes visually presented political propaganda.”
The exhibition will doubtless be welcomed by the liberal feminists and the bearded dudes who chant “sex workers work” and “blow jobs are real jobs”, because they subscribe to a faux feminism that actually benefits men more than women. And it is telling that the majority of the artists whose work is featured in the exhibition identify as they/them, and at least one of the she/hers are trans women.
The pro-prostitution and trans-activists/queer identified activists have become so intertwined they sing from the same hymn sheet.
But there should be no place for a sanitized, romanticized version of the sex trade in a city which is home to countless brothels full of abused women.
While there is always room for debate about removing the harms from prostitution, a propaganda puff piece that legitimizes and normalizes prostitution is dangerous. In staging this exhibition the ICA is making a very strong, political statement about its acceptance of the world’s oldest oppression.
It’s a matter of great shame the money wasn’t spent in helping women out of the sex trade.
[author title=”Nazarul Islam ” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Nazarul-Islam-2.png”]The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.[/author]
