The government wants police to nick men who pay for sex. For years the law has come down heavily on girls who sell their bodies but not on their customers, the men who fuel the trade. Will prosecuting men who pay for sex lead to fewer women taking up the world's oldest profession?
Highly unlikely, so why not just legalise it?
A similar law which criminalised men who paid for sex was introduced in Sweden eight years ago, but instead of ending the practise, it simply become more hidden, placing the women involved in it at greater risk of violence.
If the government wants to help remove women from a life of prostitution, it needs to offer help, training and a realistic chance of employment and provide counselling and support to those who are emotionally damaged and addicted to drugs and alcohol.
Doesn't matter which gender of the brief sexual relationship you try and criminalise, it is not going to stop until we learn to help those prostituting themselves instead of wanting to constantly punish them.
3 comments:
Makes sense to me! Keep the prossies from spreading disease, main thing. Get rid of the pimps, good thing. Acquire some tax revenue from it, bonus.
Such things have been tried here, as well, to no avail.
The first thing that people who want to completely eliminate 'the world's oldest profession' need to understand is this: They will fail. It will always go on, in one form or another.
So, that being known, how do we go about ameliorating the worst effects of the sex industry - those effects being exploitation (particularly of the young and/or those from the Third World), the spread of STDs, the 'vicious circle' caused by so many prostitutes also being drug addicts, and of the trade being performed in the streets.
In these cases I usually think that the carrot works better than the stick (no, I'm not talking about some service you have to pay for here); consequently, this latest suggestion sounds a bit kneejerk and ill-conceived. A range of efforts are needed to lift as many women as possible out of prostitution and into a real job.
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