According to this BBC News article: “Prostitutes from across the world have been writing to the BBC News website about their lives following the murders of five prostitutes in eastern England.” Below are two excerpts:
I work as a part-time prostitute in Kuala Lumpur.
Over here, we have to engage our services through an agent, whose contacts include 5-star hotels.
We are often kept in the hotel itself and sometimes abused if we do not comply with our customers’ needs. Malaysia is a Muslim country and there’s no room for any complaints. There’s no safety or precautionary checks by the health authorities and furthermore we are strictly told to perform oral sex without condoms.
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In Los Angeles I operated massage parlours, escort services, rap studios and dance studios which in realistic terms are pseudonyms for brothels.
Only a small percentage of working girls were addicted to drugs or victimised by violence.
The businesses operate under pseudonyms because prostitution is illegal in California.
However, a large percentage of clients were a cross-section of lawyers, city administrators, law enforcement officers and businessmen.
It is ironic that the people who use the services and benefit from prostitution are the same people in the USA that beat the drum against prostitution.
Read the entire article here. Note also that there are related stories in the sidebar. Via Sparkle*Matrix.
I’ve decided a couple of things about prostitution.
1. It’s always existed.
2. Much of the “pathology” surrounding it exists because it’s so stigmatized.
Soooo, if I were queen for a year (because these things take time). Prostitution should be:
1. Legalized.
2. Tightly regulated–complete with state licensing boads for service providers.
3. Unionized (sex workers need collective bargaining rights).
4. Harsh penalties for un-licensed operations.
I’m thinking that prostitution (or sex work) needs to be as professionalized as medicine and law.
Any takers???
There are a lot of different views about the effectiveness of legalization, and I don’t claim any particular expertise on this subject, but my impression is that legalization makes things better for customers, but not necessarily for sex workers. The most vulnerable sex workers are the ones driven to sex work out of desperation, and they are not going to be equipped to file quarterly income tax returns, pay union dues, or submit to drug tests, etc., but I am not sure I’d want to submit them to “harsh penalities” for this.